II
The boy had the house to himself, and the world too. At last he could retire once more upon the Love within him.
He could pray—without words.
The sea was a plain shining beneath the moon. Against the light, inky sycamores ruffled, stars entangled in their leaves. On the shingle- bank the bear-skinn'd sentinel showed black against white waters.
The plain beauty of the night stole upon his mind. All was jewelled silence, save for the jar-r-r of the familiar goat-sucker from the foot of the hills, and the wash of the sea.
How calm it was, how strong, how radiant!
He had been far away. Now he was drawing near again. It was his once more. He possessed it all, all, all, and loved it as his own.
All day he had been the prisoner of his own distraught senses. And how comfortable it was, after the darkness of that life which is death, to resume the large loveliness of Life Unending.
Space and Time had no more meaning for him. He was again eternal and infinite. All this beauty of earth and sky and moon-wan water, it was not outside him, it was himself. He reached out a hand to pluck a handful of stars, and could not—because they were too close. You cannot pluck the jewels of your own heart.
Yet however deep he plunged into Eternity, the ache of Time was still present to his mind, remote indeed, on the farthest shores of memory, but always there, an ache that would not still. He felt the pain of it, and still more the pettiness. To him, sitting at the heart of things, drinking in the great night, they seemed strangely mean and tawdry now, the excitements of the past day.
Let not your heart be troubled, came the voice of the Poet of Truth down the ages.
Was it worthy of a Son of God so to vex himself with the trivialities of this world?
What was war? what victory? what defeat?
True he must do his best for conscience' sake, but God would swing the stars across the heaven whether Napoleon landed or not. He would still march on His great way, though Nelson were lost.
Smiling to himself, the lad was wondering whether to the Maker of those stars, this earth, that sea, the issue of this business might be more than the issue of a squabble between two sparrows would be to him.