(This one needs some updating - it's obviously from nearly 30 years ago, and some of the time/period references don't hold up.)
Chapter
3
He collapsed into the chair, gasping. Even
putting books on a shelf was becoming too much.
As he desperately tried to catch his
breath, he could feel the tickle in his lungs beginning again. He readied for
the inevitable.
The coughing came in an explosion. His body
bent forward, his face flushed with pain.
He coughed again and again, until he felt
as if his lungs would leap from his body. Every muscle in his chest ached with
the strain.
Then, slowly, too slowly, the attack
subsided.
His lungs throbbed. His throat was raw.
He wiped his mouth with his handkerchief,
slumped back into the chair.
And he thought of Joy.
Joy chiding him about his smoking.
Dear sweet, Joy, concerned about him,
warning him even as the tumor in her stomach grew and the cancer spread through
her organs and into her bones.
"I don't want to have to take care of
an old invalid," she'd said gently.
He picked up the book resting on the table
next to his chair and opened to the title page.
Middle
English Love Poetry, it read. And below, in her neat script, "To my
beloved Middle English husband, Ergo age duremus, quamvis adoleverit aetas; uta
murque annis quos mora parva teret.”
Still
let us love, he silently translated, although
the years be hasty, and use the hours that brief delay is wasting.
Ah, Joy.
It was one of the few books he had kept.
Well, few by his standards.
In the last year, even as the doctors
fought to halt the cancer that was spreading through his lungs, he'd given away
thousands of books accumulated through 50 years as a student and as an Oxford
professor of history.
Now, he had a few hundred books that he had
had shipped across to Carthage with him. Enough to get him through a few
semesters of teaching. And to aid him in his last quest.
Perhaps inspired by the Crusades he so
loved, he had in the past few decades become a crusader of sorts himself. At
first, he'd fought academic battles, especially in the 1960s and 1970s when the
lust for the new threatened to undermine the educational system that had formed
him.
But gradually, in part through Joy's
influence, he'd begun to look at society as a whole. He welcomed the new ways that
cleared away a lot of the old stuffiness and rigidity that deserved to be
overturned - stuffiness and rigidity of which he himself had been guilty. He
even remembered an embarrassing article he'd once written as a student condemning
the concept of higher education for women. The anti-feminists who so loved his
works kept trotting that one out, to his discomfort.
Still, amid the welcome changes he saw a
coarseness creeping in, and with it, something darker.
So he wrote, spoke, did battle on
television, radio, and the opinion pages. One newspaper branded him "Lewis
Staples, Curmudgeon Crusader." Accompanying the article was a caricature
of him in crusader's armor, his sword raised against a gaggle of pornographers,
media stars, and popular writers.
Then the battle against the cancer had
begun. And he knew he had time and energy for one last fight.
That's when the offer to teach for a year
at Carthage University had arrived. A former student was the history department
chairman there. The invitation to the highly respected historian was intended
to gain a feather in the former student's cap.
At first, he'd been inclined to simply
toss it away. But then another old friend, a compatriot in his cultural war,
wrote to describe some of the current danger spots in the world. Carthage was
among them. A little further research, and he began to sense behind the
invitation something more than an ambitious young academic.
It was a longtime foe hoping for one last
victory.
So he'd taken the offer, knowing that he
might not live another year.
I'm not dead yet, old Scratch.
He opened the book, and started reading.
Tears welled.
Ah, Joy, my love.
Pax et bonum
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