He left the room, and Roderick lay back and stared at the ceiling. He caught the word amputation, and he knew they were talking about his arm. They were going to cut it off, then. The knowledge did not seem to add anything to the overwhelming weight which had fallen upon him, and was crushing him. The whole structure of his life was tumbling about him, and he lay caught helpless in its fall. His new position was gone, for well he knew the company could not wait—indeed, would not wait—for so insignificant a servant as he. His father—perhaps his father was gone. And now the rosy hope that had steadily and surely arisen in his heart, since the day he had seen Helen Murray on board the Inverness, until it had lighted up his whole life, had suddenly vanished in darkness. His fighting spirit rose against these odds. He shoved the deft hands of the nurse aside and sat up.
"I'm going home," he said hoarsely. Then the nurse, and the little white table by the bedside with the bottles on it, and the white uniformed man standing outside the doorway, swung up to the ceiling and became an indistinct blur. He recovered almost immediately. The nurse slipped a little thermometer under his tongue, and put a cool finger on his pulse.
"I must go home," mumbled Roderick. "Where's Dr. Wells?"
"Dr. Wells is wanted in the operating room," she said soothingly. "You will be glad to know he is going to assist. I understand you are old friends." She looked at him anxiously. He was in the worst possible condition mentally for an operation.
"If you'd just brace up, you know," she said encouragingly. "If you would get hold of yourself." She had prepared many a patient for the operating table, and had seen few so exercised as this one. "You must be courageous," she said. "The operation may not be serious. And it will be over soon."
Roderick looked at her uncomprehendingly. He cared not at all for the operation itself, but it was the trap that had caught him, and he was writhing to be free.
Her next words put a new face on it.
"If you have any message to send to your friends," she said gently, "I should be glad to have it attended to. Have you any—property or anything that should be settled. We hope this operation will be simple; but if not—you should be prepared, Mr. McRae."
"There's nothing," said Roderick. "Nothing."
Everything in the world was slipping from him. The props of life had given way one by one, and now perhaps life itself was going. He lay there on the small cot-bed, watching the nurse and orderly hurry to and fro, and looked squarely at the situation. It was desperate. Always he had taken hold of difficulties and wrenched them out of his path and gone proudly on his way. But here he was helpless. For the first time in his strong, successful youth he realised that which his father had striven all his years to teach him, man's utter impotence before God. He was bound hand and foot, helpless, just as the door of success had flung open at his touch. He had paddled out bravely into the open sea of life after the rainbow gold, only to find it vanish and leave him lost in a world of mists and shadows. He remembered Dr. Leslie's words: "If His love cannot draw us into the way, it meets us on the Damascus road and blinds us with its light."