Braced by the coffee, she started for the galley; but on impulse, wrapped in the cloak that the morning chill made necessary, she decided to take a stroll on the terrace, which would probably be warmer than the house.
The rising sun told that the day would be warm—one of those days when a haze hung over the river, one of those days when she loved to sit and dream, or feel, because it was a feeling of reality into which she slipped, shaking off a world of which she had no part.
Resolutely she squared her shoulders and went in. But when she came to her desk in the gallery, she decided that it was not yet light enough to work. She might as well go up to the tower until the day was full-born.
The tower was shadowy. But day breaking over the river would be all the more impressive with a twilight gloom at her back. And then she felt the blood chill. She reached a chair by the table, sat down and lowered her head to her knees, trying at the same time to raise her eyes sufficiently to keep the window in view.
If he made one move toward her, she would scream; and once started, she believed she never would stop. When the faintness had passed and slowly she straightened, there was nobody in the room. She thought the daylight advanced with unusual rapidity. Light streamed through the window, giving it a borrowed effect of stained glass. Though she could see that the window seat was unoccupied, she had but to close her eyes to see him clearly again. A gnomelike man with a slit lip, with face seamed and pitted, with nose awry, with eyes that— Gradually she saw only the eyes and, seeing them, felt that she had seen all the sorrows of the world. Compassion streamed over her, agonizing regret that, by the look of horror, fear and abhorrence, she had added her bit to his weight of sorrow. Her own misfortune, her cheek stained with an ugly birthmark, told her something of what it must be like to be condemned to go through life like that, to know that women turned away in revulsion, that children probably hid from him in fright, that even men...
The caretaker must have seen him. How else could he have got in? But when she spoke to him about it, he said no, of course not. No one had entered, unless he came through the French door she had left unlocked.
“Unless he slipped through the keyhole!” she said with nerve-racked asperity. “How could he have got through the door without my seeing him, and up to the tower ahead of me?”
But when he asked, with a skeptical look, what sort of man he was, she found herself tongue-tied. She could not bear to say, “The most repulsive-looking man in the world.” When he said something about the tower’s being dim at so early an hour, she agreed and turned away.
By noon she was wondering if she really had seen anyone. If not, she was definitely ill—not only because she was having hallucinations but because her mind could create such a fearful one. At that thought she felt the eyes reproach her and was torn with longing to assuage the wound.
She kept away from the tower all day, though desire to go there, to recapture the old trancelike rapture, rasped her nerves like the craving for dope.
As she surveyed the work she had done, she saw that through some intense driving power she had accomplished in half a day what would ordinarily have taken a day and a half. Her love of the work took possession of her again. She stretched back in her chair and closed her eyes, conscious for the first time that she was tired. She could see, could feel the river flowing by.
Bits of imagery from half-forgotten poems drifted through her mind; bits that conveyed only feebly the sense of the marvelous transformation that took shape as she looked out, letting her gaze project itself farther and farther toward infinity. She jerked out of an uncomfortable sleep; coming back to reality with the fretfulness of a child.
It was the caretaker’s wife, with an embarrassed and worried look upon her face. “Do you mind if I speak a bit that’s in my mind, Miss Reed?”
“Of course not. What’s worrying you?”
“You, if you don’t mind my saying so. I’ll wager you weigh fifteen pounds less than the day you came. You haven’t seen a human being to speak to except Sam and me. It’s not good to stick to work as you do.”
Mrs. Brown was worried about her—about anything more than her thinness? Had she been doing queer things?
“If I were you I’d change over to the inn for the nights. Lord, nothing would tempt me to sleep up here all by myself. I’d have bats in my belfry if I so much as tried it.”
She took a deep breath. Fresh air seemed to flow over her. She had not faced the thought of night because she lacked the courage, but knew that when the time comes, a person can usually face what can’t be avoided. But to be free of nights here while reveling in the days!
“I like the idea of the inn. I’ll admit that the bedroom is somewhat damp and chilly.” There, she had got by that nicely. Both of them relaxed. “Do you suppose I can get a room at such short notice?”
“At this time of the year, yes. Shall I telephone?”
“If you will be so kind.”
She awoke from a night of dreamless sleep, with a sense of buoyancy that made her smile at thought of sickness. Thin, yes. Maybe if she had both breakfast and dinner at the inn she’d plump up a bit. Even though she had no desire to make acquaintances, yet eating in the company of others might give food a more savory taste.
Again she settled down to work, punishing her mind with mental arithmetic, which it hated, whenever it teased for just one look from the tower, just one glimpse of paradise. Not until five o’clock, she said firmly.
It was in the middle of the afternoon that she came across the gray notebook, in a large book on the bottom shelf—a dingy book with an unprepossessing title. Its leaves had been hollowed out. There were thin-papered letters under the notebook. She glanced at them first. Her instinctive disquiet at reading what the first line revealed to be love letters eased as she proceeded. They were so lyrical, so intense, so impassioned, they became at once associated with the loves that have become public property.
Her dream came vividly back to her and, putting a hand over the birthmark, she let the same sweet terror it had produced sweep over her again. But the letters puzzled her. Though clearly both sides of a correspondence, all were in the same handwriting—a script in which each letter was as perfect as if typewritten, and so small that, without that perfection, it would have been almost undecipherable.
The notebook was in the same handwriting; and that was so small and at times so cryptographic, through abbreviations, that reading it was as if one with a smattering of a foreign language were trying to translate it. It seemed to be a random jotting down of notes. She saw a familiar sentence, “He who has seen paradise with earth-bound eyes.” That verified the book as Thomas Woods’s—probably the notes from which he had put his book together.
But a few pages beyond she came upon, “Heaven but the vision of fulfilled desires. Heaven but the vision of fulfilled desires. Heaven but the vision of fulfilled desires.” Over and over the phrase was repeated down the length of two pages, the final phrase sputtering out in a spatter of blots, as if the writer had reached the end of endurance.
A magnifying glass was needed for the fine writing. Instead of going up to the tower when her day’s work was over, she would drive into town and buy a glass.
The glass showed that the book was a repository for flashing thoughts, a writer’s net to catch each stirring fancy. She found other bits from Ultima Thule. She came across a description of her—of their—paradise that made her tremble. She recognized it even from the first line, “Across the river....” His imagery produced that same sense of shallow breathing that a long stay in the tower produced—the same sense of expectancy of being about to take off from the earth.