“It’s a bewildering discovery,” he went on, “that of finding oneself approaching the wonderful bourne one has struggled toward so long. I don’t think I’m afraid, Renalt, lying here in peace and watching my soul walk on. Yet now, though I know I have done two great and wicked deeds in my lifetime, I wouldn’t put off the moment of that coming revelation by an hour.”
I stroked his hand, listening and wondering, but I made no answer.
“It’s like being a little child,” he said; “fascinated and compelled toward a pleasant fright. When you were a toddling baby, if one came at you menacing and growling in fun, you’d open your eyes in doubt with fear and laughter; and then, instead of flying the danger, would run at it half-way and be caught up in daddy’s arms and kissed. That seems to illustrate death to me now. The heart of that grim, time-worn playfellow may be very soft, after all. It’s best not to cry out, but to run to him and be caught up and kissed into forgetfulness.”
Oh, my father! How in my soul did I echo your words!
He wandered on by such strange sidewalks till speech itself seemed to intermingle with the inarticulate language of dream. Is there truth after all in the senile visions of age that can penetrate the veil of the supernal, though the worn and ancient eyes are dim with cataracts?
As I sat alone with my thoughts that night many emotions, significant or pathetic, wrought changing phantoms of the shadows in the dimly lighted room. Sometimes, shapeless and full of heavy omen, they revolved blindly about that dark past life of my father, a little corner of the curtain over which had that evening been lifted for my behoof. Sometimes they thrilled with spasms of pain at the prospect of that utter loneliness that must fall upon me were the old man’s quiet foretelling of his doom to justify itself. Sometimes they took a red tinge of gloom in memory of his words of self-denunciation.
What had been a worser evil in him than that long degrading of his senses? Yet, of the “wicked deeds” he had referred to, that which could hardly be called a “deed” was surely not one. Perhaps, after all, they were nothing but the baseless product of a fancy that had indulged morbidity until, as with Frankenstein, the monster it had created mastered it.
Might this not be the explanation of all? Even of that eerily expressed fear of his, that had puzzled me in its passing, that the wheel was calling for a victim again?
CHAPTER XLIV.
THE SECRET OF THE WHEEL.
The day that followed the unlooked-for visit of my brother Jason to the mill my father spent in bed. When, in the morning, I took him up his breakfast, I could not help noticing that the broad light flooding the room emphasized a change in him that I had been only partly conscious of the evening before. It was as if, during the night, the last gleams of his old restless spirit had died out. I thought all edges in him blunted—the edges of fear, of memory, of observation, of general interest in life.