The material things about him—walls, staircase, even the lamp-globes—were shadowy and unreal in the midst of these mystically glowing conceptions.
The sense of perfect health came to him—a steady, rhythmic radiation; not a tired, weak fibre, but a singing vitality of every tissue, as if it were cushioned in some life-giving fluid—a pure perfumed bloom of health.
Bedient turned upon the stair. He wanted no man-made room, but the night and the hills and the skies…. Bare of head he went forth.
THIRTY-FOURTH CHAPTER
THE SUPREME ADVENTURE
The night was full of sounds, sights, odors, textures—that he had never sensed before. He smelled the wild oranges from the hillsides, and the raw coffee that lay drying on the great cane mats before the native cabins. His limbs seemed lifted over the rocky ways; he loved the dim contours in the starlight, and the breath of the sea that came with the night-wind. The stars said, "Welcome," and the hills, "All is well."
Mother Earth was lying out in more than starlight—but not asleep. She was laughing, wise, sweet in eternal youth. Always she had been dear to him, this Flesh Mother. Her storms and terrors she had shown, but never harmed him. He loved her, sea and mountain and plain—God-Mother and the Kashmir border—the highway ride with the lustrous lady and its sunshine—the path through the wood…. What a boy and girl they had been! How he had loved her—and the day—how he had suffered for it!
And now Bedient knelt upon the stones, uplifted his hands to the starlight, and cried in a low voice: "God bless Beth Truba, and help me to bless her at every turning of her life! God bless Beth Truba for the sensitizing sorrow she gave me, without which this hour could not have been revealed to me!"
… He seemed to be leaping from crest to crest in an ocean of happiness…. Some glorious magnetic Presence strode beside him. The night quivered with mighty energies—strange brightenings flashed before his eyes. He wanted nothing—but to give…. All was clear to him. Immortality was here and now: This life but a hut upon the headland of interminable continents, yet as much a part of immortality, as the life of the star-clothed Master who blinded Saul on the road to Damascus.
What a symphony—the flower, the star, the drop of rain, the rose, the child, the harvest, the voice of love, the soul of Woman,—all from the Luminary, God,—all His immortal symphony.