The Glory of the Conquered Part 13

In the outer laboratory, Professor Hastings stopped him, remonstrating against his working when he was having trouble with his eyes. He a.s.sured him, elaborately, that he was taking care of them, that probably he would not be in there long.

He opened the door of his laboratory and pa.s.sed in. He closed it behind him, and stood there leaning against it. He was all alone now. There was nothing in the room but himself and the truth which was waiting for him.

He put his book down upon the table. He walked over and sat down before the culture oven. He must get this over with! He was getting sick. He could not stand much more.

With firm, quick hand he wrenched open the doors. He put his hand upon what he knew to be the tube. He pulled it out, turned around to the light and held it up between him and the window. For one moment he looked away;--how parched his mouth was! And then, a mighty will turning his eyes upon it, in one long gaze he read the plain, unmistakable, unalterable truth. He had never seen a better culture. Science would perhaps commit itself no further than to say his eyes had become inoculated with the most virulent germ known to pathology. But out beyond the efforts which would be made to save him, he read--written large--the truth.

He was going blind.

CHAPTER XVI

"GOOD LUCK, BEASON!"

Minutes pa.s.sed and nothing happened. There was no sound of splintering gla.s.s. The tube did not fall from his hands. Not so much as gasp or groan broke the stillness of the laboratory. He did not seem to have moved even the muscle of a finger.

He faced it. He understood it. He faced it and understood it as he had no other truth in all his life. No merciful, mitigating force caused his mind to totter. With fairly cosmic regularity, cosmic inevitability, comprehension struck blow after blow.

He was going blind. He had spent his life studying the action of such forces as this. _He knew them!_ A man who knew less would have hoped more. Some idle dreamer might attempt to push one star closer to another.

An astronomer would not do that.

He was going blind. He could no more do his work without his eyes than the daylight could come without the sun. Fate jeered at him: "Your eyes are gone, but your life will remain." It was like saying to the sun: "You are not to give any more light, but you are to go on shining just the same."

He was going blind. The world which had just opened to him--the world of sunsets and forests and mountains and seas gulped to black nothingness!

Blind! Swept under by a trick he would not have believed possible from his most careless student! Mastered by the things he had believed he controlled! Meeting his life's destruction from the things which were to bring his life's triumph! In that moment of understanding's throwing wide her gates to torture, fate stood out as the master dramatist. Making him do it himself! Working it out of a mere fool's trick!

Blind?--_Blind?_ But his eyes fitted his brain so perfectly it was through them all knowledge came to him. They were the world's great channel to his mind. It was through his eyes he knew his fellow beings.

The lifting of an eyebrow, a queer twist to a smile--those things always told him more than words. And--but here he staggered. The mind could get this, as it had all else, but on this the heart broke. _Ernestine!_--that smile--the love lights in her eyes--the glints of her dear, dear hair--The tube fell from his hand. His head sank to the table. He was buried now under an agony beyond all power to lift.

Whether it was minutes or hours which pa.s.sed then, he never knew in the days which followed. Time is not measured by common reckoning on the hill of Calvary.

The thing which brought him from under the blow at last was a blinding rage. He wanted to take a revolver and blow his brains out, then and there. He--a man supposed to have a mind! _He_--counted a master of those very things! And now, what? Manhood, power, _himself_ gone. Stumbling through his days! Useless!--a curse to himself and everyone else. Groping about in the dark--a thing to be pitied and treated well for pity's sake!

Cared for--looked after--_helped!_ That beat down the bounds of control.

He did things then which he never remembered and would not have believed.

It all rushed upon him--the birthday night--the crafty, insidious mockery through every bit of it, until everything to which he had held tottered about him, and goaded beyond all power to bear there came a slow, comprehending, soul-deep curse on the world and all that the world had done. And then, out of the darkness, through the blackened, dizzying, tottering ma.s.s--a voice, a face, a smile, a touch, a kiss, and the curses gave way to a sob and things steadied a little. No, not the world and everything it had done, for it was a world which held Ernestine, a world which had given Ernestine to him for his.

He fought for it then: for his faith in the world, his belief in the things of love. It was the fight of his life, the fight for his own soul.

