"Of course it was no indulgence at all to him," said the writer, whose affectionate regard for his friend was one of long standing.
"I hope so," answered the other, "and, indeed, I had every reason to suppose that the liking which sprang up between us was no less on his side than on my own. We were mutually attracted in spite of, or perhaps because of, our fundamental differences in disposition, opinions, beliefs; though no Christian could have borne affliction with a braver patience than he—the braver in that he did not look to a hereafter for comfort."
"A continuous powder and no jam to come," threw in the writer, with the glare of battle in his eye, for he also had opinions and beliefs at variance with those of his companion. "There are a good many of us who have to face that."
"Not many in worse case than he," returned the clergyman gently, declining to be drawn into discussion. "But although the use of his limbs was denied him, he took a keener delight than any man I have ever known in the compensations that his mind, through books, and his senses, through contact with the outer world, brought him. Beauty of color and form, beauty in nature, beauty in people, was an exquisite pleasure to him, and music an intense—I had almost said a sacred passion. He drank in lovely sights and sweet sounds with an almost painful appreciation, and I remember well his telling me in his whimsical way—it was during one of the last conversations I had with him before my departure—that, travel about as I would with my mere automatic arms and legs, I could never overtake such happiness as he did on the wings of harmony.
"We corresponded, from time to time, for a year or two, I in the usual manner and he by means of dictation to his servant, who was an earnest if somewhat poor performer on the type-writer. But gradually the thread of our intercourse was broken in some way and our letters ceased."
"I've always said that nothing but community of interests preserved friendship," declared the writer sententiously, "with the exception, of course, of our own."
"I was surprised, therefore," went on the clergyman, "to receive about eighteen months ago a brief note telling me that a great sorrow and a great joy had come into his life almost simultaneously, and begging me to go to him, if he might so far trespass upon our acquaintance, as he had 'matters about which it behooved a man'—I am repeating his words—'to consult another wiser than himself.' I started at once. It took me all day to accomplish the journey, and it was early evening when I arrived at the little station he had mentioned as the place where he would send somebody to meet me. I found the carriage without difficulty, and was driven for some five miles through the beautiful autumn woods.
"It was a low, square, comfortable-looking paper-weight of a house," he went on after a moment, "beaming welcome from an open front door, where my friend's confidential servant stood waiting for me. He conducted me at once to my room, saying that dinner would be served as soon as I could make myself ready and join his master in the library. This I made haste to do. I found my friend in his wheeled chair, near a cheerfully crackling fire in a delightful room lined with books from its scarlet-carpeted floor to its oak-beamed ceiling. He welcomed me warmly and yet with a certain constraint, and I felt—it might have been some subtle thought-transference—that the thing he had it in his mind to discuss with me was one which only an extremity of trouble would have induced him to discuss with any man.
"Dinner was announced almost before our first greetings were over, and an excellent dinner it was—cooked by an old woman who, he declared, had virtually ruled him and the house ever since he could remember, and waited upon by the man, who also attended to his master's peculiar needs with the utmost swiftness and dexterity. The household, I subsequently learned, consisted of only these two, an elderly housemaid, and the white-haired coachman who had driven me from the station.
"'Why they stay with me in this out-of-the-way place, without a grumble, all the year round, I can't see,' said my host, after our meal was over and we were once more alone in the library. 'And, by the way,' he added, turning his face toward me suddenly,—I don't know whether I have mentioned that he had a particularly handsome face,—'apropos of seeing, what I have not seen before I shall have no further chance of informing myself about now, for I have become, in these last six months, completely blind.'