“The firm” lay in one heap—Cassidy on his back, Mallandane athwart him. To the only person to whom he ever spoke of the affair, Cassidy said: “He was stooping to light another fuse when I reached him. I gripped both arms round him as he turned on me and tried to carry him out. It was a wrestling match, for he showed fight. My face was over his one shoulder, as his was over mine; but mine was turned towards the shots.”
A piece of the rock that shattered poor Cassidy’s face entered the back of his partner’s head, and he never stirred again.
Cassidy lay for months in hospital, bandaged, blindfolded, barely alive; and the woman he had stood by, stood by him. When he was able to walk about, it was on her arm he leaned. When he was fit to leave, it was to her house he went to be tended for months longer. He never complained nor lost heart, although he knew that one eye was gone and thought he would lose the other.
Some seven or eight months had passed, and he was getting well and strong—he was healing. She had always dreaded the effect of the first sight of himself, and for this reason had removed the mirrors from the rooms he frequented; but one day, when she had been out for a while, she found him lying on the sofa, the bandage off his eyes, and a hand-glass dropped on the carpet close by. It was the only time he had fainted or in any way given in.
Later in the evening he said:
“I don’t really mind so much now that I know. It was the suspense that worried me.” And, after a pause, he added in a voice that seemed to let you hear his heart lifting: “I’ll be able to tackle work again soon, and will be all right again.”
“That was the only allusion,” Mrs Mallandane said, “that he ever made to his disfigurement. I believe it was out of delicacy and consideration for my feelings that he never spoke about it. You could not even see that he ever thought of it, for he had that splendid manliness that doesn’t know what self-consciousness means.
“Only one thing showed unmistakably that he did feel it, and that he felt he was dead to all the promise of his past. You must have remarked his manner of speech?” she observed, turning to me. “He spoke like a working man. That was his only shield. He deliberately sank himself to that level to be spared the prominence and pity that would be given him as a gentleman. It was his hope to pass through life unnoticed. With me, and with me only, he had no disguise, no concealment, no reserve!”
He used always to talk of their affairs as one and the same, in order to keep up the illusion he had encouraged in her from the beginning when he had told her very seriously that “it would never do to liquidate the firm’s business now. It would mean sacrificing everything.” She agreed to do whatever he thought right; and at the end of every month he used to hand to her, scrupulously accounted for, a sum greater or less, according to “the firm’s profits for the month.”
From his own “profits” he always managed to have something—no matter how little—to spend on Molly, who was his pet and companion always. The proceeds of the sale of house and furniture—when they had to be given up—were handed over to Mrs Mallandane “for a stand-by,” and she went into lodgings because she “would feel more comfortable and have more time to give to Molly there,”—not because he was watchful over her good name and would not stay in the house once he was well enough to walk alone.