Part 15 (2/2)

”Have you ever suffered an injury in the head?” he asked. ”Were you ever thrown from your horse? Were you wounded?”

”No,” said Durrance.

The Syrian did not disguise his conviction that the case was grave; and after he had departed both men were silent for some time. Calder had a feeling that any attempt at consolation would be futile in itself, and might, moreover, in betraying his own fear that the hurt was irreparable, only discourage his companion. He turned to the pile of letters and looked them through.

”There are two letters here, Durrance,” he said gently, ”which you might perhaps care to hear. They are written in a woman's hand, and there is an Irish postmark. Shall I open them?”

”No,” exclaimed Durrance, suddenly, and his hand dropped quickly upon Calder's arm. ”By no means.”

Calder, however, did not put down the letters. He was anxious, for private reasons of his own, to learn something more of Ethne Eustace than the outside of her letters could reveal. A few rare references made in unusual moments of confidence by Durrance had only informed Calder of her name, and a.s.sured him that his friend would be very glad to change it if he could. He looked at Durrance--a man so trained to vigour and activity that his very sunburn seemed an essential quality rather than an accident of the country in which he lived; a man, too, who came to the wild, uncitied places of the world with the joy of one who comes into an inheritance; a man to whom these desolate tracts were home, and the fireside and the hedged fields and made roads merely the other places; and he understood the magnitude of the calamity which had befallen him. Therefore he was most anxious to know more of this girl who wrote to Durrance from Donegal, and to gather from her letters, as from a mirror in which her image was reflected, some speculation as to her character. For if she failed, what had this friend of his any longer left?

”You would like to hear them, I expect,” he insisted. ”You have been away eight weeks.” And he was interrupted by a harsh laugh.

”Do you know what I was thinking when I stopped you?” said Durrance.

”Why, that I would read the letters after you had gone. It takes time to get used to being blind after your eyes have served you pretty well all your life.” And his voice shook ever so little. ”You will have to help me to answer them, Calder. So read them. Please read them.”

Calder tore open the envelopes and read the letters through and was satisfied. They gave a record of the simple doings of her mountain village in Donegal, and in the simplest terms. But the girl's nature shone out in the telling. Her love of the country-side and of the people who dwelt there was manifest. She could see the humour and the tragedy of the small village troubles. There was a warm friendliness for Durrance moreover expressed, not so much in a sentence as in the whole spirit of the letters. It was evident that she was most keenly interested in all that he did; that, in a way, she looked upon his career as a thing in which she had a share, even if it was only a friend's share. And when Calder had ended he looked again at Durrance, but now with a face of relief. It seemed, too, that Durrance was relieved.

”After all, one has something to be thankful for,” he cried. ”Think!

Suppose that I had been engaged to her! She would never have allowed me to break it off, once I had gone blind. What an escape!”

”An escape?” exclaimed Calder.

”You don't understand. But I knew a man who went blind; a good fellow, too, before--mind that, before! But a year after! You couldn't have recognised him. He had narrowed down into the most selfish, exacting, egotistical creature it is possible to imagine. I don't wonder; I hardly see how he could help it; I don't blame him. But it wouldn't make life easier for a wife, would it? A helpless husband who can't cross a road without his wife at his elbow is bad enough. But make him a selfish beast into the bargain, full of questions, jealous of her power to go where she will, curious as to every person with whom she speaks--and what then? My G.o.d, I am glad that girl refused me. For that I am most grateful.”

”She refused you?” asked Calder, and the relief pa.s.sed from his face and voice.

”Twice,” said Durrance. ”What an escape! You see, Calder, I shall be more trouble even than the man I told you of. I am not clever. I can't sit in a chair and amuse myself by thinking, not having any intellect to buck about. I have lived out of doors and hard, and that's the only sort of life that suits me. I tell you, Calder, you won't be very anxious for much of my society in a year's time,” and he laughed again and with the same harshness.

”Oh, stop that,” said Calder; ”I will read the rest of your letters to you.”

He read them, however, without much attention to their contents. His mind was occupied with the two letters from Ethne Eustace, and he was wondering whether there was any deeper emotion than mere friends.h.i.+p hidden beneath the words. Girls refused men for all sorts of queer reasons which had no sense in them, and very often they were sick and sorry about it afterwards; and very often they meant to accept the men all the time.

”I must answer the letters from Ireland,” said Durrance, when he had finished. ”The rest can wait.”

Calder held a sheet of paper upon the desk and told Durrance when he was writing on a slant and when he was writing on the blotting-pad; and in this way Durrance wrote to tell Ethne that a sunstroke had deprived him of his sight. Calder took that letter away. But he took it to the hospital and asked for the Syrian doctor. The doctor came out to him, and they walked together under the trees in front of the building.

”Tell me the truth,” said Calder.

The doctor blinked behind his spectacles.

”The optic nerve is, I think, destroyed,” he replied.

”Then there is no hope?”

”None, if my diagnosis is correct.”

Calder turned the letter over and over, as though he could not make up his mind what in the world to do with it.

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