The eyes sneered. Tristram met their ferocious gibe unflinchingly.
"That is one thing I had to say. And then—there's Anne. When I asked her to be my wife, I didn't know what you would feel about our marriage and I didn't care very much. You had made her pretty wretched, and I didn't consider at the time that what had happened between us made any difference. You had been considerably less than a father to her—and besides, you were knocked out. I understand Sir Gilbert treated you like a brave man and was quite honest with you. He doesn't believe in your recovery—nor do I—chiefly because I've done everything for you that science can do—and failed." He paused again. His sentences had been clipped and hard, the words almost brutal. But his attitude was not that of a strong man talking down from the height of his strength and well-being to a broken victim. The eyes under the straight fair brows revealed pitilessly what lay behind the dogged jaw, the composed and resolute exposition. There can be no sentimentality between suffering and suffering, only equality.
"But there was one thing I hadn't understood," he said, "and that was Anne's love for you. Frankly, I thought she would be freer, happier without you. But I was mistaken. It didn't matter that you'd made her wretched. She only remembered that you were her father, the Bagh Sahib, the fine soldier who had done great things. She cared intensely, and all this—this sort of life smashed her up. If she ran away from it, it was because she felt it as an insult to you—a deliberate cruelty. She just ate her heart out about it. When I realized how matters were there was only one thing on earth I wanted to do, and that was to come along and give her every mortal thing I could to make her happy—you included—everything she'd missed. It seemed to me pitiable to consider your feelings or any conventional notions of—of propriety, as I suppose you'd call it. She needed some one to look after her—some one who cared. Well, I cared. Now that I have the right, I shall live for her as far as one human being can live for another. It is my most passionate hope to make her happy. I don't know whether I shall succeed—that's another matter. I shall do my best."
He got up and stood at his full height. The evening regimentals which he wore did not become him. They looked indefinably grotesque on his bigness—like a child's toy uniform on a grown man. The short Eton coat exaggerated the breadth of his shoulders, the black trousers the narrowness of his hips, the length of limb. The gold and red clashed with his tawny hair and the rugged, weather-tanned features. He needed a background of forest, of action, of stern living. His body needed the freedom of rough clothing.
"Anne wants you to live with us," he said. "That is what I have come to tell you. If you both would be happier, I should be glad, too. There is a great deal I might be able to do to make things more tolerable for you—at least, I should try. I have given up my quarters at Heerut. It is for you to decide."
The eyes sparkled. It seemed to Tristram that they were blazing with satiric laughter. He had a reasonless, overwhelming sense of near disaster. "Give me some sign, Boucicault. If you consent, close your eyes or——"
Slowly, as if weighed down by disuse, the withered arm lying on the sheet lifted itself from the elbow. It remained upright for an instant, throwing a sinister shadow on the wall, seeming to point upwards with menacing significance, then sank slowly to its place. The eyes were mad with exultation.
Tristram was back to the bedside at one stride. He laid his fingers on the savagely beating pulse. With rapid, skilful movements, he began to test the muscles and nerve of the now motionless arm. He was breathing quickly. The weariness, the painful deliberation had gone from him. He was himself again—the fighter on the vast field of suffering, the physician glorying in the greatest of all triumphs.
"By God, Boucicault, you don't know what that may mean! It's what we'd hoped for. Look here—can you do it again?"
The arm remained inert, the eyes were, momentarily veiled and insignificant. "How long have you been able to do that?" He was still busy with his examination and scarcely troubled about an answer. He had plunged back into a world where there were no passions or conflicts, but only huge immutable laws, no personal desires or unreal dreams, but only facts, unending chains of cause and effect, a thousand paths converging on one great end. It was not till he had made every experiment complete that he remembered. He looked up. The eyes were turned into their corners, resting on his face. Their exaggerated expanse of white gave them a look like that of a vicious dog. They did not move save when Tristram lifted himself slowly from his half-kneeling position, and then they followed him with a malicious fixity. The rest of the face was dead—a crumbling mask—but the life in those eyes was inextinguishable, titanic in its will to continuation.