II.
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February 23d.
Who originated that most exquisite of inquisitions,
the condolence system?
A solid blow has in itself the elements of its
rebound; it arouses the antagonism of the life
on which it falls; its relief is the relief of a
combat.
But a hundred little needles pricking at us, —
what is to be done with them? The hands
hang down, the nerves are feeble. We cannot
so much as gasp, because they are little needles.
I know that there are those who like these
calls; but why, in the name of all sweet pity,
must we endure them without respect of persons,
as we would endure a wedding reception
or make a party-call?
Perhaps I write excitedly and hardly. I feel
excited and hard.
I am sure I do not mean to be ungrateful
for real sorrowful sympathy, however
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imperfectly it may be shown, or that near friends (if
one has them), cannot give, in such a time as
this, actual strength, even if they fail of comfort,
by look and tone and love. But it is not
near friends who are apt to wound, nor real
sympathy which sharpens the worst of the
needles. It is the fact that all your chance
acquaintances feel called upon to bring their
curious eyes and jarring words right into the
silence of your first astonishment; taking you
in a round of morning calls with kid gloves
and parasol, and the liberty to turn your heart
about and cut into it at pleasure. You may
quiver at every touch, but there is no escape,
because it is “the thing.”
For instance: Meta Tripp came in this
afternoon, — I have refused myself to everybody
but Mrs. Bland, before, but Meta caught
me in the parlor, and there was no escape.
She had come, it was plain enough, because
she must, and she had come early, because, she
too having lost a brother in the war, she
was expected to be very sorry for me. Very
likely she was, and very likely she did the best
she knew how, but she was — not as uncomfortable
as I, but as uncomfortable as she could
be, and was evidently glad when it was over.
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She observed, as she went out, that I should n't
feel so sad by and by. She felt very sad at
first when Jack died, but everybody got over
that after a time. The girls were going to sew
for the Fair next week at Mr. Quirk's, and she
hoped I would exert myself and come.
Ah, well: —
“First learn to love one living man,
Then mayst thou think upon the dead.”
It is not that the child is to be blamed for
not knowing enough to stay away; but her
coming here has made me wonder whether I
am different from other women; why Roy
was so much more to me than many brothers
are to many sisters. I think it must be that
there never was another like Roy. Then we
have lived together so long, we two alone, since
father died, that he had grown to me, heart
of my heart, and life of my life. It did not
seem as if he could be taken, and I be left.
Besides, I suppose most young women of my
age have their dreams, and a future probable
or possible, which makes the very incompleteness
of life sweet, because of the symmetry
which is wanting somewhere. But that was
settled so long ago for me that it makes it very
different. Roy was all there was.
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February 26th.
Death and Heaven could not seem very different
to a Pagan from what they seem to me.
I say this deliberately. It has been deliberately
forced upon me. That of which I had
a faint consciousness in the first shock takes
shape now. I do not see how one with such
thoughts in her heart as I have had can possibly
be “regenerate,” or stand any chance of
ever becoming “one of the redeemed.” And
here I am, what I have been for six years, a
member of an Evangelical church, in good and
regular standing!
The bare, blank sense of physical repulsion
from death, which was all the idea I had of
anything when they first brought him home,
has not gone yet. It is horrible. It was
cruel. Roy, all I had in the wide world, —
Roy, with the flash in his eyes, with his smile
that lighted the house all up; with his pretty,
soft hair that I used to curl and kiss about my
finger, his bounding step, his strong arms that
folded me in and cared for me, — Roy snatched
away in an instant by a dreadful God, and laid
out there in the wet and snow, — in the hideous
wet and snow, — never to kiss him, never to
see him any more! * * * *
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He was a good boy. Roy was a good boy.
He must have gone to Heaven. But I know
nothing about Heaven. It is very far off. In
my best and happiest days, I never liked to
think of it. If I were to go there, it could do
me no good, for I should not see Roy. Or if
by chance I should see him standing up among
the grand, white angels, he would not be the
old dear Roy. I should grow so tired of singing!
Should long and fret for one little talk,—
for I never said good by, and —
I will stop this.
A scrap from the German of Bürger, which
I came across to-day, shall be copied here.
