This eBook was produced by David Widger
By Gilbert Parker
"It's a fine day."
"Yes, it's beautiful."
Fleda wanted to ask how he knew, but hesitated from feelings of delicacy.Ingolby seemed to understand. A faint reflection of the old whimsicalsmile touched his lips, and his hands swept over the coverlet as thoughsmoothing out a wrinkled map.
"The blind man gets new senses," he said dreamily. "I feel things whereI used to see them. How did I know it was a fine day? Simple enough.When the door opened there was only the lightest breath of wind, and theair was fresh and crisp, and I could smell the sun. One sense less, moredegree of power to the other senses. The sun warms the air, gives it aflavour, and between it and the light frost, which showed that it was dryoutside, I got the smell of a fine Fall day. Also, I heard the cry ofthe wild fowl going South, and they wouldn't have made a sound if ithadn't been a fine day. And also, and likewise, and besides, andhowsomever, I heard Jim singing, and that nigger never sings in badweather. Jim's a fair-weather raven, and this morning he was singinglike a 'lav'rock in the glen.'"
Being blind, he could not see that, suddenly, a storm of emotion sweptover her face.
His cheerfulness, his boylike simplicity, his indomitable spirit, whichhad survived so much, and must still face so much, his almost childlikeways, and the naive description of a blind man's perception, waked in heran almost intolerable yearning. It was not the yearning of a maid for aman. It was the uncontrollable woman in her, the mother-thing, belongingto the first woman that ever was-protection of the weak, hovering lovefor the suffering, the ministering spirit.
Since Ingolby had been brought to the house in the pines, Madame Bulteeland herself, with Jim, had nursed him through the Valley of the Shadow.They had nursed him through brain-fever, through agonies which could nothave been borne with consciousness. The tempest of the mind and thepains of misfortune went on from hour to hour, from day to day, almostwithout ceasing, until at last, a shadow of his former self, but with awonderful light on his face which came from something within, he waitedpatiently for returning strength, propped up with pillows in the bedwhich had been Fleda's own, in the room outside which Jethro Fawe hadsung his heathen serenade.
It was the room of the house which, catching the morning sun, was bestsuited for an invalid. So she had given it to him with an eagernessbehind which was the feeling that somehow it made him more of the innercircle of her own life; for apart from every other feeling she had, therewas in her a deep spirit of comradeship belonging to far-off times whenher life was that of the open road, the hillside and the vale. In thosedays no man was a stranger; all belonged.
To meet, and greet, and pass was the hourly event, but the meeting andthe greeting had in it the familiarity of a common wandering, thesympathy of the homeless. Had Ingolby been less to her than he was,there would still have been the comradeship which made her the greatcreature she was fast becoming. It was odd that, as Ingolby becamethinner and thinner, and eve