“I should rather say to you ‘Sleep outside,’” he said. “If the lightning makes another shot here, it will certainly shoot at the highest thing, and the house is much higher than my hammock.”
He looked at him a moment in silence, with the pity that is akin not to contempt, but to love.
“Ah, you are afraid of fear,” he said. “That is one degree worse than anything we need be afraid of. It is of our own making, too. We dress up Fear like a turnip-ghost and then scream with terror at it. Or, don’t you remember as a child making faces at yourself in a looking-glass till you were so frightened you could scarcely move? That is what most of us do all our lives.”
Again, and rather more vividly, a blink of lightning was reflected in the clouds, and from far off the thunder muttered sleepily.
“So when I go,” asked Philip, “I can think of you as being as happy and fearless—as certain of yourself and the scheme of the world as ever?”
Merivale smiled.
“Yes, assuredly you can do that,” he said, “and though I do not like to hear you talk of going, of course I know you must. If you stopped here you would get bored and fidgetty. You have not at present because you have been getting well, and in convalescence all conditions, so long as one is allowed to stop still, are delightful. But your place, your work is not here. I feel that as strongly as you. You have the harder part; you have to go back and sort the grains of gold from the great lumps of worthless alloy, and distinguish many things that glitter from the royal metal. However, you know all that as well as I do.”
He leaned forward over the table, and looked very earnestly at Philip.
“Think of me always as happy,” he said, “and think of me as of a man who is waiting in an antechamber, waiting to be summoned to a great Presence. At least that is how I feel myself, how strongly and certainly I cannot explain to you. Here am I in this beautiful and wonderful antechamber, the world which I love so, in which I have passed days and months of such extraordinary happiness. But at one end of the antechamber there is a curtain drawn, and behind that is the Presence. Soon I think it will be drawn back and I shall see what is behind it. I think it will be drawn soon, for—all this imagery is so clumsy for what is so simple—for lately the curtain has been stirred, so it seems to me, from the other side: it has been jerked so that often I have thought that each moment it was to be drawn away, whereas till lately it has always hung in heavy, motionless folds. And I am waiting in front of it, conscious still—oh, so fully conscious—of all the beautiful things I have loved, but looking at them no longer, for I can look nowhere but at the curtain which stirs and is twitched as if someone is on the point of drawing it back.”
He paused a moment, but did not take his eyes off Philip, but continued looking at him very gravely, very affectionately.