The Old Blood Part 45

His thoughts ran in leaping waves of half-consciousness from one picture of recollection to another... Yes, it was Helen who had been to see him last... What a ninny she had made him appear when he proposed to her by mistake under the tree!... How the mischief would leap out of her eyes!... How many kinds of Helen were there?

Sometimes he had thought that she suffered because she was plain. No, all she cared for was to make drawings. How would she and Peter get along? They would be a pair! She would be certain to cartoon him...

The terrace at Mervaux! That last night when the three had walked up and down together in the dusk. White slippers moving in unison with his own steps--odd that he should remember that! Two voices were so alike that either girl might have been speaking. Why, it was quite the same as if he had his hearing back and could not see...

Henriette smiling from her easel at him--how good she was to look at!

Helen with her quips as she was drawing the cartoons! Helen in her intensity as she made the real drawing! Henriette silent, smiling, her lips parted as if she were speaking and Helen's words seeming to be here! Oh, afternoon of afternoons! Air sweet to the nostrils and genial sunlight! All the senses in tranquil enjoyment!...

And Henriette! Oh, he had been hard hit that day. It was enough for any woman to be as beautiful as she was! But how little he realised her worth then! Her beauty had dimmed her other qualities. She was all of Helen and Henriette, too... That glorious courage of Henriette in face of the sh.e.l.ls! The woman who had waited had not been afraid.

When she had only to raise her finger to bring the strong and the well to pay her court, her loyalty had not faltered when he was too horrible to remain alive. If he had not been wounded he would never have known her true worth...

How had such luck come to him? Silence, you pain devils! It had--it had! The messages of her st.u.r.dy determination that had fortified him and of the nonsense that cheers which she had written on his arm were recalled. Now he was imagining the touch of her fingers on his arm writing good news. Any minute he might feel her hand-clasp announcing her return. For he had no idea of time; her comings and goings set his calendar. This Henriette made the other seem only a doll. She said that he would get well. He should. It was too good a world for his sight not to come back in order that he might feed it on the beautiful vision of her--now that suffering had taught him how to appreciate her.

"You are very eerie this afternoon," whispered the Fiend General Commanding, beaten down to a grumbling complaint. "If we could only stop you from thinking of her we'd soon have you."

"You never will!" Phil replied. "She has the measure of such imps of h.e.l.l as you."

And he slept.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

LIGHT

Either Helen or Phil had given the eye expert the name of Mr. Eyes and the ear expert that of Mr. Ears, which these great men who had honourific alphabetical court trains to their names did not mind. As guardian of the nerve which enables us to know whether the tenor is in good voice or not and to tell the notes of the lark from those of the nightingale or, what was more important in the latest European operations, the cough of the _soixante-quinze_ from the rattle of a machine-gun, Mr. Ears was champion of silence in the hospital, which might have been as noisy as a boiler factory without disturbing Phil.

The ambulances ran softly up to the door; the nurses spoke low; they did not rattle the dishes when they brought food from the diet kitchens. After Phil's nurse had placed his tray in front of him preparatory to feeding him, she was called to the other end of the room for something, when she heard a crash behind her. She turned to see broken gla.s.s and crockery scattered on the floor. Extraordinary! This had never happened before to him. As she bent over to wipe up the small delta of milk she saw Phil's foot wiggling energetically, demanding his pad--a rare request unless he knew that Helen was present.

"Did it make a noise?" he asked.

"Of course, and an awful mess!" she replied. "How did it happen?"

"Experiment!" he wrote.

Experiment? It was a plain case of being out of his head. She hoped that Helen would come soon, as she always brought him around if he gave signs of delirium. Meanwhile, she must be on the watch lest he tear off his bandages, as other of Bricktop's patients had done, but her apprehensions were quite groundless.

The downfall of the tray was a test after vague intimations that sound was entering Phil's silent world. It was as loud to his ears as the crackling of a sheet of newspaper. His elation over the discovery was so great that he had a reaction when the nerve-devils began plying him with their scepticism.

"Well-known psychological illusion!" they said, using professional language which they had picked up from long a.s.sociation with hospitals.

"Imagination played you a trick. You knew it was going to crash!"