“Be calm, my child, forget thy woe,
And think of God and Heaven;
Christ thy Redeemer hath to thee
Himself for comfort given.
“O mother, mother, what is Heaven?
O mother, what is Hell?
To be with Wilhelm, — that 's my Heaven;
Without him, — that 's my Hell.”
February 27th.
Miss Meta Tripp, in the ignorance of her
little silly heart, has done me a great mischief.
Phœbe prepared me for it, by observing,
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when she came up yesterday to dust my room,
that “folks was all sayin' that Mary Cabot” —
(Homer is not an aristocratic town, and Phœbe
doffs and dons my title at her own sweet
will) — “that Mary Cabot was dreadful low
sence Royal died, and had n't ought to stay
shut up by herself, day in and day out. It
was behaving con-trary to the will of Providence,
and very bad for her health, too.” Moreover,
Mrs. Bland, who called this morning with
her three babies, — she never is able to stir
out of the house without those children, poor
thing! — lingered awkwardly on the door-steps
as she went away, and hoped that Mary my
dear would n't take it unkindly, but she did
wish that I would exert myself more to see my
friends and receive comfort in my affliction.
She did n't want to interfere, or bother me,
or — but — people would talk, and —
My good little minister's wife broke down
all in a blush, at this point in her “porochial
duties” (I more than suspect that her husband
had a hand in the matter), so I took pity on
her embarrassment, and said smiling that I
would think about it.
I see just how the leaven has spread. Miss
Meta, a little overwhelmed and a good deal
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mystified by her call here, pronounces “poor
Mary Cabot so sad; she would n't talk about
Royal; and you could n't persuade her to come
to the Fair; and she was so sober! — why, it
was dreadful!”
Therefore, Homer has made up its mind
that I shall become resigned in an arithmetical
manner, and comforted according to the
Rule of Three.
I wish I could go away! I wish I could go
away and creep into the ground and die! If
nobody need ever speak any more words to
me! If anybody only knew what to say!
Little Mrs. Bland has been very kind, and I
thank her with all my heart. But she does
not know. She does not understand. Her
happy heart is bound up in her little live
children. She never laid anybody away under
the snow without a chance to say good by.
As for the minister, he came, of course, as it
was proper that he should, before the funeral,
and once after. He is a very good man, but I
am afraid of him, and I am glad that he has
not come again.
Night.
I can only repeat and re-echo what I wrote
this noon. If anybody knew what to say!
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Just after supper I heard the door-bell, and,
looking out of the window, I caught a glimpse
of Deacon Quirk's old drab felt hat, on the
upper step. My heart sank, but there was no
help for me. I waited for Phœbe to bring up
his name, desperately listening to her heavy
steps, and letting her knock three times before
I answered. I confess to having taken my
hair down twice, washed my hands to a most
unnecessary extent, and been a long time
brushing my dress; also to forgetting my
handkerchief, and having to go back for it
after I was down stairs. Deacon Quirk looked
tired of waiting. I hope he was.
O, what an ill-natured thing to say! What
is coming over me? What would Roy think?
What could he?
“Good evening, Mary,” said the Deacon,
severely, when I went in. Probably he did not
mean to speak severely, but the truth is, I
think he was a little vexed that I had kept him
waiting. I said good evening, and apologized
for my delay, and sat down as far from him as
I conveniently could. There was an awful
silence.
“I came in this evening,” said the Deacon,
breaking it with a cough, “I came — hem! —
to confer with you —”
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I looked up. “I thought somebody had
ought to come,” continued the Deacon, “to
confer with you as a Christian brother on
your spiritooal condition.”
I opened my eyes.
“To confer with you on your spiritooal condition,”
repeated my visitor. “I understand
that you have had some unfortoonate exercises
of mind under your affliction, and I observed
that you absented yourself from the
Communion Table last Sunday.”
“I did.”
“Intentionally?”
“Intentionally.”
He seemed to expect me to say something
more; and, seeing that there was no help for
it, I answered.
“I did not feel fit to go. I should not have
dared to go. God does not seem to me just
now what He used to. He has dealt very bitterly
with me. But, however wicked I may be,
I will not mock Him. I think, Deacon Quirk,
that I did right to stay away.”
