By degrees, his expression recovered its habitual irony. “Won't you sit down?”
Brusquely, she moved down the porch, seated herself to one of the rockers. At once, he turned off the lights, and darkness came pouring through the screens. “I think better in the dark.” Before her eyes adjusted, she heard the chair beside her squeak as he sat down.
For a time, the only sounds were the soft protest of his chair and the stridulation of the crickets. Then he said abruptly, “Some things I'm not going to tell you. Some I can't-some I won't. But I got you into this. I owe you a few answers.”
After that, he spoke like the voice of the night; and she listened in a state of suspension-half concentrating, as she would have concentrated on a patient describing symptoms, half musing on the image of the gaunt vivid man who had said with such astonishment and pain,
'Eleven years ago, Thomas Covenant was a writer with one bestseller, a lovely wife named Joan, and an infant son, Roger. He hates that novel-calls it inane-but his wife and son he still loves. Or thinks he does. Personally, I doubt it. He's an intensely loyal man. What he calls love, I call being loyal to his own pain.
“Eleven years ago, an infection on his right hand turned out to be leprosy, and those two fingers were amputated. He was sent down to the leprosarium in Louisiana, and Joan divorced him. To protect Roger from being raised to close proximity to a leper. The way Covenant tells it, her decision was perfectly reasonable. A mother's natural concern for a child. I think he's rationalizing. I think she was just afraid. I think the idea of what Hansen's disease could do to him-not to mention to her and Roger-just terrified her. She ran away.”
His tone conveyed a shrug, “But I'm just guessing. The fact is, she divorced him, and he didn't contest it. After a few months, his illness was arrested, and he came back to Haven Farm. Alone. That was not a good time for him. All his neighbours moved away. Some people in this fair town tried to force him to leave. He was to the Hospital a couple times, and the second time he was half dead-” Dr. Berenford seemed to wince at the memory. 'His disease was active again. We sent him back to the leprosarium.
“When he came home again, everything was different. He seemed to have recovered his sanity. For ten years now he's been stable. A little grim, maybe-not exactly what you might call diffident-but accessible, reasonable, compassionate. Every year he foots the bill for several of our indigent patients.”
The older man sighed. “You know, it's strange. The same people who try to convert me seem to think he needs saving, too. He's a leper who doesn't go to church, and he's got money. Some of our evangelicals consider that an insult to the Almighty.”
The professional part of Linden absorbed the facts Dr. Berenford gave, and discounted his subjective reactions. But her musing raised Covenant's visage before her in the darkness. Gradually, that needy face became more real to her. She saw the lines of loneliness and gall on his mien. She responded to the strictness of his countenance as if she had recognized a comrade. After all, she was familiar with bitterness, loss, isolation.
But the doctor's speech also filled her with questions. She wanted to know where Covenant had learned his stability. What had changed him? Where had he found an answer potent enough to preserve him against the poverty of his life? And what had happened recently to take it away from him?
“Since then,” the Chief of Staff continued, 'he's published seven novels, and that's where you can really see the difference. Oh, he's mentioned something about three or four other manuscripts, but I don't know anything about them. The point is, if you didn't know better, you wouldn't be able to believe his bestseller and the other seven were written by the same man. He's right about the first one. It's fluff-self-indulgent melodrama. But the others-
“If you had a chance to read
Linden was squirming. She understood at least one kind of relationship between guilt and effectiveness. She had committed murder, and had become a doctor because she had committed murder. She knew that people like herself were driven to power by the need to assoil their guilt. But she had found nothing-no anodyne or restitution- to verify the claim that the damned could be saved. Perhaps Covenant had fooled Dr. Berenford: perhaps he was crazy, a madman wearing a clever mask of stability. Or perhaps he knew something she did not.
Something she needed.
That thought gave her a pang of fear. She was suddenly conscious of the night, the rungs of the rocker pressing against her back, the crickets. She ached to retreat from the necessity of confronting Covenant again. Possibilities of harm crowded the darkness. But she needed to understand her peril. When Dr. Berenford stopped, she bore the silence as long as she could, then, faintly, repeated her initial question.
“Who is she?”
The doctor sighed. His chair left a few splinters of agitation in the air. But he became completely still before he said, “His ex-wife. Joan.”
Linden flinched. That piece of information gave a world of explanation to Covenant's haggard, febrile appearance. But it was not enough. “Why did she come back? What's wrong with her?”
The older man began rocking again. “Now we're back to where we were this afternoon. I can't tell you. I can't tell you why she came back because he told me in confidence. “If he's right- ”His voice trailed away, then resumed. ”I can't tell you what's wrong with her because I don't know.'
She stared at his unseen face. “That's why you got me into this.”
“Yes.” His reply sounded like a recognition of mortality.
“There are other doctors around. Or you could call in a specialist.” Her throat closed suddenly; she had to swallow heavily in order to say, “Why me?”
“Well, I suppose-” Now his tone conveyed a wry smile. “I could say it's because you're well trained. But the fact is, I thought of you because you seem to fit. You and Covenant could talk to each other-if you gave yourselves a chance.”
“I see.” In the silence, she was groaning, Is it that obvious? After everything I've done to hide it, make up for it, does it still show? To defend herself, she got to her feet. Old bitterness made her sound querulous. “I hope you like playing God.”
He paused for a long moment before he replied quietly, “If that's what I'm doing-no, I don't. But I don't look at it that way. I'm just in over my head. So I asked you for help.”
Help, Linden snarled inwardly. Jesus Christ! But she did not speak her indignation aloud. Dr. Berenford had touched her again, placed his finger on the nerves which compelled her. Because she did not want to utter her weakness, or her anger, or her lack of choice, she moved past him to the outer door of the veranda. “Goodnight,” she said in a flat tone.
“Goodnight, Linden.” He did not ask her what she was going to do. Perhaps he understood her. Or perhaps he had no courage.
She got into her car and headed back toward Haven Farm.
She drove slowly, trying to regain a sense of perspective. True, she had no choice now; but that was not because she was helpless. Rather, it was because she had already made the choice-made it long ago, when she had decided to be a doctor. She had elected deliberately to be who she was now. If some of the implications of that choice gave her pain-well, there was pain everywhere. She deserved whatever pain she had to bear.
She had not realized until she reached the dirt road that she had forgotten to ask Dr. Berenford about the old man.
She could see lights from Covenant's house. The building lay flickering against a line of dark trees like a gleam about to be swallowed by the woods and the night. The moon only confirmed this impression; its nearly-full light made the field a lake of silver, eldritch and fathomless, but could not touch the black trees, or the house which lay in their shadow. Linden shivered at the damp air, and drove with her hands tight on the wheel and her senses taut, as if she were approaching a crisis.
Twenty yards from the house, she stopped, parked her car so that it stood in the open moonlight.
She did not know how.
The approach of her headlights must have warned him. An outside lamp came on as she neared the front door. He stepped out to meet her. His stance was erect and forbidding, silhouetted by the yellow light at his back. She could not read his face.
