The Idol of the Blind: A Novel

by Tom Gallon

The captain was pacing up and down the little parlour, turning abruptly on his heel when he reached the edge of the hearthrug, and again when he almost breasted the old oak bureau at the other side of the room. Seeing the boy standing panting and white-faced in the doorway with his cap in his hand, the captain stopped dead, and faced him. Comethup was trembling so much that he even forgot to salute.

“Oh, sir!” he burst out, almost on the verge of tears. “The little girl—I thought she was a ghost—in the garden—and it’s raining—and I promised to go and see her—and I haven’t been—and Mrs. Blissett says she’s a brat, and—oh, sir—what am I to do?” And poor Comethup burst into tears and hid his face in the lining of his cap.

It may naturally be supposed that the captain was startled. The first idea he grasped, however, was that the boy was in distress, and that was sufficient to stir him to action; he put his arm tenderly round Comethup’s shoulders, stooping a little and trying to draw the cap away from his face, and led him over to a chair. There, seating himself, he drew the boy against his knee, saying nothing, but gripping him tightly with his arm, so that the very presence of that comforting, encircling thing should make itself felt without the necessity for words. In a few moments Comethup was calmer, and could give an intelligent account of what he wanted.

The captain questioned him closely, and Comethup knew whether or not he was pleased, at each point of the recital, by the tightening or loosening of the arm about him. When he had finished, and had expressed his determination to go to the house and see the child, the arm held him very closely indeed.

For some moments the captain sat perfectly still; then he got up, walked across to the window, and looked out. Darkness had already fallen, and the wind and rain were making havoc among the captain’s roses. It was characteristic of the captain that he took the whole matter from the boy’s standpoint; never appeared to consider for an instant that he might be interfering in some one else’s business. He saw only, as Comethup had done, the child alone in the garden, haunted by fears of the echoing, half-empty house, and of Mrs. Blissett. Finally, with a grunt, he turned sharply away from the window, walked across the room to a long cupboard, and pulled open its double doors with a jerk; then he pulled out from it a long, old-fashioned military cloak, very rusty and faded, and swung it round his shoulders with a single movement of his arm. “We’ll go and find her, boy,” he said, and Comethup followed him obediently from the room.

The captain took down his hat from the peg in the hall and rammed it on his head a little more tightly than usual, and opened the cottage door. A drifting spray of rain drove in at them, and the captain threw out a fold of his cloak, like a huge wing, and drew it round the boy. Then they passed out of the cottage together.

Comethup had only a dim remembrance afterward of that walk; of passing people in the streets, and seeing only their feet and ankles; of hearing everything muffled and blurred through the heavy cloak; of catching glimpses of a storm-twisted sky through certain tiny moth-holes and thinnesses of the cloak as it touched his face. Presently the captain threw back an edge of it, and Comethup saw that they were standing before the iron gates.

“Go first,” said the captain, in a low voice, “and call to her. Don’t frighten her if she is there.”

So Comethup stepped softly into the garden, treading cautiously over the wet leaves, and feeling the heavy rain drops from the branches above him tumbling on his hair and shoulders. He called “’Linda! ’Linda!” as he went.

Out of the darkness near the house came the little figure at last, as he had hoped; not joyfully, or with laughter on its lips, but bedraggled, and wet, and trembling, and piteous. She ran to him and caught him eagerly, whispering his name brokenly between her sobs, and hiding her tear-stained face against his childish shoulder. She did not see the captain, who stood with his arms folded beneath his military cloak, looking down at them.