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When Ingolby's voice ceased, a horrified silence filled the room for a moment. Even Jim Beadle, his servant, standing at the foot of the bed, clapped a hand to his mouth to stop a cry, and the nurse turned as white as the apron she wore. Dumbfounded as Rockwell was, with instant professional presence of mind he said: "No, Ingolby, you must be kept in darkness a while yet."
Here, strange to say, he had never been drunk but once; and that was the night before he married the widow of a local publican, who had a nice little block of stock in one of Ingolby's railways, which yielded her seven per cent., and who knew how to handle the citizens of the City of Booze. When she married Tom Straker, her first husband, he drank on an average twenty whiskies a day.
The trouble between the two towns and the change of control and policy of the railways, due to Ingolby's downfall, had greatly shaken land and building values in Lebanon, and a black eye, as it were, had been given to the whole district for the moment.
His being seemed suspended in an atmosphere of misery and helplessness. "Blind! I am blind!" That was the phrase which kept beating with the pulses in Ingolby's veins, that throbbed, and throbbed, and throbbed like engines in a creaking ship which the storm was shaking and pounding in the vast seas between the worlds. Here was the one incomprehensible, stupefying fact: nothing else mattered.
On the evening of this day of her destiny carrying the story of her own fate within its twenty-four hours she was in a mood of detachment from life's routine. As at a great opera, a sensitive spirit loses itself in visions alien to the music and yet born of it, so she, lost in this primeval scene before her, saw visions of things to be. If Ingolby's sight came back!
Such was Berry when he had under his razor one of Ingolby's business foes of Manitou, who had of late been in touch with Felix Marchand. Both were working for the same end, but with different intentions.
There had been something of the same look in Ingolby's eyes in the past, only with him it was the sense of great adventure, intrepid enterprise, a touch of vision and the beckoning thing. That look was not in his eyes now. Nothing was there; no life, no soul; only darkness. But did that look still inhabit the eyes of the soul? He answered the question himself.
There was in them, however, a kind of pleading look. She could not see Ingolby's face; did not want to see it when the bandages were taken off; but at the critical moment she shut her eyes and her back held the door, as though a thousand were trying to force an entrance. The first words after the bandages were removed came from Ingolby. "Well, Jim, you look all right!" he said.
"You can see it is," answered Rockwell with a chuckle in his voice, and then suddenly he put the bandages round Ingolby's eyes again. "That's enough for today," he said. A moment later the bandages were secured and Rockwell stood back from the bed. "In another week you'll see as well as ever you did," Rockwell said. "I'm proud of you."
An acknowledging smile played at Ingolby's mouth. "We've got to have a try. We've got to draw off the bull with a red rag somehow." "I don't see how myself. That Orange funeral will bring a row on to us. I can just see the toughs at Manitou when they read this stuff, and know about that funeral." "It's announced?"
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