"My first idea was how to prevent Europe and Asia finding it out and frightening my family, at least until my eyes had had time to turn round. The next voice I heard was the doctor's, summoned, I suppose, by Mrs. Bailey. It was cheerful, and said that was good hearing, and now we should do. He said:—'You lie quiet, Mr. Torrens, and I'll tell you what it all was; because I daresay you don't know, and would like to.' I said yes—very much. So he told me the story in a comfortable optimist way—said it was a loss of blood from the occipital artery that had made such a wreck of me, but that a contusion of the head had been the cause of the insensibility, which had nearly stopped the action of the heart, else I might have bled to death...."
"Oh, how white you were when we found you!" Gwen exclaimed—"So terribly white! But I half think I can see how it happened. Your heart stopped pumping the blood out, because you were stunned, and that gave the artery a chance to pull itself together. That's the sort of idea Dr. Merridew gave me, with the long words left out."
"What a very funny thing!" said Adrian thoughtfully, "to have one's life saved by being nearly killed by something else. Similia similibus curantur. However, all's fish that comes to one's net. Well—when Sir Coupland had told me his story, he said casually:—'What's all this Mrs. Bailey was telling me about your finding the room so dark?' I humbugged a little over it, and said my eyesight was very dim. Whatever he thought, he said very little to me about it. Indeed, he only said that he was not surprised. A shock to the head and loss of blood might easily react on the optic nerve. It would gradually right itself with rest. I said I supposed he could try tests—lenses and games—to find out if the eyes were injured. He said he would try the lenses and games later, if it seemed necessary. For the present I had better stay quiet and not think about it. It would improve. Then my father and 'Rene came, and were jolly glad to hear my voice again. For I had only been half-conscious for days, and only less than half audible, if, indeed, I ever said anything. But I was on my guard, and my father went away home without knowing, and I don't believe 'Rene quite knows now. It was your father who spotted the thing first. Had he told you, to put you up to the hand-shaking device?"
"He never said a word. The handshaking was my own brilliant idea. When I found—what I did find out—I went away and had a good cry in mamma's room." This speech was an effort on Gwen's part to get a little nearer—ever so little—to Marcus Curtius; nearer, that is, to her metaphorical parallel of his heroism. Marcus had got weaker as an imitable prototype during the conversation, and it had seemed to Gwen that he might slip through her fingers altogether, if no help came. Her "good cry" reinforced Marcus, and quite blamelessly; for who could find fault with her for that much of concern for so fearful a calamity? What had she said that she might not have said to a friend's husband, cruelly and suddenly stricken blind? Indeed, could she as a friend have said less? Was her human pity to be limited to women and children and cases of special licence, or pass current merely under chaperonage? No—she was safe so far certainly.
"Oh, Lady Gwendolen, I can't stand this," was Adrian's exclamation in a tone of real distress. "Why—why—should I make you miserable and lay you awake o' nights? I couldn't help your finding out, perhaps. But what a selfish beast I am to go on grizzling about my own misfortune.... Well—I have been grizzling! And all the while, as like as not, the medicos are right, and in six weeks I shall be reading diamond type as merry as a grig...."
"Do grigs read diamond type?"
"I may be doing so, anyhow, grigs or no!" He paused an instant, his absurdity getting the better of him. "I may have employed the expression 'grigs' rashly. I do not really know how small type they can read. I withdraw the grigs. Besides, there's another point of view...."
"What's that?" Gwen is a little impatient and absent. Marcus Curtius has waned again perceptibly.
"Why—suppose I had been knocked over two miles off, carried in, for instance, at the Mackworth Clarkes', where 'Rene's gone...!"
"But you weren't!"