“No one cares what happens to the man who always succeeds; no one loves him,” he continued. “Do you know, in my trouble I’ve had more out of nigger Jim’s affection than I’ve ever had in my life. Then there’s Rockwell, Osterhaut and Jowett, and there’s your father. It was worth while living to feel the real thing.” His hands went out as though grasping something good and comforting. “I don’t suppose every man needs to be struck as hard as I’ve been to learn what’s what, but I’ve learned it. I give you my word of honour, I’ve learned it.”
Her face flushed and her eyes kindled greatly. “Jim, Rockwell, Osterhaut, Jowett, and my father!” she exclaimed. “Of course trouble wouldn’t do anything but make them come closer round you. Poor people live so near to misfortune all the time—I mean poor people like Jim, Osterhaut, and Jowett—that changes of fortune are just natural things to them. As for my father, he has had to stretch out his hands so often to those in trouble—”
“That he carried me home on his shoulders from the bridge six weeks and three days ago, at three o’clock in the morning,” interjected Ingolby with a quizzical smile.
“Why did you omit Madame Bulteel and myself when you mentioned those who showed their—friendship?” she asked, hesitating at the last word. “Haven’t we done our part?”
“I was talking of men,” he answered. “One knows what women do. They may leave you in the bright days, not in the dark days. On the majority of them you couldn’t rely in prosperity, but in misfortune you couldn’t do anything else. They are there with you. They’re made that way. The best life can give you in misfortune is a woman. It’s the great beginning-of-the-world thing in them. Men can’t stand prosperity, but women can stand misfortune. Why, if Jim and Osterhaut and Jowett and all the men of Lebanon and Manitou had deserted me, I shouldn’t have been surprised; but I’d have had to recast my philosophy if Fleda Druse had turned her bonny brown head away.”
It was evident he was making an effort to conquer emotions which were rising in him; that he was playing on the surface to prevent his deep feelings from breaking forth. “Instead of which,” he added jubilantly, “here I am, in the nicest room in the world, in a fine bed with springs like an antelope’s heels.”
He laughed, and hunched his back into the mattress. It was the laugh of the mocker, but he was mocking himself. She did not misunderstand. It was a nice room, as he said. He had never seen it with his eyes, but if he had seen it he would have realized how like herself it was—adorably fresh, happily coloured, sumptuous and fine. It had simple curtains, white sheets, and a warm carpet on the floor; and yet with something, too, that struck the note of a life outside. A pennant of many colours hung where two soft pink curtains joined, and at the window and over the door was an ancient cross in bronze and gold. It was not the simple Christian cross of the modern world, but an ancient one which had become a symbol of the Romanys, a sign to mark the highways, the guide of the wayfarers. The pennant had been on the pole of the Ry’s tent in far-off days in the Roumelian country. In the girl herself there was that which corresponded to the gorgeous pennant and the bronze cross. It was not in dress or in manner, for there was no sign of garishness, of the unusual anywhere—in manner she was as well controlled as any woman of fashion, in dress singularly reserved—but in the depths of the eyes there was some restless, unsettled thing, some flicker of strange banners akin to the pennant at the joining of the pink curtains. There had been something of the same look in Ingolby’s eyes in the past, only with him it was the sense of great adventure, intrepid enterprise, a touch of vision and the beckoning thing. That look was not in his eyes now. Nothing was there; no life, no soul; only darkness. But did that look still inhabit the eyes of the soul?
He answered the question himself. “I’d start again in a different way if I could,” he said musingly, his face towards the girl. “It’s easy to say that, but I would. It isn’t only the things you get, it’s how you use them. It isn’t only the things you do, it’s why you do them. But I’ll never have a chance now; I’ll never have a chance to try the new way. I’m done.”
Something almost savage leaped into her eyes—a wild, bitter protest, for it was her tragedy, too, if he was not to regain his sight. The great impulse of a nature which had been disciplined into reserve broke forth.
“It isn’t so,” she said with a tremor in her voice. All that he—and she—was in danger of losing came home to her. “It isn’t so. You shall get well again. Your sight will come back. To-morrow; perhaps to-day, Hindlip, the great oculist comes from New York. Mr. Warbeck, the Montreal man, holds out hopes. If the New York man says the same, why despair? Perhaps in another month you will be on your feet again, out in the world, fighting, working, mastering, just as you used to do.”