Artists -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Love stories; Rich people -- Fiction
"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. I never 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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