"Yes. He"s in there!" Peter concluded, nodding toward the operating-room.
"Yes!" she murmured. "It"s too awful!"
She, too, was silent, taking her cue from his evident desire. As she paced beside him she had an atmospheric feeling of the power of the man as something absolute and indomitable, centred on fighting with his will for a decision in favour of Phil. He made talk of any kind seem petty.
When the door of the operating-room opened they heard its swing, noiseless as were its hinges. Dr. and Mrs. Sanford rose mechanically in answer to that signal; the others turned in their tracks. As Bricktop appeared in the doorway two pairs of old eyes saw him indistinctly through a swimming haze. They were going to learn now if Phil would ever be to their sight as he was before, or---- Bricktop"s round face drawn with effort lighted with a smile, as he held up his hand.
"You"ve done it! By G.o.d, you"ve done it, Bricktop!" Peter cried, rushing toward him.
"Right!" said Bricktop. "Unless there is some setback in the next two or three days. I don"t think there will be. Expect to make him as good as new, only a few little scars!"
Two pairs of old eyes still saw that red head like a sun through a fog, but they had heard his words. They did not cry out; their only demonstration was to clasp hands. Helen could not speak, only look at Bricktop with glorious wonder in her eyes, which he was quick to see.
"We beat the Boches to it, eh?" he said to her.
Peter, too, had become silent in his inexpressible happiness, after he had wrung Bricktop"s hand.
"If now he should recover his sight!" Henriette exclaimed abstractedly, her words apparently the beginning of a train of thought too rapid to be expressed in speech.
"He will!" said Helen and Peter together.
Phil was being wheeled from the operating-room back to the ward.
Bricktop beckoned the waiting group to come in; then bade them pause at the door until Phil was transferred from his carriage to the bed. The nurse said that he had recovered consciousness, though there was no sign of it in his motionless form.
"You tell him!" said Bricktop to Helen.
"Bricktop has done it! You win!" she wrote on his arm.
Many days awaited him, with the pain devils in their last big dance, but with every day meaning less torture. His hearing had become distinct enough to perceive an ordinary conversation around his chair as a faint hum. The silver harness still clinched his jaw and the bandages were still over his eyes.
"Quite as he was before--only a few scars," Bricktop, whom Henriette had met coming out of his office, said in answer to her inquiry when she was on her way to Phil.
Mr. Eyes happened to be coming along the path at the time. Henriette joined him and together they crossed the court.
"What hope?" she asked. She put the question to him with increased fervour every time that she saw him; and of late she had chanced to see him frequently.
"I am going to change the bandages," he replied.
Sometimes the great man had doubts about the system of bandages, which nine out of ten specialists would not have favoured, perhaps; but when he considered an operation he fell back on them as the only way.
Sh.e.l.l-shock was baffling, freakish, in its results, and the truth was that he was groping in professional darkness to save Phil from eternal darkness. Yesterday he had strengthened the application. A matter of daily routine the change of the bandages. It brought him every afternoon to the ward and always Helen was there to receive him, the same look of confident antic.i.p.ation in her eyes, as yet unfulfilled.
He pressed his hand on Phil"s forehead, and this Phil had long ago come to recognise as Mr. Eyes" private signal which preceded the removal of the bandages. He was particularly welcome to-day, as Phil had had a kind of restless sensation back of his eyeb.a.l.l.s. As the medicated pad was withdrawn, a gurgling outcry rose from his throat and he leaned convulsively forward, fingers outstretched, opening and closing as if he were trying to grasp at a reality that might escape.
"It"s not true! Imagination again!" snarled the pain devils; but they could not deceive him about this.
Light had come into his black night, soft, dreamy, vague, amazing light--just light, light, light! There were no people in it, no houses, no trees, only light which seemed like silver gauze hung before his eyes and yet to stretch to the ends of the world. It had brought something dead to life as by miracle, with a touch as soft as eiderdown, sending little thrills knitting in and out all through him.
Light for the first time since he had heard that hurtling scream of the sh.e.l.l! Light was in his brain, his veins, his tissue, singing and frolicking as it opened the doors of dark places. He wanted to embrace it, fondle it, run it through his fingers with a miser"s greed of gold and gather a store of it while he might. Out of the light, as if traced by the hand of light, a message was being traced on his arm.
"What is it, Phil?" Helen asked him.
He would not attempt to speak again. He had forgotten himself when he made that gurgling outcry. It was one of the idiosyncrasies of his sick man"s pride that he would not try to talk before the one who wrote on his arm. The sounds that he emitted through the bandages and silver harness must be like a stuttering idiot"s lisp, as he expressed it, and he thought of himself as repulsive enough to her brave eyes without that. Speech would return normally, the throat expert had said, when the removal of Bricktop"s apparatus should give it a chance.
