In the evening, when the sun was down, they went for another walk. I suspect the major, but am not sure:—anyhow, in the middle of a fir-wood Hester found herself alone with Christopher. The wood rose towards the moor, growing thinner and thinner as it ascended. They were climbing westward full in face of the sunset, which was barred across the trees in gold, blue, rosy pink, and a lovely indescribable green, such as is not able to live except in the after sunset. The west lay like the beautiful dead not yet faded into the brown dark of mother-earth. The fir-trees and bars of sunset made a glorious gate before them.
"Oh, Hester!" said Christopher—he had been hearing her called Hester on all sides all day long, and it not only came of itself, but stayed unnoticed of either—"if that were the gate of heaven, and we climbing to it now to go in and see all the dear people!"
"That would be joy!" responded Hester.
"Come then: let us imagine it a while. There is no harm in dreaming."
"Sometimes when Mark would tell me one of his dreams, I could not help thinking," said Hester, "how much more of reality there was in it than in most so-called realities."
Then came a silence.
"Suppose," began Christopher again, "one claiming to be a prophet appeared, saying that in the life to come we were to go on living just such a life as here, with the one difference that we should be no longer deluded with the idea of something better; that all our energies would then be, and ought now to be spent in making the best of what we had—without any foolish indulgence in hope or aspiration:—what would you say to that?"
"I would say," answered Hester, "he must have had his revelation either from God, from a demon, or from his own heart: it could not be from God, because it made the idea of a God an impossibility; it must come from a demon or from himself, and in neither case was worth paying attention to.—I think," she went on, "my own feeling or imagination must be better worth my own heeding than that of another. The essential delight of this world seems to me to lie in the expectation of a better."
They emerged from the wood, the bare moor spread on all sides before them, and lo, the sunset was countless miles away! Hills, fields, rivers, mountains, lay between! Christopher stopped, and turning, looked at Hester.
"Is this the reality?" he said. "We catch sight of the gate of heaven, and set out for it. It comes nearer and nearer. All at once a something they call a reality of life comes between, and the shining gate is millions of miles away! Then cry some of its pilgrims, 'Alas, we are fooled! There is no such thing as the gate of heaven! Let us eat and drink and do what good we can, for to-morrow we die!' But is there no gate because we find none on the edge of the wood where it seemed to lie? There it is, before us yet, though a long way farther back. What has space or time to do with being? Can distance destroy fact? What if one day the chain of gravity were to break, and, starting from the edge of the pine wood, we fared or flew farther and farther towards the bars of gold and rose and green! And what if even then we found them recede and recede as we advanced, until heart was gone out of us, and we could follow no longer, but, sitting down on some wayside cloud, fell a thinking! Should we not say—Justly are we punished, and our punishment was to follow the vain thing we took for heaven-gate! Heaven-gate is too grand a goal to be reached foot or wing. High above us, it yet opens inside us; and when it opens, down comes the gate of amber and rose, and we step through both, at once!"