Very likely they were right. Hadn't he imagined that he could see the interior of the ward and how Henriette looked when she bent over him to write on his arm? Hadn't he sometimes heard her steps in imagination around his chair? He set all his mind into his ears, straining for some other sound. There was none.

"This torture is called hope unfilled!" chirruped the nerve-devils.

"Oh, what a dance we shall give you to-morrow after the operation! The operation is to-morrow, isn't it?"

Of course the nurse related the whole affair to Helen when she arrived.

"'Experiment,' he said. How extraordinary!" exclaimed the nurse, who was still more astounded when Helen gave an outcry of joy and, leaning over, puckered her lips and uttered a sharp whistle--which was one of her accomplishments--in Phil's ear.

Here was real test! No imagination about this, if he had heard. She drew back, quivering with suspense. Phil was wiggling his foot almost violently for his pad and pencil.

"Did somebody whistle in my ear?" he asked.

"I did! I did!" she repeated wildly, as she wrote her reply.

"They said it was imagination"--she knew who "they" were, those "Boches" of nerve-devils.

"Score one for the Allies!" she wrote on his arm. "I'm off to tell Mr.

Ears!"

The Great Man came swinging along the gravel path, half running to keep up with Helen. After the scientific test which he promptly applied he felt as triumphant as a brigadier who had taken the first line trenches on a front of a thousand yards in the Ypres salient.

"Only a question of time, he says," Helen wrote.

"Hurrah!" Phil replied. "If anybody has a steam siren handy and blew it in my ear it would be all the more comforting."

"Soon I shall not have to write on your arm any more," she told him.

"That will be odd."

"Yes, very!" she said.

Mr. Ears had gone to tell Bricktop, who said that it would hearten Phil for the operation the next day and then despatched a messenger to the parents and Peter Smithers. The news travelled fast about the hospital. It was across the street with the Trucklefords in half an hour.

"Clever of him, wasn't it, dropping the tray?" said Lady Violet. "And so American!"

Of course the Truckleford lot had met Peter Smithers by this time. He and the Sanfords had even had tea over there on the primary invitation of Henriette, renewed unanimously by all present. He was a card, this dry American worth three millions, which were to go to that poor fellow struggling to become a whole human being again without yet knowing that he was to be the heir. Phil's case took on fresh interest. So he could hear a little! And the big operation was to-morrow! If that should succeed and he should recover his sight!

Dr. and Mrs. Sanford sat on one of the benches in the court, at times furtively clasping hands as they thought of what was going on in the operating-room. Peter Smithers and Helen were walking up and down; and they, too, were silent. All felt their helplessness. Everything was with the skill of that red-headed dental surgeon. The eyes of the men in pain lying on the gra.s.s or resting on other benches were bright with sympathy, peering out from the white b.a.l.l.s of bandages. Phil's was the worst case ever admitted, and theirs had been bad enough. The magician they knew had only made the attempt for the sake of those two old people sitting as quiet as if they were of stone.

Surprise appeared in the faces of the Sanfords, Peter, and Helen as Henriette came under the Oral Surgery sign. She met their glances with one of appealing inquiry, as she stood hesitant, looking from one to another. It occurred to Dr. and Mrs. Sanford how beautiful she was, and again for the thousandth time to Helen. The father and mother could not help thinking of the thing that they had promised to keep out of mind, as they saw the contrast between the two, with the well-moulded features of Henriette and the irregular ones of Helen in repose.

"Nothing yet!" said Peter. "We wait."

There was a glint of pa.s.sing sharpness in his shrewd eye. She smiled in the face of it as one will who asks not to be misunderstood; then joined him and Helen in their pacing.

"You have been so wonderful to Cousin Phil," she said to Peter.

"Bricktop will do it!" remarked Peter, closing his fist and giving it a little shake. "Wonderful, did you say? Me?"

"Yes," she smiled up at him. "I did not know that there could be such men as you in the world."

"Lots of them in America!" replied Peter. "Growing them is one of our national industries! Compet.i.tion is hard and they knock one another about so much some of 'em get calloused, I suppose."

"How worthy Phil is of all your generosity we found at Mervaux,"

Henriette continued.