Then the Hon. Percival made a speech he half repented of later; videlicet, when he woke next morning. It became the fulcrum, as it were, of an inexplicable misgiving that Miss Dickenson would be bearing the light worse than ever when he saw her at breakfast. The speech was:—"It's very nice out here. One can hear the Don at Covent Garden. Besides ... one can hear out here just as well." This must have been taken to mean that two could. For the lady's truncated reply was:—"Till you've finished your cigar, then!"
Combustion was lip-close when the cigar-end was thrown away. The reader of this story may be able to understand a thing its writer can only record without understanding—the fact that this gentleman felt grateful to the fine moonlight night, now nearly a fait-accompli, for enhancing this lady's white silk, which favoured a pretence that she was only reasonably passée, and enabled him to reflect upon the contour of her throat without interruption from its skin. For it had a contour by moonlight. Well!—sufficient to the day is the evil thereof; daylight might have its say to-morrow. Consider the clock put back a dozen years!
"Oh yes, he's asleep still, but I've seen him—looked in on my way down. Do you know, I really believe he will be quite fit for the journey to-morrow. He's getting such a much better colour, and last night he seemed so much stronger." Thus the last comer to the morning-rally of breakfast claimants, in its ante-room, awaiting its herald. Miss Irene Torrens is a robust beauty with her brother's eyes. She has been with him constantly since she came with her father three weeks ago, and the two of them watched his every breath through the terrible day and night that followed.
"Then perhaps he will let us see him," says Lady Gwen. "At last!"
"You must not expect too much," says Miss Torrens. She does not like saying it, but facts are overpowering. Her brother has exacted a pledge from her to say nothing, even now, about his blindness—merely to treat him as weak-eyed temporarily. He will pass muster, he says—will squeak through somehow. "I can't have that glorious girl made miserable," were the words he had used to her, half an hour since. This Irene will be all on tenterhooks till the interview is safely over. Meanwhile it is only prudent not to sound too hopeful a note. It is as well to keep a margin in reserve in case the performance should fall through.
Irene's response to her brother's words had been, "She is a glorious girl," and she was on the way to "You should have seen her eyes last night over that Beethoven!" But she broke down on the word eyes. How else could it have been? Then the blind man had laughed, in the courage of his heart, as big a laugh as his pitiable weakness could sustain, and had made light of his affliction. He had never given way from the first hour of his revival, when he had asked to have the shutters open, and had been told they were already wide open, and the July sun streaming into the room.
It was the Countess who answered Irene's caution, as accompaniment to her morning salute. "We are not to expect anything, my dear. That is quite understood. It would be unreasonable. And we won't stop long and tire him. But this girl of mine will never be happy if he goes away without our—well!—becoming acquainted, I might almost say. Because really we are perfect strangers. And when one has shot a man, even by accident...." Her ladyship did not finish, but went on to hope the eyesight was recovering.
"Oh yes!" said Irene audaciously. "We are quite hopeful about it now. It will be all right with rest and feeding up. Only, if I let you in to see him you will promise me, won't you—not to say a word about his eyes? It only frightens him, and does no one any good." Of course, Miss Torrens got her promise. It was an easy one to make, because reference to the eyes only seemed a means towards embarrassment. Much easier to say nothing about them. Gwen and Miss Torrens, very liées already, went out by the garden window to talk, but would keep within hearing because breakfast was imminent.
More guests, and the newspapers; as great an event in the early fifties as now, but with only a fraction of the twentieth century's allowance of news. Old General Rawnsley, guilty of his usual rudeness in capturing the Times from all comers, had to surrender it to the Hon. Percival because none but a dog-in-the-manger could read a letter from Sir C. Napier of Scinde, and about Dr. Livingstone and Sekeletu and the Leeambye all at the same time. All comers, or several male comers at least, essayed to pinion the successful captor of the Times, thirsting for information about their own special subjects of interest. No—the Hon. Percival did not see anything, so far, about the new Arctic expedition that was to unearth, or dis-ice, the Erebus and Terror; but the inquirer, a vague young man, shall have the paper directly. Neither has he come on anything, as yet, about a mutiny in the camp at Chobham. But the paper shall be at the disposal of this inquirer, too, as soon as the eye in possession has been run down to the bottom of this column. In due course both inquirers get hold of corners at the moment of surrender, and then have paroxysms of polite concession which neither means in earnest, during which the bone of contention becomes the prey of a passing wolf. Less poetically, someone else gets hold of the paper and keeps it.