Out of the ambush of copse and heather and bracken had started up at a chieftain’s whistle—“wild as the scream of the curlew”—a host of mountaineers, while the Chieftain revealed himself to the enemy who had imagined him alone:
“And, Saxon, I am Roderick Dhu.”
“What is the matter, Arthur?” asked Harry when I came to this line. I answered him with a look of trembling contempt. The whole scene so fascinated me—I so thrilled with admiration at everything done by the Highland chieftain—that his magic whistle at last pierced me to the marrow with exquisite joy. In my excitement I said the words, “And, Saxon, I am Roderick Dhu,” aloud, yet not loud enough to make anything but a husky muttering audible. I was choking and blushing with pleasant pains and with a desire to pass them on to another, myself not lacking glory as the discoverer. Hence my muttering those words aloud: hence the contempt of my answer to Harry, upon not being instantly and enthusiastically understood. The contempt, however, was not satisfying.... I, too, wished that I possessed a tower upon a mountain where I could live for ever in a state of poetic pain. Therefore I went out silently, saying no good night, not seeing Philip again.
Fog and cold cured me rapidly. On that wretched night I could no more go on thinking of a tower on a mountain than I could jump into a pond. I had to run to get warm. Then I thought of the book once more: I recovered my pleasure and my pride. The fog, pierced by some feeble sparkles of lamps, and dim glows of windows from invisible houses, the silence, broken by the dead leaf that rustled after me, made the world a shadowy vast stage on which I was the one real thing. The solitary grandeur was better than any tower, and at the end of my run, on entering again among people and bright lights, I could flit out of it as easily as possible, which was more than Morgan could do, since to escape from his tower he had to die.
CHAPTER XVI
THE HOUSE OF THE DAYS OF THE YEAR
Lewis never did raise a tower in the Wilderness. His towers were in the air. A wish, with him, was seldom father to any deed. I think he expected the wish of itself to create; or if not, he was at least always angered when the nature of things proved to be against him. He would not have been unduly astonished, and would have been wildly grateful, if he had seen looming through the fog next morning a tower such as he desired. But except on paper he never did. As he drew it, the tower was tall and slender as the tallest and slenderest factory chimney, more like a pillar for St Simeon Stylites than a castle in Spain. It would have been several times the height of the elms in the Wilderness which he had furiously refused to take into his service. It was to be climbed within by a spiral staircase, each step apparently having its own little window. Thus it was riddled by windows.