"Yes."
"Wise men saying, 'We have seen His star in the east—' Oh, that's a figure!"
"There is some Reality, or thousands of us would not be hearkening, as we are hearkening.... A new man, a new creature.... It's a consummation devoutly to be desired!"
The heaped corn stood around, the orange globes made constellations on the earth. They were now well up the slope, at their feet Sweet Rocket and the little sliding river. All was reflected, all was veiled, but now and again eyes looked through the veil. Reaching the top of the hill they found there a tall, solitary tree—a black gum—and built around it a bench. It linked in Curtin's mind with the sycamore before the overseer's house.
They sat upon the bench and upon the ring of brown grass that ran around the tree. The view was fair and they rested in silence. It was Anna Darcy who noticed how much silence there was at Sweet Rocket—silence that sang, that caressed. Moments went by, silence held them, fair solitude, sense of one person here alone. Tam moved, coming nearer to Linden. The latter's hand dropped to Tam's head. Anna Darcy heard a low sigh of relief and burden lifted. It came, she thought, from Frances Dane, who sat near her upon the grass. But it might have come from more than Frances, from all.
Stillness and silence deepened. There grew a cathedral sense, a desert, an ocean sense. Into that entered a wealth of light and strength. A vast wave of freedom, an access of life, lifted them. They had life and they had it more abundantly. They seemed to themselves to flash together, and of them all was made a god. For an instant there held an intense vision of this valley and of Sweet Rocket transfigured. Color and sound lived, every movement was of joy. That broke away, vanished like the image of a rose into the image of a garden of ten thousand. Then that was gone into an image of all the earth, and then that into intense, sheer, mighty Living, with small regard to old space and time, abounding, keen, a Reality leaving old reality behind.
"When it is all done, when it is all known, all felt, when we are fully, completely ourself, when we remember our Godhood and live it, when we do not look through storm for the lighthouse ray because we are Light, when we do not cry Father and Son because we are both and know it, when there is glory of home, glory of health, glory of love—"
Who had spoken they did not know; it seemed their common voice. Perhaps it was Linden, but if so he spoke as their common voice. Into it came not only the voice of the seven there, but the voice of old Mr. Morrowcombe and the Carters, and of Mrs. Cliff and Mimy and Zinia and Mancy and the others; not just the voice of Sweet Rocket, but the voice of Alder, and of many an Alder, big and little, the voice of the city and the country, the land and the sea. "To be well! Oh, rise within me, truest Self, with healing in thy wings!"
The great, golden feeling passed, leaving echoes, leaving memory. These folk were separate again where they had been one, but not so separate. In and out hovered that breath of transfiguration, a day of spring in late winter, dying, but with a tongue to tell of a time when it would not die. Where all had been vivid, singing, laughing, now was the wonted gentleness of this valley, a dreaminess shot with gold, taking and giving, but doing it subtly, silently, only now and then bestowing evidence of a vast interpenetrative life, showing like the eyes through the veil of this Indian summer day.