The high Tulip lost at once its dignity of guardianship. It became a vast devil fish, a myriapod slimily prying and squirming, with the house in its clutches.
It might even now be ready to swell and heave and overturn the house. The scavenger might be even now wrapping its arms about Jud Lasher’s corpse—slowly, patiently haling it forth to the light of day and the eyes of men.
There seemed to be an unrelenting conspiracy in the world to bury everything that man would preserve and expose everything that man would conceal. In RoBards’ own conscience there was a something burrowing and squirming, as if commanding him to disgorge the secret interred in his brain.
The secret was like a growth creeping, growing and bulging toward the surface and multiplying its pain with every hour of concealment. He wondered how long he could withhold the proclamation of his crime. He caught himself at long intervals just about to announce to any bystander:
“I have committed my own little murder in my day. I am human, too. I am not innocent because of any incapacity for crime. My respectable reputation is due to my discretion, not to any flaccidity of character.”
Months would go by with no onset of this publishing instinct. Then it would sweep over him like a vertigo.
Hearing Keith tell of the tender root that broke through the aqueduct, he understood how even stone and mortar must eventually yield to the intolerable nagging of a weak thing that never rested.
He rose and with a laborious pretense of dawdling sauntered to the door, out and around the house to where the tulip tree stood. As if idly, he leaned against the trunk and studied the sprawl of the roots. Some of them were thicker than a young tree. They writhed and contorted the ground. Standing still like pythons petrified, they yet seemed to move with a speed the more dreadful for its persistence. Glaciers were not more leisurely, nor more resistless.
The roots dived into the earth, some of them bent upon reaching the foundation walls. They had but one instinct, the hunt for water, and nothing could check them but death.
Down the outside stairway of the cellar went RoBards and stumbling in the dark found the wall nearest the tree and passed his hands along it like a blind man.