Aderhold thought that he might sink from sleep into stupor and so die painlessly and without words. But in the middle of the night he waked again.
“Gilbert!”
“Yes, I am here.”
“What did you think of all that which Master Clement had to say?... How much was true and how much was false?”
“There was some truth. But much of it was false. It is false because reason and feeling, the mind and the spirit recoil from it. Whatever is, that is not.”
“I never thought it was.... I’ve been called sour and hard and withholding, and maybe I am it all. But I would not make an imperfect creature and then plague it through eternity for its imperfection.... Gilbert—”
“Yes?”
“What would you do?”
Aderhold came and knelt beside the bed, and laid his hands over the cold and shrunken hand of Master Hardwick. “I would trust and hope—and that not less in myself than in that Other that seems to spread around us. I think that ourselves and that Other may turn out to be the same. I would think of myself as continuing, as journeying on, as surely carrying with me, in some fashion, memory of the past, as growing endlessly through endless experience. I would take courage. And if, in my heart, I knew that in this life I had at times—not all the time, but at times—been sour and hard and withholding and fearful, and if I felt in my heart that that made against light and love and wisdom and strength for all—then, as I lay here dying, and as I died, I would put that withholding and fear from me, and step forth toward better things.... There is within you a fountain of love and strength. Trust yourself to your higher self.... Hoist sail and away!”
The night passed, and at dawn Master Hardwick died. Aderhold closed his eyes, straightened his limbs, and smoothed the bed upon which he lay. Going to the window he set the casement wide. The dawn was coming up in stairs and slopes of splendour. The divine freshness, the purity, the high, austere instigation, the beginning again.... The dawn perpetual, never ceasing, the dawn elsewhere when here would be noon, the dawn elsewhere when here would be night—Never, from the first mists upon earth rising to the great sun, had dawn failed, dawn rising from the bath of night and sleep, dawn the new birth, the beginning again, the clean-washed.... Aderhold breathed the divine air, the blended solemnity and sweetness. The light was growing, a thousand beauties were unfolding, and with them laughter and song. The water rippling over the stones came to him with a sound of merriment. The window was clustered around with ivy and a spray nodded, nodded against his hand with an effect of familiarity, a friend tapping to call his attention. From some near-by bush a thrush began to sing—so golden, so clear. “O moving great and small!” said Aderhold; “O thought of all sense and soul, gathered, interfused, and aware of a magic Oneness! O macrocosm that I, the microcosm, will one day lift to and be and know that I am—O sea of all faiths, O temperer of every concept, O eternal permission and tolerance, nurse of growth and artifex of form from form!... These children’s masks which we lift upon a stick and call Thee, crying, Lo, this is God with the fixed face—”