Brother Robinson likewise, with Zinia, rose to say good night. "I'll see you in the morning," said Richard. "I want to talk to you about the school."
That night Curtin, also, increased his sense of life, life that included those that were said to be dead. There had been no repetition of the hour when, lying in the room where now slept Robert and Frances Dane, he had touched with an inward sense that brother who had fallen from the aeroplane, who had been jostled out of the body, but who lived! Surely the life was not quite that of the old life, though surely built from that; certainly Curtin might not fully understand until he, too, slipped the body. Yet there was life and living. He had not experienced that hour again, and he had tried doubting if he had ever experienced it. But doubt did not prove to be a going proposition. Memory smiled it down. Yet the experience had not been repeated, or rather what had come had diffused itself in the wide awakening of these Sweet Rocket weeks. Nor did its distinctive klang return to-night. There was not the same white keenness. That which beamed about him now was more like that which Marget had spoken of on the summerhouse steps. Not one now, but many of his dead; not the human only, but the flower and the tree, the bird and the beast, the scene, the water, land and sky. "The old and sweet is here, but chosen, redeemed, gathered up, understood, become immortal! And we have had it all the time. It has been here all the time! Just as we had electricity and did not know it."
He fell asleep, rocked by the waves of a sunny sea of love and home and kindred.
XIX
Major Linden spent two days at Sweet Rocket, chiefly sitting upon the porch in the sunshine or walking about the place, sometimes in company, sometimes alone, but never, Curtin noticed, with an old man's look of loneliness, though he thought that at times before this Major Hereward would have shown that loneliness. But now there was vigor in him, vigor and interest and life. "If they are here, living for me as I for them, talking to me and I talking to them—it is the strangest thing what life does when it comes!" His laughter had a clear and happy ring. "I had thought of all kinds of solutions! And here it is, the needle threaded, while I was still looking for it in the haystack!" He stood beneath the oak he had planted almost sixty years ago. "Phil is here. Trying, wasn't it, Phil, when I said, 'Oh, fancy!' or, 'It's just Wilmot Hereward talking to himself!'"
When he met Linden on the porch he said: "Richard, if it's so with those folk whom we so promptly insisted hadn't any reality in them, isn't it so all over? When I'm pondering Bob who's in England, or when I'm thinking of nothing in particular and in he walks into mind and affection—"
"Yes. It is part of the same truth. It all rests on the oneness of Being. That is why you must in some wise grasp that Oneness first. A time will come where there will be no saying 'My brother Dick,' or 'Bob in England,' because they and Wilmot Hereward and all others will have advanced beyond all such divisions. But on the road there you will meet many a fair power!"
The old man went the next morning back to Oakwood in his battered car. He went alone and not alone, with a peaceful face.