“Surely! A man so howly in his life—him what——”
Dead! So suddenly! Will stood still. This altered many things. The winged image of the Gaffer faded before the picture of a lonely Jinny. “When did he die?”
“You know that better than me,” said Caleb meekly.
At this the thought that his “epistle” had over-excited the patriarch and stilled that aged heart, shot up, agitating the young man. That was why relief mingled with a vague disappointment when Caleb went on: “They lions couldn’t kill him, but Oi reckon he had to die some time. But many of them what sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, he tells us, and maybe”—he added with a flash—“they’ll wake up in that golden city.”
Will grunted a vague “Maybe.”
“Touching that there city,” said Caleb, “the gold of the street thereof will be transparent.”
“I know,” murmured Will, suppressing a yawn.
He knew! And the contradiction did not strike him! Instantly, as by another flash, the text solved itself in the old man’s mind—gold in those millennial days, while it retained its sacred splendour would also lose its gross opaqueness, becoming rarefied, disembodied, spiritualized, so that gold was as brass since both were like glass, making thus a harmony of light with the jasper wall, clear as crystal, and the twelve giant pearls of the gates.
“It’ll be a pritty sight!” he mused aloud.
“Yes, like the Crystal Palace,” sneered Will.