A DARK TOWER
When Stephen returned from his excursion with Professor Mayne, Miss
MacVane had installed a young woman in his office and had herself taken
charge of his house, filling her new position with Fetzer's devotion.
He had given no directions for Ellen's letters to follow him and when
he read them on his return he discovered with selfish pleasure that
she had missed a week. So she couldn't write, poor child! A pretty
dreary time she must have had with Miss Grammer! So had he with Mayne.
He longed to tease Ellen until her eyes filled with tears and then to
brighten them again. He had changed his Christmas plans neither out of
respect to Fetzer's opinion, nor because he wished to avoid encouraging
Ellen's affection, but because of the sharp eyes of the other women in
his house, and because he believed his deliverance was at hand. Hilda
was worse, and her malady was likely to take henceforth a more rapid
course.
Ellen's mid-year examinations were successfully passed and he proudly
showed her report card to Miss MacVane, who looked at him keenly and
enigmatically from behind her thick glasses, but kept her thoughts to
herself. Ellen and Miss Grammer had been invited by Professor Anderson
to the box of his fraternity at the Junior Promenade, and Ellen had
danced. Did Ellen dance? His heart sank. Professor Anderson was an
old man--she must have had a more agile partner. She went to the
theater--she did not say with whom. She won election to Phi Beta Kappa,
and his eyes sparkled.
In the spring impatience tortured him. He was tired and his nights were
restless. Life was passing; he was now forty-three years old and joys,
unless they were snatched quickly, would cease to be joys.
Late in May Dr. King asked for a personal interview--the message could
mean only a change for the worse. To be free, to have a few years
of life at high pitch--how eager was his longing, how clear his
visualization of the nature of that happiness! A year from now Ellen
would have finished her course--it would be absurd to wait beyond that
time.
But freedom was not at hand. Hilda, he learned, had seemed to improve
and had asked for her husband. Dr. King was almost jubilant; the
improvement offered hope for all similar cases. She was so much better
that he believed it might be possible for her to have a period of
liberty in her home under the care of attendants. He felt an intense
sympathy for Lanfair, and an intense satisfaction in the news he had to
impart. Mrs. Lanfair had not been long enough away for her return to
seem like a return from the dead as sometimes tragically happened. But
Lanfair must not let himself be too hopeful.
Stephen looked silently down upon the eager little man. Hopeful! He
began to tremble. Was he to take her home _now_? It couldn't be; he
would have to explain, to make excuses. He stammered an incoherent
answer and followed along thickly carpeted corridors, his cheeks
quivering. He fixed his eyes upon the back of Dr. King's well-clad
figure and was absurdly and grossly offended by the pattern of his
coat. He said that he must get hold of himself, that this would never
do.
Only the fact that his guide locked and unlocked all doors through
which they passed differentiated the journey from a journey through any
large and well-appointed house. It appeared to be endless, but when
they paused before Hilda's door, it seemed to have lasted no more than
a second. Stephen laid his hand on Dr. King's arm. With difficulty he
commanded his voice, and the words when they were formed seemed to
come from some other throat. If the interview could be only a little
delayed! It was not possible that he would faint! He had felt a similar
terror years ago when he had traveled toward Philadelphia expecting to
hear that he was forever disgraced.
"Has she been prepared for my visit?"
"Oh, yes! She's waiting for you!"
The superintendent pushed the door open and tapped on an inner door and
a nurse greeted them in a friendly voice.
"We've been watching for you, haven't we, Mrs. Lanfair?" she said,
turning to some one within.
Stephen felt an insane desire to imitate with childish and impertinent
syllables the rise and fall of her voice. He found himself in a
luxurious sitting-room. For a moment he could see nothing; then he
discovered Hilda in a rocking-chair close to the barred and awninged
window which opened upon a portion of the lawn laid out in imitation of
a Japanese garden. He could hear the delicate sound of running water,
and see birds dipping into a pool.
While he tried to speak, he observed that Hilda had grown stout; though
she did not look like herself, face and figure were nevertheless
familiar. Ah! it was her uncle whom she had grown to resemble, and
there was something grossly unpleasant in the change.
"You see, I've brought him!" announced the superintendent, as though
this had been accomplished only by a very great effort.
Poor Hilda saw plainly--for this moment she had been cunningly
planning. She did not rise or move forward or make any motion, except a
motion with her lips. All that she wanted to say to her uncle and Dr.
Good on the night when she came away, she said now, eloquently. Her
heavy, motionless body seemed to add treble emphasis. Such accusations
uttered with an accompaniment of hysterical laughter or of waving arms
would have seemed mad; but she did not speak like a madwoman. One would
have said that her reasoning was sound though her premises were false.
