"And you will not forget the wooden spoon, Sir Deryck?"The doctor looked down into the kind old face raised to his in the dim light."I will not forget the wooden spoon, Mistress Margery,"he said, gravely.And old Margery, turning the handle whispered mysteriously into the half-opened doorway: "It will be Sir Deryck, Miss Gray," and ushered the doctor into a cosy little sitting-room.
A bright fire burned in the grate.In a high-backed arm-chair in front of it sat Jane, with her feet on the fender.He could only see the top of her head, and her long grey knees; but both were unmistakably Jane's:
"Oh, Dicky!" she said, and a great thankfulness was in her voice, "is it you? Oh, come in, Boy, and shut the door.Are we alone? Come round here quick and shake hands, or I shall be plunging about trying to find you."In a moment the doctor had reached the hearth-rug, dropped on one knee in front of the large chair, and took the vaguely groping hands held out to him.
"Jeanette?" he said."Jeanette!" And then surprise and emotion silenced him.
Jane's eyes were securely bandaged.A black silk scarf, folded in four thicknesses, was firmly tied at the back of her smooth coils of hair.There was a pathetic helplessness about her large capable figure, sitting alone, in this bright little sitting-room, doing nothing.
"Jeanette!" said the doctor, for the third time."And you call this week-ending?""Dear," said Jane, "I have gone into Sightless Land for my week-end.
Oh, Deryck, I had to do it.The only way really to help him is to know exactly what it means, in all the small, trying details.Inever had much imagination, and I have exhausted what little I had.
And he never complains, or explains how things come hardest.So the only way to find out is to have forty-eight hours of it one's self.
Old Margery and Simpson quite enter into it, and are helping me splendidly.Simpson keeps the coast clear if we want to come down or go out; because with two blind people about, it would be a complication if they ran into one another.Margery helps me with all the things in which I am helpless; and, oh Dicky, you would never believe how many they are! And the awful, awful dark--a black curtain always in front of you, sometimes seeming hard and firm, like a wall of coal, within an inch of your face; sometimes sinking away into soft depths of blackness--miles and miles of distant, silent, horrible darkness; until you feel you must fall forward into it and be submerged and overwhelmed.And out of that darkness come voices.And if they speak loudly, they hit you like tapping hammers;and if they murmur indistinctly, they madden you because you can't SEE what is causing it.You can't see that they are holding pins in their mouths, and that therefore they are mumbling; or that they are half under the bed, trying to get out something which has rolled there, and therefore the voice seems to come from somewhere beneath the earth.And, because you cannot see these things to account for it, the variableness of sound torments you.Ah!--and the waking in the morning to the same blackness as you have had all night! I have experienced it just once,--I began my darkness before dinner last night,--and I assure you, Deryck, I dread to-morrow morning.Think what it must be to wake to that always, with no prospect of ever again seeing the sunlight! And then the meals--""What! You keep it on?" The doctor's voice sounded rather strained.
