Scales and Blindfold

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The tall, erect man moved very easily in the darkness. He hadn’t been in this room in three years, but he knew every inch of it. It was his room, the room his mother kept readied for him whenever he should return.

He paused a moment in the moonlight that filtered through the window. The pale light touched a broad, heavy, yet young face. An open face. His gray eyes were glowing; a smile played eagerly about his broad, warm mouth.

Up here the house was silent save for the whispering of the wind through the great oaks outside and the expectant thud of the man’s pulse in his ears. In the next room he knew his son was sleeping, and in the room beyond that his mother would be alone. Silent and dark up here in this great house, yet downstairs the laughter and bubbling noise of an informal party drifted to him faintly.

The tall man stood quite still in the patch of moonlight. His whole being exuded expectant pleasure, yet there was something lonely in the tiny wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the cast of his lips. He was thinking of a lovely, wealthy young Spanish-English girl. The girl he’d married and who had died over three years ago, taking part of him with her. He was thinking that he had been away from this huge, somehow grim house a long time. He’d missed his son. He’d seen too much tired death as a war correspondent. There is a limit to the amount of death a man can see and still not be lonely.

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