Old Robert’s face had grown more set. Around his mouth lived less a smile and more a grimace, as though some ancient, anguished smile had frozen there. Ah! the years had been lonely, barren things, with nothing left in their arms for him. He knew the meaning, now, of Gwenliana’s words—that age brought nothing with it save a cold, restless waiting; a dull expectancy of a state that might not be imagined with any assurance. Perhaps he waited for the time when Henry would come to him again. But that could scarcely be so. He was not at all sure that he wanted to see Henry any more. It would be disturbing. When one is old, one hates disturbing things.
For a long time he had wondered, “What is Henry doing now? what seeing now?” And then the boy had faded slightly, had come to be like people in old books—not quite real, yet real enough to be remembered. But Robert thought often of this abstract person, his son, of whom he heard wavering rumors now and again.
With waking on the fine morning of the Spring, Robert had said, “I will climb up to see Merlin today. Strange how that old man lives under the growing pressure of his years. There must be more than a hundred of them now. His body is a thin wisp—nothing more than a suggestion that here was once a body. But William says, if you can be picking thought out of William’s speaking, that his voice is golden and strong as always, and that he still talks tremendous nonsense that would not be tolerated at London. It is amazing how this road-mender has his whole life curled like a kitten around four days in London. But I must be going to Merlin. It is not likely that I shall go again.”
The steep, rocky path was a thing of torture to him; more a cruel thing because of his memory of lithe, powerful legs, and lungs as tireless as bellows. Once he had led all comers in the mountain race, but now he climbed a bit, then rested on a stone, and climbed again—up and up into the cleft and over the rock shoulder. It was noon when he came at last to Crag-top.
Merlin met him at the door before he had time to knock, and Merlin had no more changed than the harps and spearheads hanging to his walls. He seemed to have discarded time like a garment. Merlin came to Robert with no surprise. It was as though he had known of this slow pilgrimage a thousand years before the day had happened.
“It is very long, Robert, since you climbed the path to me, and long since I went down it.” And “down, down” sang the harps. He spoke the language of the strings, and they responded like a distant choir in high mass of the mountains.
“But it’s an old man who climbs to you now, Merlin. The trail is a beast enemy to wrestle with. You seem no older. I wonder when you will come to die. Do not your years sometimes argue that question with you?”
“Why, to speak truthfully, Robert, I have taken it in my mind several times—but always there were too many things to think about. I could not take the time to die. If I did, I might not be able to think ever again.
“For up here, Robert, that furtive hope the valley men call faith becomes a questionable thing. Oh, without doubt, if there were a great many about me, and they all intoning endlessly the chant, ‘There is a wise, kind God; surely we shall go on living after death,’ then I might be preparing for the coming life. But here, alone, halfway up the sky, I am afraid that death would interrupt my musing. The mountains are a kind of poultice for a man’s abstract pain. Among them he laughs—oh, far more often than he cries.”
“You know,” said Robert, “my mother, the old Gwenliana, made a last, curious prophecy before she died. ‘This night the world ends,’ she said, ‘and there will be no more earth to walk upon.’ ”
“Robert, I think she spoke truth. I think her dying words were truth, whatever may have been her other auguries. This gnawing thought comes visiting, sometimes, and because of it I am afraid to die—horribly afraid. If by my living I give life to you, and fresh existence to the fields and trees and all the long green world, it would be an unutterable deed to wipe them all out like a chalk drawing. I must not—yet awhile.
“But enough of these foreboding things. There is no laughter in them. You, Robert, have been too long in the valley of men. Your lips laugh, but there is no amusement in your heart. I think you place your lips so, like twigs over a trap, to conceal your pain from God. Once you tried to laugh with all your soul, but you did not make the satirist’s concession—that of buying with a little amusement at yourself the privilege of laughing a great deal at others.”
“I know that I am defeated, Merlin, and there seems to be no help for it. Victory, or luck, or whatever you wish to call it, appears to lie hidden in a chosen few as babies’ teeth hide under the gums. Of late years this God has a hard, calculating game with me. There have been moments when I thought he cheated.”
Merlin spoke slowly:
“Once I played against a dear young god with goat’s feet, and that game was the reason for my coming here. But then, I made the great concession and signed with sad laughter. Robert, did I not
