All his life Francis had been a sworn opponent of worry. When anything disagreeable threatened, his mode of procedure was to shrug his shoulders, and immediately divert his thoughts. “Leave the thing alone; don’t bother about it; it will probably come all right in the end!” Such was his theory, and experience had proved that as often as not it was correct. He endeavoured to cultivate the same attitude towards his boy, but in vain. The anxiety recurred.
He told himself that he would have the eyes tested, and satisfy himself once for all; but once and again his courage failed, and the days passed on, and nothing was done. Then there came an evening when suddenly fear engulfed him, and made anything seem easier than a continuation of suspense.
He was holding the child in his arms, and he rose and carried it across the room, to where a powerful light hung from the wall. He pushed aside the shade, and held the tiny face closely approaching the glass. The eyes stared on, unblinking and still. A great cry burst from Francis’ throat:
“My God!” he cried. “The boy is blind!”
The boy was blind, and there was no hope that he would ever possess his sight. Mrs Manning wept herself ill, but even in the depths of her distress she realised that her husband’s sufferings were keener than her own. It gave an added touch of misery to those black days, to feel a strange new distance between her husband and herself. She could not comfort him; she could not understand him; after ten years of married life it appeared as if the man she had known had disappeared, and a stranger had taken his place. Yet there was nothing unmanly in his grief; he was quiet and self-restrained as she had never seen him before, gentler, and more considerate of others.
The poor woman noticed the change with awe, and wondered if Francis were going to die.
“I have never seen you feel anything as you are feeling this,” she said to him one night. They were sitting by the dying fire, and Francis raised his head and stared at her with sombre eyes.
“But I have felt nothing,” he said flatly. “I am finding that out. I did not know what it meant to feel!”
From the moment of his discovery of the blindness of his son, Francis Manning became a man possessed of but one aim—to lighten and alleviate, so far as was humanly possible, the child’s sad lot. He taught himself Braille, so that in time to come he might teach it to the boy, and be able to translate for his benefit appropriate pieces of literature. He visited every famous institute for the blind at home and abroad, and made an exhaustive study of their systems. He searched for a girl of intelligence and charm, and sent her to be trained in readiness to undertake the boy’s education; he schooled himself to be a playmate and companion; he denied himself every luxury, so that the boy’s future might be assured. As Francis the man, he ceased to exist; he lived on only as Francis the father.
During the first three years of his life the young Francis remained blissfully unconscious of his infirmity. A strong, healthy child surrounded by the tenderest of care, the sun of his happiness never set. His little feet raced up and down; his sweet, shrill voice chanted merry strains; his small, strong hands seemed gifted with sight as well as touch, so surely did they guide him to and fro. Nature, having withheld the greatest gift, had remorsefully essayed compensation in the shape of a finer touch, a finer hearing. The blind child was the sunshine of the home; but the father knew that the hour must dawn when that sunshine would be clouded. He held himself in readiness for that hour, training himself as an athlete trains for a race.