I started to the door, but his troubled expression was so piteous that I did not like leaving him.
"I get paid as a member ..." he murmured to himself. "Burgess will pay me, too ... and I shall get a pension.... It doesn't cost much to live...." Then turning to me imploringly he cried, "George, you must tell me who they were! I must repay them! Old man, you don't want to break my luck?"
With his wonderful black eyes on mine—eyes that I could hardly yet believe were sightless—I was unable to discuss what he was pleased to call his luck.
"The secret's not mine," I said. "But I'll arrange for the repayment."
"Jim Loring was one."
"Perhaps; or again, perhaps not."
My luncheon-party opened uncomfortably, for I had first to warn Arden what fate had overtaken O'Rane and then whisper to Raney that he must exert himself to make the meal cheerful. Valentine greeted me unsmilingly with the words, "They prolong the agony scientifically, don't they?"
"Three months without a scratch isn't bad," said O'Rane.
"But if you're going to be killed in the end?" he asked, spreading out his hands. "I don't mind roughing it, I don't mind responsibility—I'd send a battalion to certain death as blithely as the most incompetent staff officer. I suppose I can stand being killed like other people, but I can't face being wounded and—my God!—I can't stand that infernal, never-ending noise!" He shuddered and was silent for a while. "I'm an exception to the general rule," he went on. "Out there, there's only one religion—you're going to escape and your neighbour's going to be killed. It must be cheering to believe that."
We survived luncheon because O'Rane took hold of the conversation on that word and discussed the new wave of mysticism that was passing over the world. "The ways of God to man" were justified in a hundred different fashions, and from the first week of the war the Book of the Revelation had been more quoted—and perhaps less understood—than at any time since the middle of the seventeenth century. The exegesis of the day contemplated the war as a Divine purge to cleanse Germany of moral perversion and punish Belgium for the Congo atrocities. France was being held to account for a stationary birthrate and the expulsion of the religious orders, and England—faute de mieux—shared the guilt of a Liberal Government which had carried a Welsh Disestablishment Bill.