CHAPTER LI
The expert surgeon, operating for blindness on the membranes of the eye,is denied the bulwark of an anesthetic. Such a one will tell you thatthe moment of success is the moment most pregnant with disaster. To thepatient who has known only the fraction of life that lies in darkness,the sudden coming of light is a miracle beyond mere resurrection fromthe dead. But he is warned he must avoid any spasm of joy. Should he cryout and start at the coming of the dawn, in that moment he bids farewellforever to the light of day.
Something of this shock of sudden sight had come to Lewis, but it cameto him with no spasm of joy. A man who has been drugged does not awaketo joy, but to pain. Liberation and suffering too often walk hand inhand. Lewis had felt no bondage; consequently his freedom was asterrible as it was sudden. It plunged him into depths of depression hehad never before sounded.
From the park he went mechanically to the flat, and sat for hours by thewindow looking out upon the dead Sunday gray of London. Darkness came,and with it Nelton and lights. Nelton remarked that there was nothing toeat in the house.
"I know," said Lewis, and sat on, too abject to dress and go out fordinner. In his depression his thoughts turned naturally to his father.He thought of joining him, and searched time-tables and sailings, onlyto find that he could not catch up with the expedition. Besides, as helooked back on their last days in America, he doubted whether his fatherwould have welcomed his coming.
The next few days were terrible indeed, for Lady Derl, as he had feared,was out of town. He wrote to her, begging her to let him know where shewas and when she would come to London. For three days he waited for ananswer, and then the emptiness of the whole world, the despair ofisolation, drove him to his studio and to work.
He had had an impulse to write to Natalie, even to go to her; but therewas a fineness in his nature that stopped him, a shame born of therealization of his blindness and of the pity in which H lne andLeighton and perhaps even Natalie must have held him.
Suddenly the full import of H lne's intimate sacrifice in the disrobingof the palpitating sorrow of her life and of his father's immolation ofhis land of dreams struck him. They had done these things to make himsee, and he had remained blind. They had struck the golden chords of thepaean of mighty love, and he had clung, smiling and unhearing, to hispenny whistle.
For the first time, and with Folly farther away than ever before, he sawher as she was. Once he had thought that she and youth were inseparable,that Folly _was_ youth. Now, in the power of sudden vision, he saw ashis father had seen all along, that Folly was as old as woman, that shehad never been young.
These things did not come to Lewis in a single day, but in long hours ofwork spread over many weeks. He was laboring at a frieze, a commissionthat had come to him through Le Brux, and upon which he had doneconsiderable work before going to America. What he had done had not beenaltogether pleasing to his father. Lewis had felt it, though Leightonhad said little beyond damning it to success.
Now Lewis saw the beginning he had made through his father's eyes. Hesaw the facile riot and exaggerations of youth, and contrasted theirquick appeal to a hurried age with the modesty of the art that hidesbehind the vision and reveals itself not to an age or to ages, but inthe long, slow measure of life everlasting. He undid all but theskeleton of what he had done, and on the bare frame built theprogression of repressed beauty which was to escape the glancing eyeonly to find a long abiding-place in the hearts of those who worshipseldom, but worship long.
At last he got word from H lne. Has letter had followed her to theContinent and from there to Egypt. She wrote that she was tired oftravel, and was coming home. In a postscript she mentioned a glimpse ofLeighton at Port Said. Lewis was impatient to see her. He had begun toknow his liberation.
The revelation that had come to him in the park was not destined tostand alone. Between such women as Folly and their victims exists analmost invariable camaraderie that forbids the spoiling of sport. Theinculcation of this questionable loyalty is considered by some the lastattribute of the finished adventuress, and by others it is said to bedue to the fact that such women draw and are drawn by men whose majorrule is to "play fair." Both conclusions are erroneous, as any victimcan testify.
The news that Lewis no longer followed in Folly's train permeated hisworld with a rapidity that has no parallel outside of London except inthe mental telegraphy of aboriginal Africa. Men soon began to talk tohim, to tell him things. He turned upon the first with an indignantquestion, "Why didn't you tell me this before?" and the informer staredat him and smiled until Lewis found the answer for himself and flushed.Ten thousand pointing fingers cannot show the sunrise to the blind.
By the time H lne came back, Lewis not only knew his liberation, buthad begun to bless Folly as we bless the stroke of lightning thatstrikes at us and just misses. He complied with H lne's summonspromptly, but with a deliberation that surprised him, for it was notuntil he was on the way to her house that he realized that he had notroubles to pour out to her ear.
Nevertheless, a sense of peace fell upon him as he entered the familiarroom of cheerful blue chintzes and light. H lne was as he had everknown her. She gave him a slow, measuring welcome, and then sat back andlet him talk. Woman's judgment may err in clinging to the last word, butnever is her finesse at fault in ceding the first.
H lne heard Lewis's tale from start to finish with only oneinterruption. It took her five minutes to find out just what it wasFolly had said in her own tongue to the little cockney in his, and evenat that there were one or two words she had to guess. When she thoughtshe had them all, she sat up straight and laughed.
Lewis stared at her.
"Do you think it's funny?" he demanded.
"Oh, no, of course not," gasped Lady Derl, trying to gulp down hermirth. "Not at all." And then she laughed again.
Lewis waited solemnly for her to finish, then he told her of some of thethings he had heard at the club.
"H lne," he finished, "I want you to know that I don't only see what afool I was. I see more than that. I see what you and dad sacrificed tomy blindness. I want you to know that you didn't do it in vain. Sixmonths ago, if I had found Folly out, I would have gone to the dogs,taken her on her own terms, and said good-by to honor and my word todad. It's--it's from that that you have saved me."
H lne waved her hand deprecatingly.
"I did little enough for you, Lew. Not half what I would willingly havedone. But--but your dad--I wrote you I'd seen him just for an hour atPort Said. Your dad, Lew, he's given you all he had."
"What do you mean?" asked Lewis, troubled.
"Nothing," said H lne, her thoughts wandering; "nothing that tellingwill show you." She turned back to him and smiled. "Let's talk aboutyour pal Natalie. We're great friends."
"Friends?" said Lewis. "Have you been writing to her?"
"Oh, no," said H lne. "Women don't have to know each other to befriends."
"Why, there's nothing more to tell about Natalie," said Lewis.
H lne looked him squarely in the eyes.
"Tell me honestly," she said; "haven't you wanted to go back toNatalie?"
Lewis flushed. He rose and picked up his hat and stick.
"'You can give a new hat to a king, but it isn't everybody that willtake your cast-off clothes,' That's one of dad's, of course."