“Well,” said the Deacon, twirling his hat
with a puzzled look, “perhaps you did. But
I don't see the excuse for any such feelings as
would make it necessary. I think it my duty
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to tell you, Mary, that I am sorry to see you in
such a rebellious state of mind.”
I made no reply.
“Afflictions come from God,” he observed,
looking at me as impressively as if he supposed
that I had never heard the statement before.
“Afflictions come from God, and, however
afflictin' or however crushin' they may be,
it is our duty to submit to them. Glory in
triboolation, St. Paul says; glory in triboolation.”
I continued silent.
“I sympathize with you in this sad dispensation,”
he proceeded. “Of course you was
very fond of Royal; it 's natural you should
be, quite natural —” He stopped, perplexed, I
suppose, by something in my face. “Yes, it 's
very natural; poor human nature sets a great
deal by earthly props and affections. But it 's
your duty, as a Christian and a church-member,
to be resigned.”
I tapped the floor with my foot. I began
to think that I could not bear much more.
“To be resigned, my dear young friend.
To say `Abba, Father,' and pray that the will
of the Lord be done.”
“Deacon Quirk!” said I, “I am not
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resigned. I pray the dear Lord with all my
heart to make me so, but I will not say that I
am, until I am, — if ever that time comes. As
for those words about the Lord's will, I would
no more take them on my lips than I would
blasphemy, unless I could speak them honestly, —
and that I cannot do. We had better
talk of something else now, had we not?”
Deacon Quirk looked at me. It struck me
that he would look very much so at a Mormon
or a Hottentot, and I wondered whether he
were going to excommunicate me on the spot.
As soon as he began to speak, however, I
saw that he was only bewildered, — honestly
bewildered, and honestly shocked: I do not
doubt that I had said bewildering and shocking
things.
“My friend,” he said solemnly, “I shall
pray for you and leave you in the hands of
God. Your brother, whom He has removed
from this earthly life for His own wise —”
“We will not talk any more about Roy, if
you please,” I interrupted; “he is happy and
safe.”
“Hem! — I hope so,” he replied, moving
uneasily in his chair; “I believe he never
made a profession of religion, but there is no
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limit to the mercy of God. It is very unsafe
for the young to think that they can rely on a
death-bed repentance, but our God is a covenant-keeping
God, and Royal's mother was a
pious woman. If you cannot say with certainty
that he is numbered among the redeemed,
you are justified, perhaps, in hoping so.”
I turned sharply on him, but words died on
my lips. How could I tell the man of that
short, dear letter that came to me in December, —
that Roy's was no death-bed repentance,
but the quiet, natural growth of a life that had
always been the life of the pure in heart; of
his manly beliefs and unselfish motives; of
that dawning sense of friendship with Christ
of which he used to speak so modestly, dreading
lest he should not be honest with himself?
“Perhaps I ought not to call myself a Christian,”
he wrote, — I learned the words by
heart, — “and I shall make no profession to
be such, till I am sure of it, but my life has
not seemed to me for a long time to be my
own. `Bought with a price' just expresses it.
I can point to no time at which I was conscious
by any revolution of feeling of `experiencing
a change of heart,' but it seems to
me that a man's heart might be changed for
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[figure description] Page 018.[end figure description]
all that. I do not know that it is necessary
for us to be able to watch every footprint of
God. The way is all that concerns us, — to see
that we follow it and Him. This I am sure
of; and knocking about in this army life only
convinces me of what I felt in a certain way
before, — that it is the only way, and He the
only guide to follow.”
But how could I say anything of this to
Deacon Quirk? — this my sealed and sacred
treasure, of all that Roy left me the dearest.
At any rate I did not. It seemed both obstinate
and cruel in him to come there and say
what he had been saying. He might have
known that I would not say that Roy had gone
to Heaven, if — why, if there had been the
breath of a doubt. It is a possibility of which
I cannot rationally conceive, but I suppose that
his name would never have passed my lips.
So I turned away from Deacon Quirk, and
shut my mouth, and waited for him to finish.
