His head had fallen to his hand, and she moved closer to him and laid her face against the sleeve of his coat. She did not say anything, she did not touch him, or wind her arm, as she loved to do, about his neck. She had come to understand so well, and perhaps the greatest triumph of her love was in knowing when to say nothing at all.
At last he raised his head. His voice, like his face, was tensely drawn. "Ernestine, don't bother to stay. Probably you want to be seeing about dinner, and I—I don't feel like talking."
That too she understood. She only laid her hand for the moment upon his hair. Then: "Call me, dear, if you want me," and she slipped away, and in a little nook under the stairs sat looking out into their strange future with wondering, beseeching eyes—seeking passionately better resources, a more sustaining strength.
Left alone the man sat very still, his hands holding tight the arm of the chair. The tide of despair was coming in, was washing over the sands of resignation, beating against the rocks of courage. Many times before it had come in, but there was something overwhelming in its volume to-night. It beat hard against the rocks. Was it within its power to loosen and carry them away? Carry them out with itself to be gone for all time?
He rose and felt his way to the window. He pressed his hot forehead against the pane. Outside was the dying light of day, but the glare of noonday, the quiet light of evening, the black of the night, were all one to him now. Was it going to be so with his mind, his spirit? Would all that other light, light of the mind and soul, be gulped into this black monotone, this nothingness?
He had heard of the beautiful spirit of the blind, of the mastery of fate achieved, the things they were able, in spite of it all, to gain from life. Ernestine had read him some of that; he had been glad to hear it, but it had not moved him much. Most of those people had been blind for a long time. He too, in the course of ten or twenty years, when the best of his life was gone, would become accustomed to groping his way about, reading from those books, and having other people tell him how things looked. But so long as he remained himself at all how accustom himself to doing without his work? In the records and stories of the blind, it seemed if they had a work it was something which they could continue. But with him, the work which made his life was gone.
Over there was the university. It had been a busy day at the university—old faces and new faces, all the exuberance of a new start, the enthusiasm for a clean slate—students anxious to make some particular class—how well he knew it all! Who was in his laboratory? Who working with his old things? To whom was coming the joy he had thought would be his? What man of all the world's men would achieve the things he had believed would crown his own life?
Some day Ernestine would read it to him. He had made her promise to do that, if it came. He would see it all—just how it had been worked out, and the momentary joy of the revelation would sweep him back into it and he would forget how completely it was a thing apart from him. And then Ernestine would ask him if he wanted his chair a little higher or lower, or whether she should shut the window; and he would pick up one of his embossed books and try to read something, and he would know, as he had never known before, how the great world which did things was going right on without him.
There were a few little petitions he sent out every once in a while. "I want to remain a man! I want to keep my nerve. I don't want to whine. I don't want to get sorry for myself. For God's sake help me to be a good fellow—a half way decent sort of chap!"
And he had not tried in vain. His success, as to exteriors, had been good. Mrs. McCormick said it was indeed surprising how well one could get along without one's sight.