Chapter XVIII: Eyes to the Blind

Aunt Manette sat alone in her neat room at her eternal knitting. If her blind eyes could not see the comfort of her glowing coal fire and her shining lamp, perhaps she felt it, for night after night she sat between them, as women do who can see. There was a curious, dull depression on her clear-cut old face to-night; even her knitting-needles moved slowly. There was no sense in the work; when it was done, she did not need the money; no sense in her life that from her third-story room in Hare’s Rents was one interminable, helpless search after the lost things of this world.

“I’m old,” she thought to herself, with a sudden sick tremor. “Old; and I’ll die alone, with it all undone;” for, in plain words, the man who had patiently done her work for her had given it up to-day. She did not know where to turn for another who could be trusted to be eyes to the blind.

“But I’ll find one,” she thought, with an ugly gentleness that her fingers copied in their slowing knitting. “If I’ve time,” and she laughed.

There was time in plenty, if nothing else, for a woman who sat her days out in blindness. A sound on the stairs made her lift her head, lean forward to listen, as blind people do. She put down her knitting with a curiously dainty gesture for a woman who lived in Hare’s Rents, and pulled the string that opened her door. The steps came closer and paused in the flood of cheerful light from the narrow doorway.

“What!” cried a voice, and the low, rich note of it struck pleasantly on the woman’s ears. “Sitting idle, Aunt Manette? Upon my honor, you’re degenerating. You’ll be getting quite human next.”

Aunt Manette breathed through her nose; from the hall came a scent that brought back a thousand things. She crossed the room briskly and laid her small hand on the man’s arm unerringly, without effort.

“I was waiting for you!” she cried--though she had never given him a thought. “Come in, my friend! I had the spleen. I said to myself, ‘I will make a little festival for my photographer and me.’”

Dick Lovell looked down at the handsome old face kindly.

“That is just what you would not let me be!” said he smiling. “But am I really to come in?” Compared to his dreary bedroom up-stairs, this room, full of firelight, of blossoming flowers, was like another world.

“Oh, yes! Have I not waited?” she composedly asked. “Never mind the door; you cannot shut it.”

She moved to her chair as lightly as a girl and undid the stout cord twisted round a knob on the arm.

“So that’s how you do it--and sit still!” said Lovell laughingly. “It’s clever, Aunt Manette,” and he looked at the cord that ran round the wall on two pulleys.

“Not clever, but useful,” observed his hostess, rather dryly. “Sit down, monsieur.”

For a moment he could not rid himself of the idea that she could see him, for she stood as if thinking, her bright brown eyes full on his face. But she turned away with that pathetic groping movement of the blind which she so seldom allowed herself.

“Let me,” he cried, jumping up, as she took a shining white table-cloth from a chair.

“You would confuse me,” she said laughing. “I have not the eyes to oversee a clumsy young man.” With that curious seeing glance at him that was but the remnants of an old habit when the eyes of Manette Duplessis had never missed their man.

Without a mistake or hesitation she laid her table for two, produced from a cupboard a bottle, of which the seal made Lovell’s eyes open, and went to her brick hearth. A pot stood there, and, as she lifted its cover, the odor of it was more suited to a prince’s kitchen than a room in Hare’s Rents.

“A dish?” Lovell said, seeing her pause.

“To ruin it! No, no; you help yourself from my pot--so!” and she deftly twisted a napkin round the earthenware jar. “A French dish,” she said; “and you are English. But you will not wish it were roast beef.”

A French dish! He saw with wonder as she helped him that it was something even few French cooks make. Pheasant, boned and filleted, cooked in Madeira with mushrooms, truffles, numerous things that were not cheap. As he took up his fork he saw it was silver, with a crest on it; and because his hostess could not see him do it, did not look at the device.

“A poor feast, this,” said Aunt Manette, gaily as a girl. “But the main dish I made myself.”

“You!” He was surprised out of his manners.

“The secret,” she went on gravely, “is to keep the cover tight with a seal of paste. Oh, I can cook many things, Mr. Lovell. To eat well is an art. It keeps the blood young.”

And young she looked as she sat opposite him, her face smooth under her nunlike head-dress, her hands white and fine. He wondered somehow that anyone so clever as she looked could be so kind, and to an acquaintance who had begun by unwittingly annoying her.

It never struck him that her invitation had been pure selfishness. Her thoughts had been heavy, hopeless; though she would not think so. And he was a gentleman, of a class she seldom came in contact with; was young; he would distract her with his talk, cheer her with his company, which was cheap at the price of some pheasant and a bottle of wine. She was more interested, too, than she had imagined possible. Her keen sense felt there was a change to-night in the man. His step, that was always light, had been gay as he ran up the stairs, when she waylaid him. She held up her glass of red wine with a gesture foreign enough to Hare’s Rents.

“I drink,” said she, “to the good fortune that has come to you to-day.”

Lovell leaned forward and touched her glass with his, but there was surprise in his face.

“Are you a witch, Aunt Manette?” he said slowly. “How did you know?”

“You told me,” with a smile. “You come up-stairs three steps at a time--from work that you dislike! You stop to call me idle, who have before begged me to rest; and--it was very extravagant tobacco, Mr. Lovell!” she gravely declared.

He laughed, throwing back his handsome head in a way many women had loved who were not blind. His whole face lit into sweetness as he looked at her. Perhaps she felt it, for she wished for the first time that she could see him.

“The tobacco was before the luck,” he said, “so you’re out in your sorcery. But it’s been all luck to-day. I was going to dine on a baked potato when you asked me to dine here. But I’d better go--since I reek of Turkish tobacco!”

