"Behold! Where are their abodes?
Their places are not, even as though they had not been."
--TOMB OF KING ENTEF.
Desire Michell was beside me, and I could not rise or answer her. She
bent over me, so that the Rose of Jerusalem fragrance inundated me and
drove back the sickening air that was the breath of our enemy.
"Let me go," she sobbed, her head beside my head. "If you can hear me,
listen and leave me as It wills. You know now that I belong to It by
heritage? You know why we can never be together as you planned? Try to
feel horror of me. Put me away from you. No evil can come to me unless I
seek evil. But It will not suffer you to take me. Live, dear Roger, and
let me go."
"Yield to me, Man, what you may not keep," the whisper of the Thing
followed after her voice. "Would you take the witch-child to your
hearth? Cast her off; and taste my pardon."
"Can you hear, Roger? Roger, let me go."
With an effort terrible to make as death to meet, I broke from the
paralysis that chained me. As from the drag of a whirlpool, I tore
myself from the tide-clutch, from the will of the Thing, from the numb
weakness upon me. For a moment I thrust back the hand at my throat. I
stood up and drew Desire up with me in my arms, both of us reeling with
my unsteadiness.
"I do not give you up," I said, my speech hoarse and difficult. "I claim
you, now, and after. And my claim is good, because I pay."
Desire exclaimed something. What, I do not know. Her voice was lost in
the triumphant conviction that I was right. She was free, and the
freedom was my gift to her. I was not vanquished, but victor. The life I
paid was not a penalty, but a price.
Her face was uplifted to mine as she clung to me; then my weight glided
through her arms and I fell back in my chair.
I was alone amid blackness and desolation that poured past me like the
wind above the world.
* * * * *
For the last time, I opened my eyes on the gray shore at the foot of the
Barrier. I, pygmy indeed, stood again before the colossal wall whose
palisades reared up beyond vision and stretched away beyond vision on
either side.
I was alone here. No whisper of taunt or menace, no presence of horror
troubled me. Opposite me, the Breach that split the cliff showed as a
shadowed canon, empty except of dread. Far out behind me the sea that
was like no sea of earth gathered itself beneath its eternal mists as a
tidal wave draws and gathers. With folded arms I stood there, waiting
for the returning surge of mighty waters to overwhelm me in their flood.
I waited in awe and solemn expectancy, beyond fear or hope.
But now I became aware of a new doubleness of experience. Here on the
Frontier, I was between the worlds, yet I also saw the room in the house
left behind. I saw myself as an unconscious body reclined in a chair
beside the hearth. Desire Michell knelt on the floor beside me, her
hands grasping my arms, her gaze fixed on my face, her hair spilling its
shining lengths across my knees. Phillida was huddled in a chair, crying
hysterically. Vere apparently had been trying to force some stimulant
upon the man who was myself, yet was not myself, for while I watched he
reluctantly rose from bending above the figure and set a glass upon the
table. I echoed his sigh. Life was good.
The sea behind me began to rush in from immeasurable distances. The roar
of the waters' thunderous approach blended with the heat and flash of
storm all about the house into which I looked.
"He dies," Desire spoke, her voice level and calm. "Has it not been so
with all who loved the daughters of my race these two centuries past?
Yet never did one of those die as he dies--not for passion, but for
protection of the woman--not as a madman or one ignorant, but facing
that which was not meant for man to face, his eyes beating back the
intolerable Eyes. Oh, glory and grief of mine to have seen this!"
Phillida cowered lower in her chair, burying her face in the cushions.
But Vere abruptly stood erect, his fine dark face lifted and set. Just
so some ancestors of his might have risen in a bleak New England
meeting-house when moved powerfully to wrestle with evil in prayer. But
it is doubtful if any Maine deacon ever addressed his Deity as Vere
appealed to his.
"Almighty, we're in places we don't understand," he spoke simply as to a
friend within the room, his earnest, drawling speech entirely natural.
"But You know them as You do us. If things have got to go this way, why,
we'll make out the best we can. But if they don't, and we're just
blundering into trouble, please save Roger Locke and this poor girl.
Because we know You can. Amen."
Now at this strange and beautiful prayer--or so it seemed to me--a ray
of blinding light cleaved up from where Vere stood, like a shot arrow
speeding straight through house and night into inconceivable space. Then
the room vanished from my sight as the great wave burst out of the mist
upon me.
I went down in a smother of ghastly snarling floods cold as space is
cold. Something fled past me up the strand, shrieking inhuman passion;
the Eyes of my enemy glared briefly across my vision.
One last view I glimpsed of that dread Barrier, amid the tumult and
welter of my passing. The breach was closed! Unbroken, majestic, the
enormous Wall stood up inviolate.