She had uttered a dozen sentences before her audience came to
themselves. Then Stephen moved backward. He was not afraid; he simply
wished to get away, to end the intolerable tirade as soon as possible.
The nurse stepped between him and Hilda, and the doctor closed and
locked the door quickly, himself and Stephen outside. Dr. King was
distressed.
"One can never tell," he said, frowning. "I can't say that I'm
altogether surprised, but I felt that the experiment should be made.
You understand my motive?"
"Certainly," Stephen assured him.
In the office Stephen repeated his directions for Hilda's comfort. He
would not sit down; he wished to escape quickly as he had wished to
escape from the hospital when there had been lengthy operations with
long incisions or with copious letting of blood. He had always avoided
contact with unpleasant realities. When a nurse came to speak to the
superintendent, he went out and got into the car, which he had driven
himself. He had expected to go on to Philadelphia for the night, but
his business there seemed suddenly unimportant. Neither did he wish to
return home.
At the first crossroad he got out to investigate a suspicious sound in
the running-gear of his car, and seeking the tool with which to tighten
a screw scratched his left hand deeply, and irritably wiped away the
blood. Then he stood still looking about. Harrisburg lay toward the
west--a road led there directly; Philadelphia toward the east--Mayne
was expecting him. He could not see Mayne of all persons in the world!
Then suddenly his eyes narrowed, the beat of his heart quickened,
he smiled slowly. He had once visited Ithaca in the spring, it was
lovely with its thick shade, its waterfalls, its lake; he determined
that he would see it again. Then he laughed. He would go if it was as
homely as Chestnut Ridge, if the month was January! No one need know,
no one would ever be the worse for it. He could be there by to-morrow
evening and any one so industrious as Ellen could cut Saturday classes.
Saturday and Sunday would be days to set against months of unhappiness.
He said again that no one would be the worse for it.
Suddenly he laughed at himself for a fool. Why had he not gone before?
Why not at Christmas-time? If the mere intention could bring about
this lightness of heart, this heavenly clearness of vision, this
certainty of purpose, this deep joy, why had he not had all these long
ago? She was, he did not doubt, prettier than ever, but it was not
her prettiness which he valued, it was her youth, her steadfastness,
her devotion. He was certain that she loved him, he remembered with
amusement his short-lived jealousy.
He speculated as he drove upon the rarity of human happiness. His
father's life--how dull, how arduous, how ill-rewarded! Mayne's--how
favorable from without, how hollow within! What undeserved calamity had
visited Fetzer--foolish Fetzer to whom he had listened so obediently!
What disappointment Levis had suffered! How little satisfaction he
himself had had and with what high hope he had begun! But here was
happiness within reach!
He noticed with sharpened observation as he drove north, those changes
in the landscape with which he had been familiar in his youth; he would
point them out sometime to Ellen. He drove rapidly and unweariedly, his
depression passing, feeling that he understood the joy of the aviator.
His route lay to the east of Chestnut Ridge, but he would see presently
a country similar to that in which he had been born and had spent his
youth.
He did not think of Hilda, sitting heavily by the shaded window; his
thoughts leaped ahead. He drove on and on like one possessed.
"I could give her riches and ease and travel," he said to himself.
"It wouldn't be an unfair exchange for youth." It may have been the
gathering dusk, it may have been a springing breeze, but a cool wind
seemed to blow across his very heart. To wait another five years or
ten! He must have Ellen now.
He was tempted to stop as twilight fell, but he changed his mind. He
had come to the point when fifty miles nearer her was a goal to be
desired. He could reach her, he believed, before noon of the next day;
he did not care where he slept or whether he ate. He had ceased to
think of her good or of his own honor or of her father--he thought of
but one matter.
"It won't hurt her to be kissed," he said to himself, smiling. His
thoughts came disjointedly, sometimes they expressed themselves in
single words--"Adorable" ... "hungry" ... "her dark eyes" ... "peace"
... Once he laughed aloud. "It won't hurt her mind, she'll blossom like
a rose!" Sometimes he smiled grimly. Fate should not cheat him, let her
set her trap never so well! There was, he believed, nothing between him
and the satisfaction of his desire but a few hours of swift driving.
He was so occupied with his own thoughts that he did not realize till
darkness was almost complete that he had taken a wrong turn. He stopped
his car and got out, a tall gray figure in the dusk, and surveyed the
landscape, and discovered that he had come into a country like the
country of his youth. He could not look far in any direction, for low,
bleak hills had closed in upon him. Through a cleft between two of them
the sun cast a last reflected gleam. Seeing no dim human habitation,
he studied the road--though it was little traveled, he believed that
it would be best to go on. In the next valley there would doubtless
be a village where they could set him straight. The pale light was on
his left; the road led at least in the right direction. Then suddenly
he smiled. Memory played queer tricks--a forgotten fragment of poetry,
recited often by his father, surprised him:
"Naught in the distance but the evening, naught
To point my footsteps further! At the thought
A great black bird, Apollyon's bosom friend,
Sailed past, nor beat his wide wing, dragon-penned,
That brushed my cap--perchance the guide I sought."
