“And I saw the harpers harping with their harps,” he repeated to himself—and then fell into silence. “Johnny, look at the opal in the sky now.”
It was very soft and beautiful.
“And there’s the evening star.”
I turned my head. Yes, there it was, and it trembled in the sky like a point of liquid silver.
“Sometimes I think I shall see the Holy City before I die,” he continued. “See its picture as in a mirror—the New Jerusalem. Oh, Johnny, I should have to shade my eyes. Not a beautiful colour or shade but will be there; and her light like unto a jasper stone, clear as crystal. When I was a little boy—four, perhaps—papa brought me home a kaleidoscope from London. It was really a good one, and its bits of glass were unusually brilliant. Johnny, if I lived to be an old man, I could never describe the intense joy those colours gave me—any more than I can describe the joy I seemed to feel the other night in that dream of heaven.”
He was saying all this in a tender tone of reverence that thrilled through one.
“I remember another thing about colours. The year that papa was pricked for High Sheriff, mamma went over with him to Worcester for the March Assize-time, and she took me. I was seven, I think. On the Sunday morning we went with the crowd to service in the cathedral. It was all very grand and imposing to my young mind. The crashing organ, the long procession of white-robed clergy and college boys, the two majestic beings in scarlet gowns, their trains held up by gentlemen, and the wigs that frightened me! I had been told I was going to college to see the judge. In my astonished mind I don’t think I knew which was judge and which was organ. Papa was in attendance on the judges; the only one who seemed to be in plain clothes in the procession. An impression remained on me that he had a white wand in his hand; but I suppose I was wrong. Attending papa, walked his black-robed chaplain who was to preach; looking like a crow amongst gay-plumaged birds. And, lining the way all along the body of the cathedral from the north entrance to the gates of the choir, were papa’s livery men with their glittering javelins. You’ve seen it all, Johnny, and know what the show is to a child such as I was. But now, will you believe that it was all as nothing to me, compared with the sight of the many-coloured, beautiful east window?[4] I sat in full view of it. We had gone in rather late, and so were only part of the throng. Mamma with me in her hand—I remember I wore purple velvet, Johnny—was stepping into the choir after the judges and clergy had taken their places, when one of the black-gowned beadsmen would have rudely shut the gates upon her. Upon that, a verger pushed out his silver mace to stop him. ‘Hist,’ says he, ‘it’s the High Sheriff’s lady—my Lady Whitney;’ and the beadsman bowed and let us pass. We were put into the pew under the sub-dean’s stall. It was Winnington-Ingram, I think, who was sub-dean then, but I am not sure. Whoever it was did not sit in the sub-dean’s stall, but in the next to it, for he had given that up, as was customary, to one of the judges. With the great wig flowing down right upon my head, as it seemed, and the sub-dean’s trencher sticking over the cushion close to it, I was in a state of bewilderment; and they were some way through the Litany—the cathedral service at Worcester began with the Litany then, you remember, as they had early morning prayers—before I ventured to look up at all. As I did so, the colours of the distant east window flashed upon my dazzled sight. Not dazzled with the light, Johnny, though it was a sunny day, but with the charm of the colours. What it was to me in that moment I could never describe. That window has been abused enough by people who call themselves connoisseurs in art; but I know that to me it seemed as the very incarnation of celestial beauty. What with the organ, and the chanting, and the show that had gone before, and now this sight to illuminate it, I seemed to be in Paradise. I sat entranced; unable to take my fascinated eyes from the window: the pew faces it, you know; and were I to live for ever, I can never forget that day, or what it was to me. This will show you what colours have been to me here, Johnny. What, then, will they be to me in heaven?”
“How well you remember things!”
“I always did—things that make an impression on me,” he answered. “A quiet, thoughtful child does so. You were thoughtful yourself.”
True. Or I don’t suppose I could have written these papers. The light in the sky faded out as we sat in silence. John recurred to his dream.