The Old Blood Part 44

Phil, who knew only that Helen had stopped to speak with some one, had no means of knowing who. She was the same to him as any other person of millions in his silent night, unseen, unheard. His circle of actual human beings consisted of Helen, or Henriette, as he thought, Bricktop, the nurses, the specialists, and now his parents and Peter. They were the visible stars in the darkness. And Helen was taking him back to his chair now.

"You've heard that Smithers will leave all his fortune to Cousin Phil, w.i.l.l.y-nilly?" said Henriette, following them indoors. "Mother wrote it from Paris. She had it from Truckleford."

"Only they have not told him," Helen said.

"Why not? I should think that if there were anything that would make him want to live it would be the thought that he was to have three millions."

"Mr. Smithers decided not," Helen replied.

"And how has he stood the day?" Henriette asked the stereotyped question of her sister.

"Very well!" was the answer. "I'm afraid it may have tired and excited him, though." She was careful not to let him overtax himself; and now, when he wanted his pad, she added: "I must not let him write much."

If Henriette prolonged her visits it was when Helen was writing him messages or he was writing to her. The process seemed to fascinate her.

"There is a question I want to ask," Phil wrote. "I have wondered about it a good deal. Helen never sends me any messages. She has not even shaken my hand and said h.e.l.lo to her seventeenth cousin. I can't see her new cartoons, but I remember all of her old ones. Tell me!"

Henriette had been looking over his shoulder as he wrote, Helen standing to one side till he had finished the first sheet. A number of times before he had asked where Helen was, and after a strange thrill that dried her throat she had replied:

"Drawing and in her ward. She inquires about you every day."

It was Henriette who reached for the first sheet this time. When he had finished the second sheet she pa.s.sed both to Helen, with a studious inquiry on her face and without speaking. Then she looked around the room. It was empty, save for one form asleep on a cot in the far corner. Helen did not look up. She was motionless, staring at the sheets. He was hurt because she had never shaken his hand--she who had no thought except him! And, yes, he had thought of her for herself a little--a part of his kindness even when he was racked with pain. She folded the sheets gently, but without the stir of so much as an eyelash, when Henriette's voice brought her out of her daze.

"The hoax seems complete," said Henriette. "He is wholly convinced that you are I."

"Yes," said Helen. "You wished it, didn't you, and it has helped him--yes, he has said that it kept him alive!"

"Kept him alive!" repeated Henriette, in a monotone.

"Yes, you, not I, kept him alive!"

When people knew this! Henriette was thinking of the Lady Truckleford lot. There were pitfalls ahead which she had not foreseen.

"Why didn't you undeceive him?" she demanded.

"I--I could not. It meant so much to him. As soon as he is well then I shall tell him."

"And if he never gets well----"

"He will!" Helen insisted. "But taking the view that he will not," she added, "only his father and mother know and Peter Smithers. They found it out inadvertently and have sworn to keep the secret." Henriette half closed her eyes thoughtfully as the two sisters looked at each other.

"It seems safe," breathed Henriette, raising her lashes and smiling in relief.

Phil was writing again:

"You do not answer. Helen wrote only one letter to me while I was at the front. I fear that I have offended her. Won't you tell me?"

"I--I must explain in some way!" said Helen.

"Let me!" Henriette interposed. "I've never tried writing on his arm, but I think that I know how from watching you."

She rolled up his sleeve and taking his hand to hold up the arm, as she had seen Helen do, traced the letters, slowly announcing each word as she wrote it:

"This is Helen. She has just come to see you and has come often and thinks that you are making the bravest kind of a fight."

He caught her hand in both of his and shook it warmly in his happiness.

"You don't write as well as Henriette," he wrote in reply, "but I have a lot of experience and could read it. What are you drawing? What cartoons are you making? What mischief are you up to generally?"

"I will tell you when I can write better. Now I shall be going so as not to tire you. Good-night!"

