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His wings were infinite, his youth eternal; the sun was a jewel on his finger as he passed it in benediction over the world. Creation, no longer monotonous, acclaimed him, in widening melody, in brighter radiances. Was Love a column of fire? Was he a torrent of song? Was he greater than either the touch of a man on a woman? It was the merest accident that Rickie had not been disgusted.
Bodies were young trees in bloom, and trees were lines of human loveliness. The body of the man, the body of the woman, beautiful male and female bodies, the ideal forms of everyone and everything he encountered, he understood and made his own. They were all living radiances against the dropped curtain of the world. He loved the light on flesh, and the shadows on strong arms, legs, and breasts.
Where there was no ice, the rolling sea was of an intense ultramarine blue, reflecting the colour of the distant sky; while, as the sun came up higher, different tints were displayed by the icebergs, whose shape was as various as their sizes bergs that in their gorgeous architecture and fairy magnificence, with fantastic peaks and airy pinnacles, which glittered now in the full light of day with all the varied colours of the rainbow, flashing out scintillations and radiances of violet and iris, purple and turquoise, and sapphire blue, emerald green and orange, blush rose and pink and red all mingled with soft shades of crimson and carmine, and interspersed with gleams of gold and silver and a frosting over all of bright white light.
They could never bring him to the surface. He seemed floating languidly in a sea of dreamy vision. Colors and radiances surrounded him and bathed him and pervaded him. What was that? It seemed a lighthouse; but it was inside his brain a flashing, bright white light. It flashed swifter and swifter.
But we do not know him with the least certainty, the least approach even to a guess, such buzzards and dullards and poor children of the Dusk are we, in spite of our Statistics, Unshackled Presses, and Torches of Knowledge; not eagles soaring sunward, not brothers of the lightnings and the radiances we; a dim horn-eyed, owl-population, intent mainly on the catching of mice!
To call him deficient in sympathy would seem strange, him whose radiances and resonances went thrilling over all the world, and kept him in brotherly contact with all: but I may say his sympathies dwelt rather with the high and sublime than with the low or ludicrous; and were, in any field, rather light, wide and lively, than deep, abiding or great.
"I think he is waiting for me there in that gloomy cave of his, and some time or other he will get me." Reeves smiled at the gloomy fancy, and Helen smiled back at him with one of her sudden radiances. The tide was creeping swiftly up over the white sands. The sun was low and the bay was swimming in a pale blue glory.
He had a vague idea that heaven would be something like that tenderly soft and beautiful, and glowing with radiances of unearthly splendour, which whispered to weary hearts of the peace and joy that lay beyond, and gently called them home to rest.
One or two of the radiances glanced at him with inviting eyes, but no, he dared not face it. He grew gloomy, gloomier. He thought angrily: "All this is not for me. I'm a middle-aged fool, and I've known it all along." Life lost its savour and became repugnant. Fatigue punished him, and simultaneously reduced two hundred and fifty thousand pounds to the value of about fourpence.
Without going deeply into questions which are only indirectly connected with the subject of this book, we will simply say this: It would have been well if Monseigneur Bienvenu had not been a Royalist, and if his glance had never been, for a single instant, turned away from that serene contemplation in which is distinctly discernible, above the fictions and the hatreds of this world, above the stormy vicissitudes of human things, the beaming of those three pure radiances, truth, justice, and charity.
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