At that instant he heard Fleda’s footstep approaching the bed. His senses had grown very acute since the advent of his blindness. He held out his hand into space.
“What a nice room this is!” he said as her fingers slid into his. “It’s the nicest room I was ever in. It’s too nice for me. In a few days I’ll hand the lease over again to its owner, and go back to the pigsty Jim keeps in Stormont Street.”
“Well, there ain’t any pigs in that sty now, Chief; but it’s all ready,” said Jim, indignant and sarcastic.
It was a lucky speech. It broke the spell of emotion which was greatly straining everybody’s endurance.
“That’s one in the eye for somebody,” remarked Rockwell drily.
“What would you like for lunch?” asked Fleda, letting go Ingolby’s hand, but laying her fingers on his arm for a moment.
What would he like for lunch! Here was a man back from the Shadows, from broken hopes and shattered career, from the helplessness and eternal patience of the blind; here he was on the hard, bright highroad again, with a procession of restored things coming towards him, with life and love within his grasp; and the woman to whom it mattered most of all, who was worth it all, and more than all where he was concerned, said to him in this moment of revelation, “What would you like for lunch?”
With an air as casually friendly as her own, he put another hand on the fingers lying on his arm, patted them, and said gaily, “Anything I can see. As a drover once said to me, ‘I can clean as fur as I can reach.’”
In just such a temper also they had parted when he went back to his “pigsty” with Jim. To Gabriel Druse he had said all that one man might say to another without excess of feeling; to Madame Bulteel he had given a gold pencil which he had always worn; to Fleda he gave nothing, said little, but the few words he did say told the story, if not the whole story.
“It’s a nice room,” he said, and she had flushed at his words, “and I’ve had the best time of my life in it. I’d like to buy it, but I know it’s not for sale. Love and money couldn’t buy it—isn’t that so?”