Whether the idea began to struggle into his
mind that he might not have been making a
very comforting remark, I cannot say; but he
started very soon to go.
“Supposing you are right, and Royal was
saved at the eleventh hour,” he said at
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parting, with one of his stolid efforts to be consolatory,
that are worse than his rebukes,
“if he is singing the song of Moses and the
Lamb (he pointed with his big, dingy thumb
at the ceiling), he does n't rebel against the
doings of Providence. All his affections are
subdued to God, — merged, as you might say,—
merged in worshipping before the great
White Throne. He does n't think this miser'ble
earthly spere of any importance, compared
with that eternal and exceeding weight
of glory. In the appropriate words of the
poet, —
`O, not to one created thing
Shall our embrace be given,
But all our joy shall be in God,
For only God is Heaven.'
Those are very spiritooal and scripteral lines,
and it 's very proper to reflect how true they
are.”
I saw him go out, and came up here and
locked myself in, and have been walking round
and round the room. I must have walked a
good while, for I feel as weak as a baby.
Can the man in any state of existence be
made to comprehend that he has been holding
me on the rack this whole evening?
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Yet he came under a strict sense of duty,
and in the kindness of all the heart he has! I
know, or I ought to know, that he is a good
man, — far better in the sight of God to-night,
I do not doubt, than I am.
But it hurts, — it cuts, — that thing which he
said as he went out; because I suppose it must
be true; because it seems to me greater than
I can bear to have it true.
Roy, away in that dreadful Heaven, can have
no thought of me, cannot remember how I
loved him, how he left me all alone. The singing
and the worshipping must take up all his
time. God wants it all. He is a “Jealous
God.” I am nothing any more to Roy.
March 2.
And once I was much, — very much to him!
His Mamie, his poor Queen Mamie, — dearer,
he used to say, than all the world to him, — I
don't see how he can like it so well up there as
to forget her. Though Roy was a very good
boy. But this poor, wicked little Mamie, —
why, I fall to pitying her as if she were some
one else, and wish that some one would cry
over her a little. I can't cry.
Roy used to say a thing, — I have not the
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words, but it was like this, — that one must be
either very young or very ungenerous, if one
could find time to pity one's self.
I have lain for two nights, with my eyes
open all night long. I thought that perhaps
I might see him. I have been praying for a
touch, a sign, only for something to break the
silence into which he has gone. But there is
no answer, none. The light burns blue, and
I see at last that it is morning, and go down
stairs alone, and so the day begins.
Something of Mrs. Browning's has been
keeping a dull mechanical time in my brain
all day.
“God keeps a niche
In Heaven to hold our idols:.... albeit
He brake them to our faces, and denied
That our close kisses should impair their white.”
But why must He take them? And why
should He keep them there? Shall we ever
see them framed in their glorious gloom?
Will He let us touch them them? Or must we
stand like a poor worshipper at a Cathedral,
looking up at his pictured saint afar off upon
the other side?
Has everything stopped just here? Our
talks together in the twilight, our planning
and hoping and dreaming together; our
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walks and rides and laughing; our reading
and singing and loving, — these then are all
gone out forever?
God forgive the words! but Heaven will
never be Heaven to me without them.
March 4.
Perhaps I had better not write any more
here after this.
On looking over the leaves, I see that the
little green book has become an outlet for the
shallower part of pain.
Meta Tripp and Deacon Quirk, gossip and
sympathy that have buzzed into my trouble
and annoyed me like wasps (we are apt to
make more fuss over a wasp-sting than a sabrecut),
just that proportion of suffering which
alone can ever be put into words, — the surface.
I begin to understand what I never understood
till now, — what people mean by the
luxury of grief. No, I am sure that I never
understood it, because my pride suffered as
much as any part of me in that other time.
I would no more have spent two consecutive
hours drifting at the mercy of my thoughts,
than I would have put my hand into the
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furnace fire. The right to mourn makes everything
different. Then, as to mother, I was very
young when she died, and father, though I
loved him, was never to me what Roy has
been.
This luxury of grief, like all luxuries, is
pleasurable. Though, as I was saying, it is
only the shallow part of one's heart — I imagine
that the deepest hearts have their shallows—
which can be filled by it, still it brings
a shallow relief.
