The Seal(135)

Do you understand what you have seen?

‘Life is regenerate, renewed, washed and pure. The two are united and the third is sealed within me.’

The world was swept up then, blown down like pollen in a sky all blue and bronze and coloured with frost, and he was thrown over the summits of ecstasy and returned to the chapel. He took a moment to recover. It seemed to him that between one heart’s pause and the next he had dreamt of the old woman of Puivert.

Now the memory of the present returned. His head moved in circles. He contrived to summon his wits to attention and his tortured body to its duty, but it took a great effort to close the hinged lid and take up the dagger into his hand. At each moment he despaired that he must soon pass out of life. He laid the ringed finger away from the others over the stone floor and, leaning over it, made a lift of the dagger once again. It paused in the air a moment, waiting for the command . . .

Cut!

He bore it down. It sliced through and the ring came away and lay useless in the shadows. There was a gush of blood and a deep heat travelled from his abused hand to his head. Pain, full of intensity, clawed at his throat.

Soon he would sink into the black.

He took the ring and dragged himself to the wall behind the altar, where he had seen a natural hole in the stone. He put the seal to its lip, as if it were his soul upon the edge of a parapet. It was a good fit. He made a prayer and pushed the creature in; it fell into the cavity behind.

He laid himself down then and let the pain swell and the darkness overtake him.

Now, once again, the old woman found that she was beyond the underground chapel and sitting outside her shop.

Finally she understood everything.

The sun was slanting from out of that sky and onto the writer, who was looking at her with concern. But St Michael was beyond the avenue of lime trees and he would not be kept waiting.

‘Behold, the pleasant and longed-for spring, it brings back joyfulness,’ the old woman said. ‘Violet flowers fill the meadows, the sun brightens everything, sadness is now at an end – déjà les chagrins se dissipent! ’ She put a hand to the other woman’s cheek. ‘You were right, my Jourdain . . . courage is born of pain.’

Outwards and beyond itself, her spirit saw St Michael raise his sword, and from above, a resounding light full of tender love and warm detachment entered into her spirit’s true humanity and made an imprint of Christ there. It struck life into that inner sun which converts all darkness to light, all evil to goodness. It was a fulfilment of what had begun so long ago, in the dim chamber of the great pyramid lit by a flickering flame, in that icy sarcophagus of stone. It was the sacramental marriage of his soul with the Spirit of God.

But now it was not Isis welcoming her child Horus, with open arms . . . it was the Divine Sophia, mother of all mothers welcoming the old woman’s redeemed soul.

‘Rest,’ she said. ‘You have been on a long journey . . .’