My imagination sprang ahead of the event. In fancy, I saw bright dawn filling this room of mine, shining on the figure of a man who had been myself. His head rested on his folded arms so that his face was hidden. On the table beside him a vase was overturned; a spray of heliotrope lay near and water had trickled over scattered sheets of music, staining the paper. By and by Vere would come to summon that unanswering figure to the gay little breakfast-table. Phillida would leave her place behind the burnished copper percolator she prized so highly and come running up the stairs. In her gentleness she would grieve, no doubt. I was sorry for that. But it was a contentment and pleasure for me to recall that I had settled my financial affairs so that my little cousin would never lack money or know any care that I could spare her. Strange, how she had been rated below more beautiful or more clever women until the waif Ethan Vere had set her dearness in full sun for us to wonder at!
"Pygmy, will you think of another pygmy now?" raged the Thing. "Yourself! Think of yourself! Crouch! Think of death, corruption, the vileness of the grave. Think how you are of the grave. Think how you are alone with me. Think how you are abandoned to me."
But with that tenderness for Phillida a warmth had flowed through me like strength.
"Not so," my defiance answered It. "For where I am, I stand by my own will. With where I shall stand, you have nothing to do. Back, then, for with the death of my body your power ends. Back—or else face me, Thing of Darkness, while we stand in one place."
At this mad challenge of mine silence closed down like a shutting trap. Consciousness sank away from me with a sense of swooning quietness.
I stood before the Barrier on the ghostly frontier; erect, arms folded, fronting the Breach in that inconceivably mighty wall. Above, away out of vision on either hand stretched the gray glimmering cliffs.
This I had seen before. But behind me lay that which I had not seen. The mists I believed to be eternal had lifted. Naked, a vast gray sea stretched parallel with the Barrier; like it, without end or even a horizon to bound its enormous desolation. Between these two immensities on the narrow strand at the foot of the wall, I stood, pygmy indeed. In the Breach, as of old, the Thing whose home was there reared Itself against me.
"Man," It spat, "would you see me? Would you see the Eyes once seen by the witch-woman, who fell blasted out of human ken? Creature of clay, crumbling now in the sea of mortality, do you brave my immemorial age?"
It reared up, up, a towering formlessness. It stooped, a lowering menace.