He shivered suddenly. This was a sinister landscape; familiar as such
scenes had been to him in his youth, he should not like to be held here
for the night. Alas, his poor father had had no other landscape to look
upon in all his latter years!
He stepped out of the car and mounted a little bank, and discerned
far ahead a hopeful gleam. Driving on carefully and slowly, he saw
with relief that the light shone from the window of a small, faintly
outlined house. Amusedly, as he pushed open the sagging gate, he went
on with his appropriate verses.
"What in the midst lay but the tower itself?
The round, squat tower, blind as a fool's heart,
Built of brown stone, without a counterpart
In the whole world--"
He knocked at the door, but there was no answer. He knocked again more
heavily. There was a light, there must be human beings about; perhaps
the occupant had gone to drive home the cow. Perhaps a deaf person
lived here. He stepped to the window and peered in.
The interior was like a hundred interiors which he had seen in his
childhood, a little room which was at once kitchen and living-room,
its furniture a bare pine table, a few chairs, a half-dozen
cooking-vessels, dirty, out-of-date calendars pinned against the wall,
rags in a broken sash, and, hanging on a nail, a miner's grimy coat and
a woman's shawl. He had driven with his father to such houses as this a
hundred times and had sat waiting in the buggy or on the grass by the
roadside amusing himself with childish games. Sometimes he had been
puzzled and distressed by a sound whose cause he then understood but
dimly. Memory played him another trick, it caused him to hear the same
sound now.
He could not see into the inner room, perhaps the deaf person was
there; he knocked again and opened the door. Then he laid his hand
across his lips. The sound had not been remembered--it had been heard.
It proceeded from the inner room.
"What's the matter?" he asked loudly and impatiently. "I've come to ask
my way. Is any one ill?"
He saw that a distorted figure lay upon a low bed. Fearing that here
was an emergency which had been repellent to him from his youth, he
went unwillingly toward the inner room and stood with his hand upon the
jamb.
"What is the trouble?" he asked again.
With painful effort the woman turned and looked up at him. It was not
as he had feared; her need was of a different sort. Upon her pale
face stood drops of perspiration and she clutched her thin chest with
both hands. It was the same agony which had smitten Edward Levis with
merciful swiftness, here long drawn out. He had seen but a few cases,
but he recognized it as different from all other sorts of anguish. But
he could not be delayed!
"Bill's went for the doctor," said a faint voice from the bed.
"How far has he gone?"
"There's none nearer than Weller."
"What!" Stephen gave a great start. Weller! Then he had veered far to
the west! This was a place he knew. He looked back over his shoulder
into the outer room and into the darkness beyond the door. He recalled
the neighborhood, the roads, the ragged outlines of the ugly hills,
the very house. Outside this gate he had sat in his father's buggy and
waited and waited. He had heard his father's voice in the magic formula
which he said at dying beds, "Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem"--it
was here, he remembered distinctly, at a Roman Catholic bedside. No,
he was dreaming, life did not present such strange coincidences. He
saw that the agonized figure was relaxed; he heard himself asking, "Is
there no doctor at Chestnut Ridge?"
"Not now. They had one after the other, but they didn't stay."
"When did your husband leave?"
"A half-hour ago, I guess. It seems longer. I guess the next spell'll
finish me."
"Did he walk?"
"He thought perhaps he could get a ride. But there's three"--the
sentence was taken up after a long pause--"three grog-shops."
"Are you afraid to stay alone a little longer? I have a car. I can send
the doctor back."
Glistening drops appeared upon the pale face.
"Oh, my God, don't leave me!" She raised herself feebly upon her elbow,
animated by a wild hope. "You ain't a doctor, I suppose!"
"I'm not a general practitioner."
She sank down, accepting the excuse as final.
"It don't make any difference, the next one'll finish me." She lay
quiet as death, fearing to breathe. It might be that another moment
would bring a fresh spasm, it might be that there would be no other for
hours.
Stephen looked down upon her. He could see the pale face with a black
smutch across it; he saw an empty bottle on a chair by the bed. He had
had no experience in this department of medicine for twenty years,
and his practice had been limited to hospital work under the eye of
an instructor. He believed that of simple specifics a mustard plaster
would relieve--there was certainly no other drug to be had here.