“Egyptian,” she corrected. She got up and brought over a brass coffee-pot from the brick hob. “On the contrary, you will smoke more of it--here! And you will prepare a cigarette for an old woman.”

If Mr. Lovell was surprised he did not show it. He saw her go back to her big chair and draw slowly, daintily, at the cigarette he lighted for her, and saw that the scent of it made her face soft, as if it brought back her youth. But he did not see that to smoke a cigarette like this was to let herself remember that youth was dead--and fruitless. She broke the silence suddenly.

“Was it the tobacco or the good luck that reduced your pocket to a naked potato?” she asked.

“It is always the tobacco!” returning the glance he eternally forgot was blind.

“But tell me of her--your good luck; is she beautiful? But, of course, since I shall see her only in your thoughts of her,” not without sarcasm. “Fair and small and blond, since you are brown-skinned and tall.”

“She is none of the three, but----” he stopped himself.

“How do I know how you look? Oh, you need not beg my pardon! It is not a secret that I am blind. You have a pleasant voice, you walk easily, with long legs--not quick, quiet, like the short. That is simple enough. But now about your good luck--who is not fair?”

The man stared at the fire. Old, lonely and blind, there was no reason he should not tell her all she cared to know. That an old woman--with a history--who had come down--for some reason that was not poverty--to Hare’s Rents--should praise her beauty, could not hurt Dark Magdalen.

“I can hardly tell you what she’s like,” he said slowly. “It sounds so strange, so ugly, if you have not seen her. She is tall, she has a graceful neck--long, round, with a curve.”

The old woman nodded. He was not a fool, then, since he began with that neck.

“Oh,” he said rather desperately. “I can’t tell you very well. She’s tall and slim, and strong; but you don’t think of that, because she has an indescribable kind of grace. And she’s black and white and red.”

It is to be hoped he did not see his hearer shudder.

“So exquisite, those English apple cheeks,” she returns, too politely.

“Apple cheeks!” he laughed out. “Good Heavens, Aunt Manette, I didn’t mean she had red cheeks! She’s white, dead-white, with the blackest eyes and eyebrows I ever saw. All the red of her is in her hair; and that’s not red, either, but dull--almost the color of rusty iron.”

Aunt Manette said one word in French. It might have been anything, but it was so low that Lovell never noticed it. She turned her indifferent face away a fraction.

“Hair _chatain foncé_?” she said.

“No, not dark-chestnut at all. Duller, richer--you could not know unless you saw her.”

“I shall see on the judgment day, in the afternoon,” she cried, with sudden, fierce profanity. “Bah! Go on. Never mind my feelings; you have not hurt them. The make of her face, her features?” Under her black gown her foot tapped hard on the floor.

“Curious,” he said, shutting his eyes to bring that face up on a black swimming background. “Very delicate and very strong, like a profile on a coin; cut in a little at the sides of the chin; a mouth perfectly brave, perfectly generous; a little too firm--for a woman.”

Aunt Manette got up, almost feebly. The next minute a cold breath rushed through the room from the window she had flung up. Her voice came back a little uncertainly as she leaned out.

“A strong cigarette when one is unaccustomed to the habit,” she said. “You will forgive me?” She closed the window and came back to her seat; certainly she was pale.

“I’ve tired you,” Lovell said contritely. “Wouldn’t you like me to go?”

Go! She would have stuck a knife into him sooner than let him go now. She laughed rather sharply.

“No, no!” she said. “I forget that one should only do foolish things when one is young. I like to hear you talk. I----”--her face was strangely pathetic--“would you, M. Lovell, tell a woman who is but a blind old wreck and cannot leave her own four walls, the name of that girl who is black and white and red?”

Lovell moved uneasily on his chair.

“The only name she has, to my knowledge,” he said softly, “is Magdalen--Dark Magdalen.”

The French woman’s face froze over.

“You mean--she is----” There was anger in her voice.

“No,” he abruptly cut in. “She’s a lady; she makes dresses, or hats, or something. Her name is Magdalen. She has ‘Madame Aline’ on her door-plate, and that’s all I know about her.”

Aunt Manette nodded with a curious relief.

“The name,” she said, “frightened me. And do you go to see her, this lady who makes hats in Bond Street?”

There was something so wistfully kind in her blind face that Lovell said something he had not meant to.

“She doesn’t live in Bond Street; she lives just round the corner, in this very block of buildings. That’s part of my luck.”

“But,” the old woman was bewildered; “this building, so poor, so--who would come here for hats?”

“I forgot you couldn’t know,” he gently explained. “It is like this, Aunt Manette. Our side of the buildings is un-get-at-able, except through that dirty lane. No one would take the rooms, they tell me, so they let them to poor people cheaply. We live on the west side; you go out round the corner to the north side, which is better than this; the east side, where she lives, has shops underneath and offices and flats above. It is as if it were twenty miles from our side.”

“And what is between?”

“Oh, a dark court.”

The woman to whom all the world was dark closed her eyes as if they hurt her.

“She perhaps lives with her mother,” she suggested indifferently.

“I don’t know.” Lovell rose, for his hostess was leaning back wearily. “Good night, Aunt Manette,” he said, with that graceful manner she could not see.

Her fine, small hand closed on his for an instant.

“You will come again, of your good heart,” she said gently. “It is a good deed to the blind.”

When he was gone she sat for a long time without moving, till suddenly she cried out in a kind of passion.

“A lucky, lucky star, but not yours, my photographer! And yet--why should I think it? It will go like the rest. Oh!”--and uncertainty caught her brave old heart and tore it--“Oh, this Dark Magdalen that I cannot see.”