Come what might in the future, it was this hour which held the decisive battle. For if he could not master those things which were surging upon him, then the things which made him himself were gone for all time. And when sense of the underlying cunning of the blow brought the surrendering laugh close to his parched lips it was held back, held under, by that ever recurring memory of a touch, a voice, a face. It was Ernestine, their love, fighting against the powers of d.a.m.nation for the rescue of his soul.

Even in the battle's heat, he had full grasp of the battle's significance, knew that all the future hung upon making it right this hour with his own soul. His face grew grey and old, he concentrated days of force into minutes, but little by little, through a strength greater than that strength with which men conquer worlds, a force greater than the force with which the mind's big battles are won, by a force not given many since the first of time, he held away, beat back, the black tides ready to carry him over into that sea of bitterness from which lost souls send out their curses and their jeers and their unmeetable silences.

He tried to see a way. He tried to reach out to something which should help him. Standing there amid the wreck of his life, he tried to think, even while the ruins were still falling about him, of some plan of reconstruction. It was like rebuilding a great city destroyed by fire; the brave heart begins before the smoke has cleared away. But that task is a simple one. The city destroyed by fire may be rebuilded as before.

But with him the master builder was gone. Out of those poor, scarred, ungeneraled forces which remained, could he hope to bring anything to which the world would care to give place?

He could see no way yet. All was chaos. And just then there came a knock at the door.

He paid no heed at first. What right had the world to come knocking at his door? What could he do for any one now?

The knock was repeated. But he would not go. If it were some student, what could he do for him? He could only say: "I can do nothing for you.

Go to some one else." And should it be one of his fellow professors, come to counsel with him, he could only say to him: "I have dropped out. Go on without me. I wish you good luck."

That message he had thought to give!--and now--

Again the knock, timidly this time, fearing a too great persistency, but reluctant to go away. He would go in just a minute now. There would not come another knock. Well, let him go. When all the powers of fate had gathered round to mock and jeer was it too much to ask that there be no other spectators? Was not a man ent.i.tled to one hour alone among the ruins of his life?

He who would gain entrance was starting, very slowly, to walk away. He listened to him take a few steps, and then suddenly rose and hurried to the door. He was not used to turning away his students unanswered.

It was Beason who turned eagerly around at sound of the opening door.

Beason--of all people--that boy who never in the world would understand!

He was accustomed to reading faces quickly and even through his dark gla.s.ses his worried eyes read that Beason was in trouble, moved by something from the path in which he was wont to go.

"I'm sorry to interrupt you," stammered the boy, as he motioned him to a chair.

"Oh--that's all right; I wasn't doing anything, very important.

Just--finishing up something," he added, glad, when he heard his own voice, that it was only Beason.

"I'm in trouble," blurted out Beason, "and I--I wanted to see you."

The man was sitting close to a table, and he rested his elbow upon it, and shaded his eyes with his hand.

"Trouble?" his voice was kind, though a little unsteady. "Why, what's the trouble?"

"I've got to stop school! I've got to give up my work for a whole year!"

The hand still shaded his darkened eyes. His mouth was twitching a little.

"A year, Beason?" he said--any one else would have been struck with the note in it--"You say--a year?"

"Yes," said Beason, "a whole year. My father has had some hard luck and can't keep me here. I'd try to get work in Chicago, and stay on, but I not only have to make my own way, but I must help my mother and sister.

Next year another deal my father's in will probably straighten things out, and then I suppose I can come back."

The man very slowly nodded his head. "I see," he said, his voice coming from 'way off somewhere, "I see."

"It's tough!" exclaimed Beason bitterly--"pretty tough!"

Dr. Hubers had turned his chair away from Beason, and with closed eyes was facing the light from without. There was a long pause. Beason waited patiently, supposing the man to be thinking what to say about so great a difficulty.

"As I understand it," he said, turning around at last, "it's like this.

You are to give up your work at the university for a year--just one short little year--and do something else; something not so much in your line, perhaps, but something which will be helping those you care for--making it easier for some one else. It's to be your privilege, as I understand it, to fill a man's place. That's about it, isn't it?"

"But that's not the point! I thought,"--in an injured, almost tearful voice--"that you would understand."