English literature -- Scottish authors; Scottish literature
The door closed. The Will was alone. For a few moments he stood, smiling
scornfully. With a sudden despairing gesture he ran to the door, flung
it open, and peered into the darkness.
He could see no one; could hear no steps. His long beseeching cry was
drowned among these solitudes. Slowly he re-closed the door; slowly
walked across the stone flags; and with folded arms stood looking upon
the altar, dyed crimson with the glow from the great lamp which hung
midway in the nave.
There was a choir-stall to the right. Here he sat, for a time glad
merely to be at rest.
Soon all desire of sleep went from him, and he began to dream. At this
he smiled: it was so brief a while ago since he had said he would dream
no more.
Away now from his two lifelong comrades, and yet subtly connected with
them, and living by and through each, he felt a new loneliness. Life
could be very terrible. Life ... the word startled him. What life could
there be for him if the Body perished? That was why he had cried out in
anguish after his comrade had left, with that ominous word "farewell."
True, now he lived, breathed, thought, as before: but this, he knew, was
by some inexplicable miracle of personality, by which the three who had
been one were each enabled to go forth, fulfilling, and in all ways
ruled and abiding by, the natural law. If the Body should die, would he
not then become as a breath in frost? If the Soul ... ah! he wondered
what then would happen.
"When I was with the Body," he muttered, "I was weary of dreams, or
longed only for those dreams which could be fulfilled in action. But now
... now it is different. I am alone. I must follow my own law. But what
... how ... where ... am I to choose? All the world is a wilderness with
a heart of living light. The side we see is Life: the side we do not see
we call Hope. All ways--a thousand myriad ways--lead to it. Which shall
I choose? How shall I go?"
Then I began to dream ... I ... we ... then the Will began to dream.
Slowly the Forest Chapel filled with a vast throng, ever growing more
dense as it became more multitudinous, till it seemed as though the
walls fell away and that the aisles reached interminably into the world
of shadow, through the present into the past, and to dim ages.
Behind the altar stood a living Spirit, most wonderful, clothed with
Beauty and Terror.
Then the Will saw, understood, that this was not the Christ, nor yet the
Holy Spirit, but a Dominion. It was the Spirit of this world, one of the
Powers and Dominions whom of old men called the gods. But all in that
incalculable throng worshipped this Spirit as the Supreme God. He saw,
too, or realised, that, to those who worshipped, this Spirit appeared
differently, now as a calm and august dreamer, now as an inspired
warrior, now as a man wearing a crown of thorns against the shadow of a
gigantic cross: as the Son of God, or the Prophet of God, or in manifold
ways the Supreme One, from Jehovah to the savage Fetich.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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