第100章 The Open Door

The end of the keeping was not an end, Rosalind understood as she came down from the tower for the last time in the ordinary way of a keeper coming down from the tower, without ceremony and without any thought that this was the last time, because a door that has been kept open is not something you close by leaving, it is something you leave open, and she left it open, and the girl was at the stair with the taper, and the count was going on in the hall, and the register lay open on its shelf with a hundred and a hundred names, and the valley was at its lamps, and the coast was at its chain, and the sea kept what it was given and returned what was asked, and the open hour went on into the evening and the evening into the night and the night into the next morning, and the morning was the same as the morning before, because a keeping that has become the ordinary life of a coast does not have endings, only continuations. She walked the lane in her last season the way she had walked it in her first, and the lane was the same lane, and the hill was the same hill, and the tower was the same tower, and she was not the same woman, and the not being the same was the whole of it, the whole of what the gate had been for, to keep a door open long enough that the woman standing in it could become somebody else, could become the keeper instead of the kept, the walker instead of the wall, the door instead of the doorpost, and she had become it, and the becoming was the keeping, and the keeping was the becoming. The girl brought her the register on the last evening of the season, not to read or to enter but to show her the whole of it, the first volume and the second, the hundred and the hundred names, the lines in four or five hands now, Ines's fierce hand and Graves's careful hand and Julian's sailor's hand and the stranger's eastern hand and her own fading hand and the child's newly forming one, and Rosalind looked at the whole long column of arrivals and understood that the register was not a book, it was a door, and the names were not names, they were the number of the times the door had been walked through, and every walk-through was a keeping, and every keeping was a name, and every name was a door, and the door was open, and the open was the whole of the register, and the register was the whole of the house, and the house was the whole of the coast, and the coast was the whole of the chain, and the chain was the whole of the keeping, and the keeping was the whole of the law, and the law was the whole of the light, and the light was the whole of the door, and the door was open. She set the register back on its shelf on that last evening and did not close it, because an open register is the only appropriate monument to an open door, and she went out into the lane and stood a while at the threshold where she had stood on the first morning, and the count was going on in the house behind her and along the chain beyond the hill and out to the farthest shore, and the traveling lamp was at the headland and the westward lamps were answering and the whole bright round of the coast was lit as it had been lit every night since the year of open hours, and she was no longer needed and had been no longer needed for a long time, and the not being needed was the whole of the triumph, the whole of what a door that has been opened truly is, and she turned and walked a little way down the lane, and did not look back, because there was nothing to look back at that was not carried in her, and the door was open, and the keeping was kept, and the keeping was handed on, and the handing on was the keeping, and the open hour went on, and the count went on, and the gate stood open, and the water ran free, and the light was lit, and that was the whole of the trust, kept at last, openly, forever. And the open door stands in the lane at Blackmore the way it has stood through the whole of the keeping, open, and the register lies on its shelf with its hundred and a hundred names and its second volume filling, and the girl keeps the tower and the count goes round the chain to the far shore and back, and the valley keeps its open hours and the coast keeps its lamps and the sea keeps what it is given and returns what is asked, and nobody living can remember a time when the door was shut, and nobody living needs to, because the door is open, and the open is the keeping, and the keeping is the door, and the one lesson the whole coast learned at the long table of that house, from the widow who came to it a stranger and left it a keeper, is the lesson the grandfathers had cut into the stone above the gate a lifetime before she was born, that whoever stands at this gate keeps the water free, and the water is free, and the light is lit, and the door is open, and that is the whole of the trust, and it has been kept, and it will be kept, and the open hour goes on into the evening and the evening into the night and the night into the next morning, and the morning is the same as the morning before, and the keeping is the keeping, and it is enough, and it goes on.