“How did it happen?”
“There was a high wind,” Durrance explained. “It took my helmet off. It was eight o’clock in the morning. I did not mean to move my camp that day, and I was standing outside my tent in my shirtsleeves. So you see that I had not even the collar of a coat to protect the nape of my neck. I was fool enough to run after my helmet; and—you must have seen the same thing happen a hundred times—each time that I stooped to pick it up it skipped away; each time that I ran after it, it stopped and waited for me to catch it up. And before one was aware what one was doing, one had run a quarter of a mile. I went down, I was told, like a log just when I had the helmet in my hand. How long ago it happened I don’t quite know, for I was ill for a time, and afterwards it was difficult to keep count, since one couldn’t tell the difference between day and night.”
Durrance, in a word, had gone blind. He told the rest of his story. He had bidden his followers carry him back to Berber, and then, influenced by the natural wish to hide his calamity as long as he could, he had enjoined upon them silence. Calder heard the story through to the end, and then rose at once to his feet.
“There’s a doctor. He is clever, and, for a Syrian, knows a good deal. I will fetch him here privately, and we will hear what he says. Your blindness may be merely temporary.”
The Syrian doctor, however, pursed up his lips and shook his head. He advised an immediate departure to Cairo. It was a case for a specialist. He himself would hesitate to pronounce an opinion; though, to be sure, there was always hope of a cure.
“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 assured 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 countryside 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;
