He started violently. She was facing him, with downcast eyes and with the rose-pink of girlhood once more glowing in her cheeks. Her voice was low and sweet.
"Antonio," she said very slowly, "how strange it all is, and wonderful! You sent me away in autumn, when the sun made haste to set and the storm had torn the leaves from the trees. I have come back in the spring, amidst thousands of birds and millions of flowers. I have come back in the sunshine to find that you loved me even more than I loved you."
Her voice died away so gently that Antonio could not be sure whether the headlong waterfall and the delirious birds had not robbed him of some sweet saying. At last she spoke again and said:
"Yes, Antonio, you loved me more than I loved you. But do not think that I loved you little or lightly. Above all, do not fear that my love is dead. Antonio, I will tell you what I had never meant to tell anybody in this world."
He waited a long time before she began her confession. To help her he bent his gaze upon the ground. At last he heard her speaking, so softly that he had to strain his ears to listen.
"I, too," she said, "cherished such a love. But I am no theologian. Although my love of you had awakened my love of God, I thought it was wrong to go on cherishing it after its work was done. For years and years I thrust it away as a snare. I so crowded my waking hours with prayer and labor and study that no time was left for other thoughts. But, time after time—not thrice, or ten times, but five hundred—my nights have been rosy with the same wonderful dream. In my dream I seem to have entered into the bliss of heaven, and to be moving in the fullness of the love of God, as in a soft glory of life-giving golden light. At the beginning of my dream it is always a churchly heaven, pillared and domed, with holy chants drifting hither and thither like clouds of incense and with clouds of incense mounting upward like holy chants. But, little by little, it changes. The dim dome widens and brightens into a blue sky, with the smoke of the incense sailing in it like pearly clouds; and the stark pillars soften into tree trunks crowned with cool foliage and hung with clinging roses. Instead of rolling organs I hear the surf of a summer sea breaking on soft sand, and instead of the chants I hear the birds, and thousands of brooks ringing like little bells. Cool grass, gay with wild flowers, spreads itself in the place of golden streets and marble pavements. But, all the time, the same holy light is over it all, like the light before a summer sunset among green hills. Then I become conscious that the heaven I am walking in is not some strange unhomely land high above the stars. Video cÅ“lum novunt et terram novam: 'I see a new heaven and a new earth,' and I know, with sudden joy, that I am walking in this beautiful world, made new, purged of evil and pain, and wholly conformed to the mind of God.
"My dream unfolds always in the same way. Gradually I see that the woods in which I am walking are woods I have walked in before. The voices of the sea and the brooks are good to hear, because they are the voices of old friends. At last I push past a mimosa, on fire with golden flowers like a burning bush, and I halt on the margin of this pool. I wait, with the cascade rumbling at me like thunder and flashing at me like lightning. I turn round; and, without hearing your footfall, I find you at my side. Then we wander off together, sometimes down deep ravines, sometimes up through pines to brown moorlands purple with heather, sometimes along the banks of lakes and rivers, or along the sea-shore, with the holy light always over us and with God's love nearer to us than our own souls. That is my dream."
After pausing a little, she added:
"At first I thought my dream was a snare. I say again that I am not a theologian. Still, I tried to puzzle out if such dreams were against sound doctrine. At first I feared they were. But I came to see that the words of our Lord, 'In the resurrection they neither marry nor are married,' referred to marrying of an earthly kind. Many another scripture came to my mind; and many another thought came to comfort me. Our Mother, the Blessed Virgin crowned in heaven—is she not a woman still? And do we not think of this saint or of that as still a man or still a woman, as the case may be? Is the life hereafter to be a blank Nirvana? Will it be less richly personal than the life we are living now? But these are only my own poor thoughts, worth less than nothing. I rest rather in two great scriptures. In domo Patris mei mansiones multÅ“ sunt: 'In my Father's house are many mansions.' And again, 'Eye hath not seen, nor hath the ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man what things God hath prepared for those who love Him.' But let me be plain to the end. My dreams are beyond my control; and, when I am awake, I do not willingly dwell on these thoughts."
The big bell of the monastery, vocal once more after seven-and-twenty years of silence, struck twelve. The monk and the nun listened to the strokes without speaking. Before the last echoes died away Brother Cypriano rang the Angelus.