"I never was horrid to you," she protested.

"You're never horrid any more," he said, and, strangely enough, he said it sadly.

"Well, do you _want_ me to be?"

"Yes! I wish you'd turn in once in a while and call me an old brute, and say you wished you'd never seen me, and didn't know how in heaven's name you were going to go on living with me!"

"Karl," she gasped--"are you going _crazy_?"

"No--at least I hope not. But you're just nice to me all the time, because--because I'm blind! I don't like it! I wish you'd _swear_ at me sometimes!"

"Well, in the first place," laughing, but serious too,--it had come so heatedly, "it isn't my way to swear at any one. I never did swear at you.

Why should I begin now?"

"Oh, swear was figurative language," he laughed.

"And of all things for a man to harrow up his soul about! Not liking it because his wife is never horrid to him!"

"It's not as crazy as it sounds. Are you and I a couple of plaster saints? Well, hardly! Then why don't we have any quarrels? It's just because you're sorry for me! I'll not have you being sorry for me!" he concluded, almost angrily.

But when she kissed him, he could not resist a smile. "You don't know much, do you, Karl? Don't you know that we don't quarrel about little things, because we've had so many big things on hand? We don't swear at each other, because--"

"Because we have so many other things to swear at," he finished for her.

"That's it. All our fighting emotion is being used up."

"Oh, you're such a genius for making things seem right! Now looking at it that way, I'm quite reconciled to your being nice to me. Still I want you to promise that if you ever feel like swearing, you will."

"I promise," she responded solemnly.

"Don't do things--or not do things--because you're sorry for me, Ernestine."

"We are 'sorry for' people who are unequal to things. I'm sorry with you, not for you, Karl."

"Ernestine,"--with an affectionate little laugh--"is there _anything_ you don't understand?"

"You might play a little for me," he said after a silence. "Play that thing that ends in a question."

"Of Liszt's?"

"Yes; the one that leaves you wondering."

At first she had resented bitterly her not being able to play more satisfyingly. If only music were her work! It seemed an almost malicious touch that fate, in taking away Karl's own work, had also shut him out from hers. Resentment at that had made it hard for her to play for him at all, at first. But she had overcome that, and had been able to make music mean much to them both. They loved especially the music which seemed to translate for them things within their own hearts.

But to-night when Ernestine had left him pondering a minute the question he said Liszt always left with him, she turned, eagerly it seemed, to lighter things. She played a little Nevin, played it with a lightness, gladsomeness, he had never felt in her touch before. He said Nevin helped him to see things, that he could see leaves moving on their branches, could see the shadows falling on the hillsides where the cattle were grazing, as he listened to Nevin. But it did not bring the pictures to-night. It opened up new fears.

"Ernestine," he said abruptly, "come here."

"Are you ever frightened, Ernestine?" he asked of her, still in that abrupt, strange manner.

"Frightened--about what?"

"Frightened about having to live all your life with me!"

For a moment she did not answer. Then, her voice quiet with the quiet that would hold back anger: "Karl, do you think you are treating me very kindly to-night? Saying these strange things I cannot understand?"

"But, Ernestine--look here! You're young--beautiful--love life. Doesn't it ever occur to you that you're not getting enough fun out of things?"

"Karl,"--and there was a quivering in the voice now--"do you think I have been thinking lately about 'getting fun out of things'?"

"No, but that's just it! You _ought_ to be thinking about it!

Ernestine--_think_ of it! How are you going to go on forever loving a blind man?"

For answer, she knelt down beside him, her arms about his neck, her cheek against his.

"Yes--I know--in that way. But in the old way of the first days? I was so different then. How _can_ you love me now, the way you did then? What do I do now but sit in a chair and try to be patient? Look at a man like Parkman! That's life. Ernestine"--drawing her close, a sob in his voice--"liebchen,--_can_ you?"

She longed to tell him then; it would mean so much to tell him now,--Karl was so troubled to-night. But the time was not ripe yet; she must not spoil it all. And so instead she talked to him of how real power comprehended more than activity, how depth of understanding, great things of the soul, were more masterful than those outer forces men called "life." Ernestine seldom failed in being convincing when she felt things as she now felt this.

"You always have the right word," he said at last. "You can always get ahead of the little blue devils."

"Oh, Karl," she murmured, very low, her heart too full to resist this--"some day I can show you better what I expect of life."

"Of course," he mused, after a silence, "you have your work."

"Yes," replied Ernestine, and something in her voice puzzled him, "I have my work."

He would have been startled could he have seen her face just then. For Ernestine was so happy to-night. She had come away from the hospital with a song in her heart; a song of resolution and of triumph. She had never foreseen the future so clearly; the time had never seemed so close at hand; it had never been this real before. Just in front of her as she sat there beside Karl was the Gloria Victis, that statue for which he had cared so little at first, but which in these later days she often found him dwelling upon with his hands in lingering touch of appreciation. To her the statue had come to hold many meanings; she looked at it now with shining eyes. Karl had held so tight to the broken sword--how splendid then that he should win the fight despite it all.

And she felt she had never risen so completely to the idea of Karl's greatness as she did to-day. What was there in the afternoon had meant so much to her? Was it actually seeing things as they were, or was it the things Dr. Parkman had said to point the way anew? There was to-night a new tide of appreciation, a larger understanding, more pa.s.sionate response to this thought of Karl as greatest of them all. Looking at his face as he sat there in deep thought, she saw the marks of his greatness upon it just as plainly as she saw those other marks of his suffering.--This man stop work? Such as he out of the race?

She remembered the letters they had received when the news of his blindness had gone out. She had wept over them many times, but it seemed she had never grasped their significance before. They were from men of science, from doctors, from students, and from many plain people unknown outside their small communities, who wrote to say they were sorry. They had seen about him once or twice in the magazines, they said, or perhaps their own doctor at home had told them of him, and they were so interested because their wife or husband or mother had died of cancer, and they knew what an awful thing it was. It should have been some one whom the world needed less than it needed him, these plain people said.

Her eyes filled with a rush of tears. This was her Karl--he with whom all the world grieved! She recalled the editorials in the scientific papers, telling of the things he had done, the things it had been believed by them all he would achieve. This was her Karl!--this man whose withdrawal from active partic.i.p.ation had been told of by great scientists everywhere as a world-wide calamity. How quiet and una.s.suming and simple he had been about it all--he whose stepping-out had been felt around the world!

And, now, some day before long she would come to him with: "Karl, I have found a new way of fighting with broken swords; take a good grip on the sword, a good strong grip, and let us turn back to the fight!"

She turned to him with that quick pa.s.sionateness he loved in her so well.

"I love you," she said, and though she had said it many times in other days, it had never sounded just like that before.

CHAPTER XXIX

UNPAINTED MASTERPIECES

Georgia was to be married. It was the week before Christmas, and on the last day of the year she would become Mrs. Joseph Tank. She had told Joe that if they were to be married at all they might as well get it over with this year, and still there was no need of being married any earlier in the year than was necessary. She a.s.sured him that she married him simply because she was tired of having paper bags waved before her eyes everywhere she went, and she thought if she were once officially a.s.sociated with him people would not flaunt his idiosyncrasies at her that way. And then Ernestine approved of getting married, and Ernestine's ideas were usually good. To all of which Joe responded that she certainly had a splendid head to figure it out that way. Joe said that to his mind reasons for doing things weren't very important anyhow; it was doing them that counted.