Let it be confessed to this honest book, that,
driven to it by desperation, I found in it a
wretched sort of content.
Being a little stronger now physically, I
shall try to be a little braver; it will do no
harm to try. So I seem to see that it was
the content of poison, — salt-water poured
between shipwrecked lips.
At any rate, I mean to put the book away
and lock it up. Roy used to say that he did
not believe in journals. I begin to see why.
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III.
[figure description] Page 024.[end figure description]
March 7.
I have taken out my book, and am going to
write again. But there is an excellent reason.
I have something else than myself to write
about.
This morning Phœbe persuaded me to walk
down to the office, “To keep up my spirits and
get some salt pork.”
She brought my things and put them on me
while I was hesitating; tied my victorine and
buttoned my gloves; warmed my boots, and
fussed about me as if I had been a baby. It
did me good to be taken care of, and I thanked
her softly; a little more softly than I am apt to
speak to Phœbe.
“Bless your soul, my dear!” she said, winking
briskly, “I don't want no thanks. It 's
thanks enough jest to see one of your old
looks comin' over you for a spell, sence —”
She knocked over a chair with her broom,
and left her sentence unfinished. Phœbe has
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[figure description] Page 025.[end figure description]
always had a queer, clinging, superior sort of
love for us both. She dandled us on her knees,
and made all our rag-dolls, and carried us
through measles and mumps and the rest.
Then mother's early death threw all the care
upon her. I believe that in her secret heart
she considers me more her child than her mistress.
It cost a great many battles to become
established as “Miss Mary.”
“I should like to know,” she would say,
throwing back her great, square shoulders and
towering up in front of me, — “I should like to
know if you s'pose I 'm a goin' to `Miss' anybody
that I 've trotted to Bamberry Cross as
many times as I have you, Mary Cabot!
Catch me!”
I remember how she would insist on calling
me “her baby” after I was in long dresses, and
that it mortified me cruelly once when Meta
Tripp was here to tea with some Boston cousins.
Poor, good Phœbe! Her rough love
seems worth more to me, now that it is all I
have left me in the world. It occurs to me
that I may not have taken notice enough of
her lately. She has done her honest best to
comfort me, and she loved Roy, too.
But about the letter. I wrapped my face up
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closely in the crêpe, so that, if I met Deacon
Quirk, he should not recognize me, and, thinking
that the air was pleasant as I walked, came
home with the pork for Phœbe and a letter for
myself. I did not open it; in fact, I forgot all
about it, till I had been at home for half an
hour. I cannot bear to open a letter since that
morning when the lances of light fell on the
snow. They have written to me from everywhere, —
uncles and cousins and old school-friends;
well-meaning people; saying each
the same thing in the same way, — no, not
that exactly, and very likely I should feel
hurt and lonely if they did not write; but
sometimes I wish it did not all have to be
read.
So I did not notice much about my letter
this morning, till presently it occurred to me
that what must be done had better be done
quickly; so I drew up my chair to the desk,
prepared to read and answer on the spot.
Something about the writing and the signature
rather pleased me: it was dated from Kansas,
and was signed with the name of my mother's
youngest sister, Winifred Forceythe. I will
lay the letter in between these two leaves, for
it seems to suit the pleasant, spring-like day;
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besides, I took out the green book again on
account of it.
Lawrence, Kansas, February 21.
My dear Child, — I have been thinking
how happy you will be by and by because
Roy is happy.
And yet I know — I understand —
You have been in all my thoughts, and they
have been such pitiful, tender thoughts, that I
cannot help letting you know that somebody is
sorry for you. For the rest, the heart knoweth
its own, and I am, after all, too much of a
stranger to my sister's child to intermeddle.
So my letter dies upon my pen. You cannot
bear words yet. How should I dare
to fret you with them? I can only reach
you by my silence, and leave you with
the Heart that bled and broke for you and
Roy.
Your Aunt,
Winifred Forceythe.
Postscript, February 23.