She gave his hand another clasp and turned to Helen, smiling, as she said: "I'm in your place, now, as well as you being in mine!" not forgetting to press her lips to Helen's before withdrawing.

She had gone through it all with a graceful facility and self-command, while Helen had found herself unable even to murmur "Good-night." For an instant, again alone with Phil, she felt that she also was groping in a noiseless and sightless world and that she, too, was maimed.

Henriette was beautiful--oh, very beautiful! It was no wonder that men fell in love with her. Just to look at her must make any man want to live. Only to the blind could she herself be beautiful. If his sight should come back, it would be the end of the walks in the court and the writing of messages for him. There was dreadful mockery in the thought when he became well he might think that she who had shared his pain in the dark night cared more for making cartoons than for him. For an instant revolt flamed up in her mind; but only for an instant. It was smothered by the appeal of his helplessness as she looked around at him.

Now he began writing again, and her thoughts were bound up in his finger-ends, in the glow of the comradeship which was sufficient unto itself from day to day. She had learned to tell his mood and if the pain were particularly bad by the way he wrote. The letters were coming slowly, ponderingly, from his pencil-point. Something puzzled him. She looked over his shoulder just as his first sentence was finished.

"Her message did not sound like Helen," he had written.

Every nerve taut with suspense, she waited with quick breaths for what was to follow.

"There was a certain style about everything that she did and said. I think that I could tell her hand from yours since I have become so sensitive to touch; though I suppose that with all the pain and the blindness I imagine all sorts of things which are not real."

A leaping something within her that was for the moment irresistible, quick desire shining in her eyes, made her stretch out her hands toward him. Then her heart seemed to stop beating and she checked herself in the reaction of one who finds herself on the verge of treason. What might have been the effect on him if she told him the truth! All her work might have been undone. She gathered her wits, mastered her emotion, and lashed them together with her will.

"It's time for you to close the writing and thinking shop for the day,"

she wrote on his arm; but when she started to take his pencil and pad he clung to them. He had something more which he must say, and it was best to yield to his wish, as she had learned.

"The shutters of darkness are always down on that shop," he wrote, "but there is always a light within--you!"

A glow came into her cheeks at the compliment. The light was the face of Henriette, her charm and grace, and the labour of Helen. It proved the wickedness of the impulse to tell him the truth. How dependent he was upon Henriette in his fight!

"Now, that writing and thinking shop idea was like Helen," he was thinking--and thinking was much faster than writing and gave lazy minds more freedom to wander. "Isn't it odd? No, it's because I can't hear or speak or see--and I am tired."

"Good-night!" said her hand-clasp out there in the darkness, but bringing her very near him.

"Good-night!" his return clasp signalled back. Soon he was dozing.

The pain was not sharp just then. He was nearly healed enough for another operation.

"He ought to sleep well," Helen said to the night nurse as she went out, with a peculiar relief in going, such as she had never felt before.

When she reached her room, for the first time since she had put them away the night after the ambulance brought Phil to the hospital she took her drawing materials out of her trunk, in answer to some tangent demand of the distraction that possessed her, only to put them back in and the unanswered demands of editors with them, as if she had no concern with them now. There was nothing to do but to keep on marching and fighting, without bothering what bridges were to be crossed on the other side of the promised land of his recovery.

Phil had no idea how long he had dozed when the head pain devil, who sat on the point of his jaw directing the operations of all the little devils on the lines of communication, prodded him awake. For him the little pain devils were articulate. He lived in a world of imagined voices.

"What if you should never get well? What if we should keep you always?" said the Fiend General Commanding. "We are a trifle weak now, but you wait till after the next operation. Then we shall have a rare old dance of it. What if it should be just one operation and another and another forever? Let your wounds heal and get back your strength, only for another bout! What if you should never see green fields or hear the birds sing again?"

On such occasions there must be prompt "counter battery work," as they say at the front, or he would go out of his head. His answer was to call upon his memory for the ammunition of battle; to relieve happy incidents of the past. His father and mother and Peter Smithers and all his friends must help him.