And, as he gazed entranced at this gorgeous spectacle, suddenly he grew conscious that he was not alone. Turning, he became aware of the figure of a woman kneeling on the ground hard by, with her head bowed in an attitude suggestive of sorrowful abandon. Her form, though the face was turned from him and partly shrouded by her huge masses of dark, disordered hair, seemed vaguely familiar; and he found himself engaged in idle speculation as to her identity. Something in her posture of dejection instinctively stirred in him a fleeting memory of Thomas Moore’s beautiful poem. “Paradise and the Peri,” the poor Peri humbly, yet vainly, craving admission into Paradise. Vaguely and disconnectedly, some of the lines wandered into his mind:
One morn a Peri at the gate
Of Eden stood, disconsolate;
The glorious Angel who was keeping
The Gates of Light beheld her weeping;
Awhile he contemplated the woman with a great pity in his heart, and was about to draw nigh and comfort her when all at once his impulse was checked and he remained spellbound in mute amazement.
For, seemingly from nowhere, a transcendentally glorious voice—that sounded not of this earth—suddenly arose in the stillness around them. Pure, peaceful, unutterably sweet, far beyond this world and its works, the golden notes floated forth into the hush of the opal dawn, uplifting the hearts of the listeners on the wings of sound—verily to Heaven’s gate:
“O Rest in the Lord! wait patiently for Him!
And He shall give thee—He shall give thee—
O He shall give thee thy heart’s desire!”
The eternal solace of the weary and heavy-laden, the Divine appeal to all poor struggling souls rose and fell, finally melting away into nothingness, save where the deep, cloister-like silence flung back a faint far echo. Beside the bowed female figure there became visible a vague shimmering something which, almost imperceptibly, began to assume the outlines of a human form. Disturbed strangely at what he knew not, the wayward, reckless soul of Ellis Benton became filled with a great and reverential awe.
He sank to his knees and bowed his head. When, fearfully, he dared to raise it again, his eyes beheld one clad in shining raiment, about whom there clung a halo of radiance. Slowly the glistening form turned and a cry of wonderment and adoration burst from his lips. For, lo!—it seemed to him that once more he looked upon the face of his long-dead love—Eileen Regan.
Motionless, she gazed down upon him long and earnestly, with gravely sweet, kind eyes; then, stooping low, she embraced the sorrowing woman tenderly, and kissed her on the brow, bidding her be of good cheer and calling her “Sister.” Presently, drawing herself erect, she uplifted her heavenly voice again, and there rang forth—as he well remembered her singing it in life, one never-to-be-forgotten Christmas morn, in that little Catholic Church in far-off Johannesburg—“In Excelsis Gloria”:
“Glory to God in the Highest!
And on earth peace, goodwill towards men!”
She bent and kissed the woman a last farewell. Then, raising her arms in holy benediction, she slowly became a shade, as before, unfolding her wings and floating away diaphonously into the silvery mists of the early morn.