The light of a great revelation dazzled Armstrong for a while, but he rose from it with renewed strength and hope and courage, resolved to devote himself more than ever to the healing art. And first he destroyed his manuscript, for his theories were shattered and forgotten. The mystery of human pain was still unsolved; but was it for him to solve it? Providence had given him another mission,--to heal and cure. And Providence had given him the clue to one mystery, at all events--his own great sympathy with sufferers and insight into suffering. Sometimes he wondered whether another revelation would follow; but none came, and he pursued his usual career, doing good and working hard. The idle speculations, the restless quest of secret things, which had haunted him and wearied him before, were now of the past, and he lived for work alone.
But more was to come--unexpectedly and without warning.
It was an ordinary case he was treating: brain surgery. The man, a wretched creature, suffered severely, and was in a broken state of health; Armstrong had traced it to brain pressure, and saw his way easily to put things right by a cerebral operation. He was just concluding an examination, and the patient lay quietly in the great chair, soothed by a slight injection of morphia. Armstrong turned away to get a light--it was five o’clock on an autumn day, just beginning to grow dark--when suddenly there came that strange grating “Kr-rk” in his head, and he felt the room whirl around him. He clutched hard at a table near him, but it receded from his grasp and he felt himself falling down, down, down in giddy helplessness. Then the movement stopped, and he felt, as before, that some weight had been lifted from his brain, and a new, unused sense developed in him. But this time there was no clear light, no pure air, no vision.
What was coming? Something, he felt, was in store--some strange, new revelation--and he waited eagerly. As the prophets of old were inspired, so light had come to him, and now perhaps he would learn one more secret of the troubled world.
But nothing came; all was blank darkness around him, and an uneasy sense of foreboding stole slowly over him, till his hand shook and his face grew damp with cold sweat.