Suddenly the pupils of his eyes dilated, then contracted. His gaze
was fixed absently on his own hand, still lifted against the door
frame. It was a slender white hand. Across the back the blood from
the scratch, now many hours old, had dried. The wound looked for some
reason unnatural, and he moved his hand with a horizontal motion close
to his eyes and put it back against the door frame. He noticed with
quickened perception that he placed it exactly upon the spot which it
had already made warm. Then he laid it in the other hand and stroked
it. A drop of blood oozed out, but it was not the blood which alarmed
him, but the puffy redness of the wound, the thick, ominous raising of
either lip and a dull pain which he felt clear to his elbow. He had
a flask of peroxide in his bag, but he had not used it, and now more
drastic treatment was required. It was required, moreover, at once; an
infection like this broke down the tissues with incredible swiftness.
His hesitation, his silence, his effort to arrange his thought, roused
a suspicion in the mind of the woman on the low bed. She raised herself
to a sitting position, trying to hold together the ragged gown which
half covered her. Of his importance, his wealth, his intellect, she had
no conception and for none of them would she have had any regard.
"For God's sake, don't go away!"
Stephen still cradled his hand. He looked curiously at the wretched
creature, now lying prone and exhausted. He frowned in the effort to
concentrate his mind upon a new and very simple problem. He believed
that his hand was seriously infected and that it should be treated at
once, that haste was imperative. He believed also that the woman left
alone might die. A cold sweat broke out upon him. He had been acutely
impatient with his father because he had not weighed his valuable life
against two worthless lives and had suffered himself to be murdered.
His father, however, had merely taken a chance, there had been a
possibility of escape, but for him there was no escape. The mischief
was done; unless he had speedy aid he might die in agony.
He felt his heart contract and laid his hand upon it. To die! He was
not old. Life which he had recently so bitterly complained of--what
inestimable happiness it offered! What delight for the eye! What
intense pleasure for the mind! And Ellen--what of Ellen, with whom he
had expected to be in a few hours? He had anticipated rapture in the
assurance of her love. He might now never see her. It was curious that
it was easier to risk his life than to forget his passion!
The moments passed; there was no sound within or without the little
house; the woman still lay motionless. It might be that she slept; he
realized basely that a step would carry him away.
Then, quite suddenly and simply, he knew that for him there was no
choice. He had lived, for all his suffering, selfishly, his heart
hardened and not softened by the single affliction of his life. He
had done many kindnesses, but he had never made a sacrifice. He had
helped the poor, but it had cost him nothing; he had performed almost
miraculous cures, but they had been performed in a sense easily.
Yet he was not at heart selfish, and now, rising from depths almost
unstirred since his youth, a single powerful impulse moved him. He had
come unknowing and unsuspecting to his Dark Tower, which, well for him!
was set in a familiar landscape, presided over by the guiding spirit of
his youth. There was a verse which said, "Train up a child in the way
he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it." He had
been trained by precept and example; was his father's last hour made
easy by confidence in his ultimate return? Did his pleading gaze ask
only that the period of departure might not be long? As tenderly as
though he had been his father, he bent over the poor bed, forgetting
life and all its joys and Ellen.
He remembered now that there was a spring a few yards away. He had been
sent there by his father and he had dipped the clear water from an
open space beside a bed of water-cress. Making his way thither in the
starlight, he filled a pail. He found a box half filled with kindling
and built a fire and set the water on it, and fetched his traveling
bag. He opened the sore wound on his hand and poured into it half the
contents of his bottle of peroxide and bound it up. He found in a dirty
cupboard a supply of mustard, provided possibly for this emergency
and forgotten. He thought with a faint smile of Miss Knowlton--if her
professional eye could see him! He remembered that he had sat for a
long time on the weedy bank across the road when he and his father had
been here--his car stood beside the exact spot. He seemed to hear now
distinctly his father's voice--would it be necessary for him to console
the dying? He could not offer a formula upon which he had not thought
for years!
He heard a moan in the inner room and returned quickly. The woman had
turned once more on her back and had seized her thin chest. Lip and
brow were beaded. He worked quickly, the perspiration standing on his
own brow. When he had done all he could, he knelt down on the floor and
took the clutching hands in his. He spoke, scarcely aware that he was
speaking, offering all the comfort that he could give. He had never
spoken to Hilda in this fashion; not even quite in this fashion had he
dreamed of speaking to Ellen.
"I'll stay with you. I'm sorry for you. It will be better soon. I'm
sure it will be better."
When the spasm was over he rose to his feet. In the cessation of agony
sleep came quickly. He stood motionless for a long time, occupied with
strange thoughts. He was intensely, incredibly happy; he understood
suddenly that his father had had this happiness often; his own danger
became negligible, he quite forgot it. Even when, as he moved about,
the pain in his hand quickened, it was still negligible.