XXXIII
Brandonreturned to Hart’s Ghyll ostensibly as he had left it. Without telling his wife what had happened, he allowed himself to be carried to his room and put to bed. For one thing he was worn out with the strange excitement of the afternoon. The visit to Wellwood had made so great a call on a devitalized nervous system, that he now felt rather feverish and overstrung. But as he sank on his pillows in a reaction of weariness, nature insisted that for a time he should forget.
As he lay trying to reconstruct the amazing experience he had just been through, a vague, delicious sense of mystery flowed through him. But it was for a moment only. He had hardly time to ask himself whether the new life was still in his limbs when sleep stole upon him, and the chain of his thought was broken.
How long his sleep lasted he didn’t know. But it was heavy, dreamless and profound, and he awoke in the pitch darkness of a December night. Almost hisfirst sensation was that something had happened, something which had forever changed the current of his life. What could it be? Before the question was answered, before he could relate himself to the life of the senses, and the mind could gain perception of itself, he grew conscious of a thought half formed. It was full of strange joy, of strange fear. Then he tried to cast his mind back, and in the very act of doing so, he suddenly heard a voice in the room: “If you believe in me rise from your bed and walk.”
Involuntarily he sat up, flung aside the bedclothes, pressed his lifeless feet upon the carpet. An instant he stood swaying, expecting to fall, and then he felt himself sustained by a new power. Foot by foot he groped his way to the window and drew its curtains aside.
The risen moon was shining on the trees of the park. As its cold light flowed into Brandon’s eyes, he was able to assure himself that he was fully awake. He was able to assure himself that a miracle had made him whole, and that his being was rooted now in some subtle but profound alchemy of the soul. For long he stood looking out on the night, while a growing joy pervaded him. Tears of pure happiness, whose shedding was an exquisite physical relief, ran down his cheeks. Again and again his flesh responded to thethrill of a recollected touch; a rapture he had never known coursed through his veins; his bonds were broken; he was borne upon the wings of a new destiny.
Almost delirious with joy he got back into bed, and lay a long hour shivering with excitement. Even now he hardly dared to meet the hard logic of the matter. The events of yesterday besieged him like a fantastic dream. He had risen from his bed, and he had walked at the command of One in whom he had implicitly believed. But at this moment he dare not ask himself to restate that faith in its superhuman aspect.
Long before daylight came, his thoughts had grown so insurgent, that he put out a hand and switched on the light. On a table by his bed was laid the manuscript he had brought from Wellwood. In an ecstasy of growing bewilderment he turned to it now, devouring it greedily, almost with a sense of ravishment.
It was called simply, ‘A Play Without a Name.’ It set forth a “religion of humanity,” in a series of parables crystal-clear to the humblest mind, yet by a superhuman cunning, as it seemed to Brandon, fulfilling the laws which govern the enchanting art of the dramatist. The action had been devised for representation, the words that they might be spoken in the theater. The theme was the power of love, humanand divine, and it was illustrated by vivid, moving, beautiful pictures.
Daylight found Brandon still pondering this wonderful play. He was now in the thrall of an all-absorbing event. A few hours back he had passed through a miraculous experience, and the problem now was to relate it to the known facts of organic life. The difficulties of the situation were foreshadowed as soon as the nurse came into the room.
“Who has drawn back the curtains?” she demanded at once, in a tone of stern surprise.
Brandon, in spite of his excitement, was able to affect a torpid indifference to the question.
“I could have taken an oath,” said the nurse, “that when I left you last night the curtains were pulled across the window as usual!”