Julie frowned slightly. “What I want to know is why I am rolling always to disaster; why I can’t call a halt—why I can’t see clearly?”
“Do you know how hopeless I was—Dick and I, drowning together, in this oriental maelstrom? We expected to finish in one of the hells of the East. We knew that time was fast overtaking us. And there would come to me, when I awoke sober in the night with the whole universe clutching at my throat, the terror of those black pits.
“Many people tried to help us. I recall their futile efforts wafting across our heedless lives. Then there came across our path the Little Gray Woman, as we call her. I don’t know what she was doing away over here. She said she was just a joyous old traveler of the world. She was not actually different from anyone else, you must understand, but she found us blind things in her path calling out from the highways for sight. It would be difficult to make you understand just how she came to help us break the bondage of our flesh.”
Mrs. Ashby paused thoughtfully, then went on. “You remember how, in divine contempt, He picked up clay and, mixing it with spittle, laid the bandage of the earth across the eyes of those who all their lives had understood in terms of clay—and tearing it away, revealed to them the miracle of sight. So it came to us. We were summoned, poor Lazaruses, from our tombs, into the day.”
Mrs. Ashby lowered her head. “This is a strange language to you, and these are not revelations for a laughing world, but for those who are going out in darkness—for men stricken in agony on the battlefield, for all who like you are in the throes of terror and destruction. These truths are the springs outside your reach across the thirsty desert.
“When you come at last upon the light, the grave-clothes the mind has worn so long drop away; the false garment man has spread across the face of things dissolves, and you find that you are not in the world for a day, but that you are in the universe forever.
“Oh! If you only knew it, you could walk free through the earth, fearing nothing. When I found that I was not thonged by crucified feet to an inexorable world, that the world was only a snowdrop on the face of the eternal, a mood of the universe; and that I was greater than all of it, could shape it with my will, touch the widest reaches with my thought—that of all creation, God and my kind alone could will—then the light of Paul broke!
“The light of Paul, Julie! A golden light, beating on the soul, revealing its far country, the kingdoms of the unseen whose invisible marvels can be brought to our own threshold.
“It was in the knowledge that it was not death he was facing, but a new direction in God’s areas, that Father Hull passed out.”
“Why did he die?” the girl asked abruptly. “I felt queerly to blame for being so weak that I couldn’t do anything. Doctors have told me that they have had the same feeling, even when they have exerted themselves to the utmost.”