"You did indeed, and Heaven knows how glad I should be to be able to be taken in by it and believe every word the doctors say. But when one has been hocus-pocussed about anything one ... one feels very strongly about, one gets suspicious of everybody.... Oh yes—indeed, I think very likely the doctors are right, and if Dr. Merridew had only said that you couldn't see at all now, but that the sight was sure to come back, I should have felt quite happy yesterday when...." She stopped, hesitating, brought up short by suddenly suspecting that she was driving home the fact of his blindness, instead of helping him to keep up heart against it. But how could she get to her point without doing so? How could Marcus Curtius saddle up for his terrible leap, and keep the words of the Oracle a secret?
At any rate, he could not see her confusion at her own malapropos—that was something! She recovered from it to find him saying:—"But what I want to know is—what happened yesterday? I mean, how came you to know anything you did not know before? Was it anything I did? I thought I got through it so capitally." He spoke more dejectedly than hitherto, palpably because his efforts at pretence of vision had failed. The calamity itself was all but forgotten.
Gwen saw nothing ahead but confession. Well—it might be the best way to the haven she wanted to steer for. "It was not what you did," said she. "You made believe quite beautifully all the time we were sitting there, talking talk. It was when I was just going. You remember when mamma had gone away with 'Rene, and I put my foot in it over those verses?"
"Yes, indeed I do. Only, you know, that wasn't because of the Watchman. I never mixed him in—not with my affairs. A sort of Oriental character!"
"Well—that was my mistake. You remember when, anyhow? Now, do you know, all the time I was standing there talking about the Watchman, I was holding out my hand to you to say good-night, and you never offered to take it, and put your hands in your pockets? It must have gone on for quite two minutes. And I was determined not to give a hint, and there was no one else there...." Gwen thought she could understand the gesture that made her pause, a sudden movement of the blind man's right hand as though it had been stung by the discovery of its own backwardness.
He dropped it immediately in a sort of despairing way, then threw it up impatiently. "All no use!" he said. "No use—no use—no use!" The sound of his despair was in his voice as he let the hand fall again upon his knee. He gave a heart-broken sigh:—"Oh dear!" and then sat on silent.
Gwen was afraid to speak. For all she knew, her first word might be choked by a sob. After a few moments he spoke again:—"And there was I—thinking—thinking...." and stopped short.
"Thinking what?" said Gwen timidly.
"I will tell you some time," he said. "Not now!" And then he drew a long breath and spoke straight on, as though some obstacle to speech had gone. "It has been a terrible time, Lady Gwendolen—this first knowledge of ... of what I have lost. Put recovery aside for a moment—let the chance of it lie by, until it is on the horizon. Think only what the black side of the shield means—the appalling darkness in the miserable time to come—the old age when folk will call me the blind Mr. Torrens; will say of me:—'You know, he was not born blind—it was an accident—a gunshot wound—a long while back now.' And all that long while back will have been a long vacuity to me, and Heaven knows what burden to others.... I have known it all from the first. I knew it when I waked to my senses in the room upstairs—to all my senses but one. I knew it when I heard them speak hopefully of the case; hope means fear, and I knew what the fear was they were hoping against. That early morning when stupor came to an end, and my consciousness came back, I remembered all. But I thought the darkness was only the sweet, wholesome darkness of night, and my heart beat for the coming of the day. The day came, sure enough, but I knew nothing of it. The first voice I heard was Mrs. Bailey's, singing pæans over my recovery. She had been lying in wait for it, in a chair beside the bed which I picture to myself as a chair of vast scope and pretensions. I did not use my tongue, when I found it, to ask where I was—because I knew I was somewhere and the bed was very comfortable. I asked what o'clock it was, and was told it was near nine. Then, said I, why not open the shutters and let in the light?"
"What did Mrs. Bailey say?"