I found myself on my knees on the tiles, with my hands clasped. I forgot Langler--I forgot my love, his sister--and all things else. From the bowed knot of men and women in front of me came groan on groan.
Yet it was faintly seen, and though I raised my head, and forced my eyes to search the divine horror, the light was most dim, and the revelation seemed rather the spectre of a thing than the thing itself. Only, each detail was perfect, and it was the crudeness of these details which proved its reality to the mind with proof a hundred times sure. The haggard crucifixions of Dürer and Spagnoletto--all the _macabre_ dreams of a painter, graver, sculptor, heaped into one massacre of flesh and of grinning bone--would seem like a child's fancy in comparison with that fact. Still in my dreams I see the sideward hang of that under-lip, and that hollow between ribs and hips drawn out into shocking length, and the irregular drip from the hands, the left of which had been ripped to the finger-roots, and the crown of sorrow, and the dead drop of that tragic brow, it cannot be told....
Perhaps I alone examined details; the rest knelt bowed down; only Dr Burton, with his neck stretched back, stared as if in vision straight upward upon heaven. In myself I felt a kind of rapture, and also of peace; and the words which I murmured to myself were these: "at last."
All at once, without ascent, descent, or movement, the image vanished.
But still for a longish time no stir nor sound, save some hushed sob, was to be heard echoing through the building.
At last! after the dumb centuries, a sign from the skies, a flag from God; and I thought to myself: "long have been those years in which so many generations of men have wept in the face of the sphinx, craving but one sure word from the callous vault for a morsel of manna to their hunger, and now the old silence is over"; and I remember hugging myself, thinking: "it was true, then! it was not a fancy of man's infancy! it was all quite true."
Through the church the sobs of duchess and ploughman, of server and acolyte, began to sound in growing volume; I saw Dr Burton lift himself and escape into the sacristy; the others mingled the sounds of their awe, till the echoes became one murmur in the vault. As for me, the burden of my thought was this: "at last...."