Adeline shook her head:
"No," she said, "I can't. I daren't leave Gerrit alone yet...."
CHAPTER XXVI
Oh, how the twilight was gathering, oh, how it was gathering around him! It was dark now, quite dark; and the fire on the hearth was dying out in the dark, shadowy room. But what was the use of making it blaze up: did the room not always remain shiveringly cold, however much the fire might glow? What was the use of lighting lamps: was the twilight not deeper and gloomier day by day, whether it were morning or evening? Did not the pale gold of the dawn shimmer more and more vaguely through the dense mist of twilight?... A dull, apathetic, feeble man.... Had he kept his secret all his life, concealed the real condition of his body and his soul, to become like that? And yet was he not Ernst's brother? Had he not always been Ernst's brother ... though it had always seemed otherwise? Were they not of the same blood and had not they, the brothers, the same soul, the same darkened soul? Was the darkness not gathering around all of them now, the sombre twilight of their small lives?... Would the darkness one day close in upon his own pale-golden dawn: his children, who also shared the same soul?... It might be the darkness of old age as it closed in upon Mamma—he could see her as she sat—or it might be the darkness of sorrow and weariness and loneliness, as yonder, round Bertha. Were the shadows not deepening round Paul and Dorine, for all their youth?... Had it not been as a night round Ernst, even though he was now stepping out of the dark ... back into the twilight that surrounded them all?... Was it their fault or the fault of their life: the small life of small souls?... Did the twilight come from their blood, which grew poorer, or from their life, which grew smaller?... Would they never behold through the twilight—the vistas, far-reaching as the dawn, where life, when all was said, must be spacious ... and would they never strive for that? Would his children never strive for that? Would they never send forth the rays of their golden sunlight towards the greater life and would they not grow into great souls?... Would the twilight, afterwards, deepen ... and deepen ... and deepen ... around them too ... until perhaps the very great things of life came thundering and lightening unexpectedly before them, crushing them and blinding them ... because they had not learnt to see the light?...
He tried to remember thoughts of former days ... but they shot ahead, like winged ironies. He knew only that night was falling, one vast night around all the family, under the grey skies of their winter. He knew only that the light was growing dimmer and dimmer around them, until it became unillumined dusk: the dusk of age; the dusk of sorrow; the dusk of cynical selfishness; the dusk of life without living; all the heavy, sombre twilight that gathered around small souls ... until with Ernst the dusk had grown into night and the dark dream from which he was now emerging.... They called that recovering.... They thought that he would recover.... Oh, how dark and gloomy were the shadows of the twilight and how heavy was the fate that hung over their small souls, hung over them like a leaden sky, an immensity of leaden skies!...
He, yes, he would get better. It might take months yet; and then he would resume his service as a dull, decrepit old man, diseased through and through, from his childhood, under the semblance of muscular strength, until one serious illness was enough to break him and make him dull and old for all the rest of his life.... Yes, he would get better. But it would no longer be necessary to raise his voice to a roar, to make his movements rough and blunt, to make a show of strength and force and roughness; for they would now all see through the sad pretence. He would jog along through his small, shadowed life, until the shadows gathered around him ... as they were now gathering, around his mother; and ... and ... and his children would never again recognize in him their father of the old days, who used to romp with them and fill the whole house with all the rush of his healthy vitality.... It was over, over for the rest of his life....
It was over. In the room which had grown chill and dark, the black thought haunted him, that it was over. It almost made him calm, to know that it was over, that for his children, his nine—did he not remember their golden number correctly?—he could never be other than the shadow of their father of the old days.... Oh, would he never again be able to love them, to be a father to them? Could he never do that again? Must he, when cured, remain for all the rest of his life the man conquered by the beast, the man eaten up by the beast, the man broken in the contest with the dragon-beast? Was it so? Was it so?...
Why did they leave him in the cold and the dark? Shivers ran down his back—his marrowless back, his bloodless body—like a stream of ice-cold water? Why didn't they make up his fire and why didn't they light his lamp?... Did they know that nothing could give him warmth and light?
"Adeline!"