Mayda was not familiar with the Psalms, with the profound word of that ancient Hebrew, to whom our little sun seemed dark, the sun which conceals the higher world. He understood, without understanding. He remained reverently silent.
Benedetto sought the stars with his eyes. His own conscience was passing in those stars, which gazed upon him so austerely, knowing he was about to review—before the threatening hour of death—the whole moral history of his life, to tell it in words which would be a first judgment, pronounced in the name of the God of Justice, impelled by the God of Love; in words that would not be lost, because no movement is lost; which would appear—who knows how, who knows where, who knows when?—to the glory of Christ, as the supreme testimony of a spirit to moral Truth, directed against itself. Thus the silent stars spoke to him, animated by his own thoughts. And his life was pictured in his mind from beginning to end, the external, salient outline less strongly marked than the inner moral substance. He saw all the first part of it dominated by a religious conception in which egotism prevailed, and so ordered as to make the love of God and the love of man converge into an individual well-being, the aim being personal perfection, and reward. He was grieved that he had thus obeyed in words only the law which places the love of God before the love of self; and it was a gentle grief, not because it was easy to find excuses for this error, to impute it to teachers, but because it was sweet to feel his own minuteness in the wave of grace which enveloped him. And he felt his own minuteness in that past, spoiled by imperfect beliefs, influenced by the uprising of the senses, in the central depression of his life, which had been one vast tissue of sensuality, of weakness, of contradictions, of lies. He felt his own minuteness in his life after his conversion, the impulse and work of an inner Will, which had prevailed against his own will, and during this last period it seemed to him, he himself had weighted the scales against the good impulse. He longed to drop off this “self” which held him back like a heavy garment. He saw that the affection for the Vision was part of this burdensome “self.” He aspired to Divine Truth in all its mystery, whatever it might be, and gave himself to Divine Truth with such violence of desire that the spasm of it nearly rent him asunder. And the stars shone forth upon him such a lively sense of the immeasurable vastness of Divine Truth as compared with his own and his friends’ religious conceptions, and at the same time such a firm faith that he was travelling towards that vastness, that he suddenly raised his head from the pillow exclaiming:
“Ah!”
The sister was dozing, not so the Professor.
“What is it?” said he. “Do you see something?”
Benedetto did not reply immediately. The Professor raised the lamp, and bent over him. Then Benedetto turned his face and looked at Mayda with an expression of intense desire, and after gazing at him a long time, sighed:
“Ah, Professor! Indeed you must come where I am going!”
“But do you know where you are going?” Mayda said.
“I know,” Benedetto replied, “that I am parting with all that is corruptible, all that is burdensome.”
He then inquired if some one had gone to the parish church. Not yet: only a quarter of an hour had passed. He apologised. It had seemed a century to him. He entreated the Professor to retire, to take some rest, and once more he fell to watching the celestial lights. Then he closed his eyes, longing for Jesus, for two human arms which should lift him up, should encircle him; longed for a human breast, incarnate of the Divine, in which to hide his head, as he entered the vast mystery.