It all resolved itself, he found, into this question of the soul. Was the marvel true? Did it really exist? For if it did, it must have food and cherishing. Inevitably then he thought of grannie, and his struggling mind seemed to appeal to her clarity, question and answer, and to every question she smiled and told him the dream was true. It did live, this mystery, this imperishable one that came from the bosom of God and would return in safety there.
Osmond rose, in the dewy midnight, and stretched his arms to heaven. He felt what he never had before, in his iron acquiescence, an ecstasy of worship. This was what grannie felt, he knew; it was the daily draught that kept her spirit young. He made no doubt she was praying for him at that moment, and that their buoyant certainties were meeting in the air of quickened life. Hitherto he had walked. Now he saw the use of wings.
He knew what Rose was doing. She would not be waking. She would be lying in her bed asleep, too secure in her glad confidence to wonder over it. Another thought swept in and awoke his quivering sentience to the marvel of his life. Some recognition of the cherishing maternal seemed to grow in him, and as grannie had saved his body for him, so now Rose seemed to have given birth to his new soul. It was like a shining child. With his bodily eyes he almost saw it through the dark, and he longed to take it in his arms to where she slept and lay it on her breast. He could fancy how the shining child would lie there and how, sleeping, her sweet soul would cherish it. And whether he began the next day with the resolve to give her up or to relinquish his own doubts, at least he had had the vision. As the dawn broke he seemed to see her coming toward him, the spirit of it, rosy-clad, bearing in her hands, outstretched, a beaker for his lips. It was the water of life, and her face besought him to know finally that they were to drink of it together. He was shaken with the wonder of it. All his past had been preparing him for ignominy and loss. He trembled when he saw what the girl in the vision meant: that the greater quest is farther yet.
XXXII
Madam Fulton and Electra were busy, each in her own track, making ready to go. Electra was truly concerned because grandmother had fallen into this frenzy of setting her belongings in order and would even fly up to town to her little apartment, on mysterious errands. But Madam Fulton was as gayly confident as she was inscrutable, and even when Billy Stark warned her that she was doing too much, she only whispered,—
"Got the tickets, Lochinvar?"
On the last day, when the house was partly closed and the servants lingered only for an hour or two, Electra, ready to her gloves, came to kiss her grandmother good-by. Madam Fulton drew back a pace and looked at her.
"Electra," said she, "you'll be horribly shocked and you'll want to laugh at me. But don't you do it. Don't you do either of those two things."
Electra's brows came together in a perplexity that yet betokened only a tepid interest. Her own affairs were too insistent. They crowded out the pale, dim hopes of age.