I open my letter to add, that I am thinking
of coming to New England with Faith, — you
know Faith and I have nobody but each other
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[figure description] Page 028.[end figure description]
now. Indeed, I may be on my way by the
time this reaches you. It is just possible that
I may not come back to the West. I shall be
for a time at your uncle Calvin's, and then my
husband's friends think that they must have
me. I should like to see you for a day or two,
but if you do not care to see me, say so. If
you let me come because you think you must,
I shall find it out from your face in an hour.
I should like to be something to you, or do
something for you; but if I cannot, I would
rather not come.
I like that letter.
I have written to her to come, and in such
a way that I think she will understand me to
mean what I say. I have not seen her since I
was a child. I know that she was very much
younger than my mother; that she spent her
young ladyhood teaching at the South; — grandfather
had enough with which to support her,
but I have heard it said that she preferred to
take care of herself; — that she finally married
a poor minister, whose sermons people liked,
but whose coat was shockingly shabby; that
she left the comforts and elegances and friends
of New England to go to the West and bury
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[figure description] Page 029.[end figure description]
herself in an unheard-of little place with him
(I think she must have loved him); that he
afterwards settled in Lawrence; that there, after
they had been married some childless years,
this little Faith was born; and that there Uncle
Forceythe died about three years ago; that is
about all I know of her. I suppose her share
of Grandfather Burleigh's little property supports
her respectably. I understand that she
has been living a sort of missionary life among
her husband's people since his death, and that
they think they shall never see her like again.
It is they who keep her from coming home
again, Uncle Calvin's wife told me once; they
and one other thing, — her husband's grave.
I hope she will come to see me. I notice
one strange thing about her letter. She does
not use the ugly words “death” and “dying.”
I don't know exactly what she put in their
places, but something that had a pleasant
sound.
“To be happy because Roy is happy.” I
wonder if she really thinks it is possible.
I wonder what makes the words chase
me about.
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IV.
[figure description] Page 030.[end figure description]
May 5.
I am afraid that my brave resolutions are
all breaking down.
The stillness of the May days is creeping
into everything; the days in which the furlough
was to come; in which the bitter Peace
has come instead, and in which he would have
been at home, never to go away from me any
more.
The lazy winds are choking me. Their faint
sweetness makes me sick. The moist, rich loam
is ploughed in the garden; the grass, more
golden than green, springs in the warm hollow
by the front gate; the great maple, just reaching
up to tap at the window, blazes and bows
under its weight of scarlet blossoms. I cannot
bear their perfume; it comes up in great
breaths, when the window is opened. I wish
that little cricket, just waked from his winter's
nap, would not sit there on the sill and chirp
at me. I hate the bluebirds flashing in and
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out of the carmine cloud that the maple makes,
and singing, singing, everywhere.
It is easy to understand how Bianca heard
“The nightingales sing through her head,”
how she could call them “Owl-like birds,”
who sang “for spite,” who sang “for hate,”
who sang “for doom.”
Most of all I hate the maple. I wish winter
were back again to fold it away in white, with
its bare, black fingers only to come tapping at
the window. “Roy's maple” we used to call
it. How much fun he had out of that old
tree!
As far back as I can remember, we never
considered spring to be officially introduced till
we had had a fight with the red blossoms.
Roy used to pelt me well; but with that pretty
chivalry of his, which was rare in such a little
fellow, which developed afterwards into that
rarer treatment of women, of which every one
speaks who speaks of him, he would stop the
play the instant it threatened roughness. I
used to be glad, though, that I had strength
and courage enough to make it some fun to
him.
The maple is full of pictures of Roy. Roy,
not yet over the dignity of his first boots,
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aiming for the cross-barred branch, coming to the
ground with a terrible wrench on his ankle,
straight up again before anybody could stop
him, and sitting there on the ugly, swaying
bough as white as a sheet, to wave his cap, —
“There, I meant to do it, and I have!” Roy,
chopping off the twigs for kindling-wood in
his mud oven, and sending his hatchet right
through the parlor window. Roy cutting leaves
for me, and then pulling all my wreaths down
over my nose every time I put them on! Roy
making me jump half-way across the room
with a sudden thump on my window, and, looking
out, I would see him with his hat off and
hair blown from his forehead, framed in by the
scented blossoms, or the quivering green, or
the flame of blood-red leaves. But there is no
end to them if I begin.