"Light!" he wrote. "Just light, without seeing you or where I am. It seems as if I were hung up in the ether, without seeing sky or earth and light held me up and I ate it and drank it and breathed it. Oh, it is good, good!"
"Yes, good!" repeated phlegmatic, kindly Mr. Eyes, who had brought light to many people for large fees from the rich and for nothing for those who live in the alleys. Light was his business. Yet he, too, must find some outlet for his emotion, which was to pat Helen on the head. General Ears had taken only a thousand yards, while General Eyes felt as triumphant as if he had taken five miles of first line trench, ten thousand prisoners and a hundred guns. It was the knock-out blow for the little pain devils.
When he had made some experiments and put on fresh compresses and was about to go, he said, choosing his words carefully:
"I think that I may safely say, barring unforeseen complications, that he will entirely recover his sight with time. How about that?" he added, to Helen.
Her eyes were moist with happiness. She was incapable of speaking.
Her first coherent thought was that Phil himself did not yet know.
"Victory!" she wrote on his arm. "You will completely recover your sight, on the high authority of Mr. Eyes himself."
For a s.p.a.ce he made no movement. His consciousness was absorbing a transcendent fact. Helen sat beside him, waiting. Henriette, who had remained all the while in the background, silent except for a prolonged cry of delight, came nearer and stood on the other side of him, also waiting. At length he wrote:
"Soon I shall see you!"
"Yes," Helen replied.
"And father and mother, too. Tell them quick--and Peter and Bricktop and Helen--everybody!"
"Yes. I will go instantly."
She should have thought of this before, she said to herself, as she hurried away on her mission.
Henriette was left alone with Phil. She regarded him with lashes half-closed and with her lips set in a way much like Madame Ribot"s.
As she grew older she would more and more resemble her mother. A step and another, slowly, gracefully, as she bent her lithe figure, her eyes opening now in venturesome inquiry as she took the place which Helen had just vacated. She had written on his arm a good deal of late and, fascinated by the accomplishment, had even practised on her own arm in her room. Phil received the hand-clasp which signalled Helen"s return.
"A messenger has gone," she wrote. "Wouldn"t you like to take a walk in the court?"
"Yes," was the answer. "It will make the happiness still more real to feel my legs under me."
She directed his steps as Helen had directed them many times. The men of pain lounging in the court looking out through the holes in b.a.l.l.s of white, watched two figures pacing in rhythmic step which was familiar when their backs were turned; but when facing them, the girl who was like a picture was in place of the picture girl. They wondered about it; wonder was a habit of their tired minds. She was beautiful, surpa.s.singly so, soothing to the eyes, and she played Helen"s part, too, by smiling at them as she pa.s.sed. Her smile was more radiant than Helen"s. It was a better short-acquaintance smile, one of them thought, while Helen"s sent a warming, lasting glow all through you and was better for easing pain. Of the two, they would rather have Helen about every day. The men of pain were not articulate, but little that pa.s.sed in the court escaped their eyes. If a sparrow lighted on a roof or a nurse appeared at a window, they knew it.
Then, just as Phil and Henriette had made a turn with their backs to them, they saw Helen appear under the sign and something happened that puzzled pain-weary heads. At the very point where the court was in view the picture girl stopped short at the sight of the two who were promenading. For an instant she was perfectly still, only an instant, as she looked at the backs of Phil and the girl who was like a picture.
Then she put her hand up to her head abruptly, as one will who recollects something, and turned away before the two had wheeled to walk back toward the Oral Surgery sign.
It was a pantomime that set the men into a prolonged quandary. Some had an idea, from the way that Helen put her hand up to her head, that there had been a flash of pain as sharp as any they had ever known through it; others thought that she was relieved to find another in her place. Perhaps both were right, and all kept thinking of it after Phil and Henriette had gone indoors.
When she had led him to his chair and drawn the coverlet over his legs as she had seen Helen do, she gave him the hand-clasp which meant "good-night." In answer, he gripped her hand tightly and drew her toward him. The other hand moved slowly back and forth in the air till its fingers touched her hair. Then, with the feathery touch of the blind, he traced the line of her forehead. A frown like her mother"s gathered as he went on to her eyes, her nose, her lips, and her chin.
"It is the first time that you ever did that," she wrote on his arm.
When she brought his pad and he began writing, her head was bent, lips tight, eyes squinting with intensity, as she watched the tracing of each word.