A QUIET WARNING.
I fully expected to be summoned as a witness to the inquest held on
George White. However, as it turned out, they left me alone, and for
that I was thankful, though indeed I had little to fear from any
cross-examination; and Dr. Crackenthorpe would hardly have ventured
under the circumstances to use his professional influence to my
discomfiture, seeing that I had shown knowledge of the fact that
between him and the dead man was once, at least, some species of
understanding. So he gave his version of the affair, without any
reference to me, who indeed could hardly in any way be held
responsible for the catastrophe.
And now he lay dead, the latest victim of the inquisition of the
wheel, I most fully believed; a poor wretch withered under its ban
that would reach, it seemed, to agents but remotely connected with the
dark history of its immediate neighbors. He was dead, and with him, I
could but think, had passed my one chance of probing the direful
mystery in that direction where the core of it festered.
Thereafter for weeks I walked in a stubborn rebellion against fate,
intensified by the thought that this stultifying of my purpose had
come upon me on the heels of my triumphant mastery of that old weird
influence of the mill--a triumph that had seemed to pronounce me the
very chosen champion of truth to whom all ways to the undoing of the
wicked should be revealed.
But, now, as the month drew to its close, a new anxiety came to humble
me with the pathos of the world, and to assimilate all restless
emotions into one pale fog of silence, gray and sorrowful.
On a certain morning, looking in my father’s face when I brought him
his breakfast, I read something there, the import of which I would not
consider or dwell upon until I could escape and commune with myself
alone.
There was little external change in him and he was bright and
cheerful. It was only a certain sudden sense of withdrawal that struck
a chill into me--a sense as if life, seeking to steal unobserved from
its ancient prison, knew itself noticed and affected to be dallying
simply with the rusted locks and bolts.
Realizing this presently to the full, I determined then and there to
put everything else to one side and to devote myself single-handed to
the tender ministering to his last days upon earth. And grief and
sadness were mingled in me, for I loved the old man and could not but
rejoice that the inevitable should come to him so peacefully. But
prospect of the utter loneliness that would fall upon me when he was
gone woke a selfish resentment that he should be taken from me and
fought in my heart for mastery over the better emotion.
Did he know? Not certainly, perhaps, for slowly dying men give little
thought to the way they wander. But something in the prospect opening
out before him must, I think, have struck him with a dawning marvel at
its strangeness; as a sleeper, wakened from a weird romance of
dreaming, finds a wonder of unfamiliarity in the world restored to
him.
It may have been that some increase of care on my part making itself
apparent was the first warning to him that all was not as it used to
be, for there came a night when he called to me as I was leaving his
room--after seeing him comfortably established--in a voice with a
queer ring of emotion in it.
“What is it, dad?” I asked, hurrying back to his bedside.
“I’m wakeful to-night, my lad; well and easy, but wakeful.”
“Shall I stop with you a bit longer?”
I saw he wished it and sat myself down upon the foot of the bed.
“Good lad,” he said. “I don’t deserve all this, Renalt. It should be a
blank and empty thing to review a life spent in idleness and
self-indulgence. I ought to feel that, and yet I’m at peace. Why
wasn’t I of your militant philosophers, who treating love like any
other luxury, find salve for the bitter sting of it in a brave
independence of righteousness!”
“As well ask, dad, why in battle the bullets spare some and mangle
others.”
“You mean the faculty of overriding fate is constitutional, not a
courageous theory, Renalt?”
“Yet I think your philosopher would be the first to acknowledge its
truth.”
“Of course. He’d have a principle to prove. But I can’t gather
consolation there for having wittingly sunk myself to the beasts.”
“Dad!”
“Why should I mince matters? Let me look at you full face. I have
never been a liar, but I’ve chosen to deceive myself into the belief
that mere brute self-indulgence was a fine revolt against the tyranny
of the gods.”
“It may have been nature’s counter-irritant to unbearable suffering.”
“Sophistry, my boy. It’s out of the kindness of your heart, but it’s
sophistry. Better to die shrieking under the knife than to live to be
a hopeless, disfigured cripple. Look at me lying here. What heritage
of virtue, what example of endurance, shall I leave to my children?”
“You have never complained.”
“No comfort, Renalt--none. I nursed my resentment from base fear only
that by revealing it, it would dissipate. With such a belief I have to
face the Supreme Court up there; and”--he looked at me
earnestly--“before very long, I think.”
I shook my head in silence. I could find no word to say.
“Am I afraid?” he went on, still intently regarding me. “I think
not--at present. Yet I have some bitter charges to answer.”
“This rest will restore you again, dad.”
He did not seem to hear me. His eyes left my face and he continued in
a murmuring voice:
“The last dispossession the old suffer is sleep, it seems. Balm in
Gilead--balm in Gilead!”
“What little breath will keep the spark alive,” I thought as I sat and
watched the worn quiet figure. The face looked as if molded out of wax
and so moved me that presently I must rise and bend over it, thinking
the end had actually come while I watched.
With my rising, however, a sigh broke from it, and a little stir of
the limbs, so that my heart that had fallen leaped up again with
gladness. Then he looked up at me standing above him, and a smile
passed like a gleam of sunlight over his features.
“I always loved you, my son Renalt,” he murmured, and, murmuring, fell
into a light trance once more.
The following day there was no change in his condition. I could have
thought him floating out of life on that tide of dreaming thoughts
that seemed to bear him up so gently and so easily. When, at moments,
he would rise to consciousness of my presence, he would nod to me and
smile; and again sink back on the pillow of gracious somnolence.
I had been sitting reading to myself in my father’s room and all was
glowing silence about me, when a sudden clap at the window-casement
made me start. I jumped to my feet and looked out. A vast gloomy
curtain of cloud was drawing up from the east; even as I looked, some
shafts of its bitterness drove through the joints of the lattice,
stabbing at me with points of ice, and I shivered, though the sunlight
was still upon me.
The storm came on with incredible speed; within five minutes of my
rising clouds of hail were flogging the streets, and from a whirling
fog of night jangle of innumerable voices hooting and whistling broke
like a besieging cloud of Goths upon the ancient capital.