I had planned, if he came this week, to strip
the richest branches, and fill his room.
May 6.
The May-day stillness, the lazy winds, the
sweetness in the air, are all gone. A miserable
northeasterly storm has set in. The garden
loam is a mass of mud; the golden grass
is drenched; the poor little cricket is drowned
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in a mud-puddle; the bluebirds are huddled
among the leaves, with their heads under their
drabbled wings, and the maple blossoms, dull
and shrunken, drip against the glass.
It begins to be evident that it will never do
for me to live alone. Yet who is there in the
wide world that I could bear to bring here —
into Roy's place?
A little old-fashioned book, bound in green
and gold, attracted my attention this morning
while I was dusting the library. It proved to be
my mother's copy of “Elia,” — one that father
had given her, I saw by the fly-leaf, in their
early engagement days. It is some time since
I have read Charles Lamb; indeed, since the
middle of February I have read nothing of
any sort. Phœbe dries the Journal for me
every night, and sometimes I glance at the
Telegraphic Summary, and sometimes I don't.
“You used to be fond enough of books,” Mrs.
Bland says, looking puzzled, — “regular blue-stocking,
Mr. Bland called you (no personal
objection to you, of course, my dear, but he
does n't like literary women, which is a great
comfort to me). Why don't you read and divert
yourself now?”
But my brain, like the rest of me, seems to
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be crushed. I could not follow three pages of
history with attention. Shakespeare, Wordsworth,
Whittier, Mrs. Browning, are filled with
Roy's marks, — and so down the shelf. Besides,
poetry strikes as nothing else does, deep
into the roots of things. One finds everywhere
some strain at the fibres of one's heart.
A mind must be healthily reconciled to actual
life, before a poet — at least most poets — can
help it. We must learn to bear and to work,
before we can spare strength to dream.
To hymns and hymn-like poems, exception
should be made. Some of them are like soft
hands stealing into ours in the dark, and holding
us fast without a spoken word. I do not
know how many times Whittier's “Psalm,”
and that old cry of Cowper's, “God moves in a
mysterious way,” have quieted me, — just the
sound of the words; when I was too wild to
take in their meaning, and too wicked to believe
them if I had.
As to novels, (by the way, Meta Tripp sent
me over four yesterday afternoon, among which
notice “Aurora Floyd” and “Uncle Silas,”)
the author of “Rutledge” expresses my feeling
about them precisely. I do not remember
her exact words, but they are not unlike these.
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“She had far outlived the passion of ordinary
novels; and the few which struck the depths of
her experience gave her more pain than pleasure.”
However, I took up poor “Elia” this morning,
and stumbled upon “Dream Children,” to which,
for pathos and symmetry, I have read few
things superior in the language. Years ago, I
almost knew it by heart, but it has slipped out
of memory with many other things of late.
Any book, if it be one of those which Lamb
calls “books which are books,” put before us
at different periods of life, will unfold to us new
meanings, — wheels within wheels, delicate
springs of purpose to which, at the last reading,
we were stone-blind; gems which perhaps
the author ignorantly cut and polished.
A sentence in this “Dream Children,” which
at eighteen I passed by with a compassionate
sort of wonder, only thinking that it gave me
“the blues” to read it, and that I was glad
Roy was alive, I have seized upon and learned
all over again now. I write it down to the
dull music of the rain.
“And how, when he died, though he had
not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he had
died a great while ago, such a distance there
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is betwixt life and death; and how I bore
his death, as I thought, pretty well at first, but
afterwards it haunted and haunted me; and
though I did not cry or take it to heart as some
do, and as I think he would have done if I had
died, yet I missed him all day long, and knew
not till then how much I had loved him. I
missed his kindness and I missed his crossness,
and wished him to be alive again to be quarrelling
with him (for we quarrelled sometimes),
rather than not have him again.”
How still the house is! I can hear the
coach rumbling away at the half-mile corner,
coming up from the evening train. A little
arrow of light has just cut the gray gloom of
the West.
Ten o'clock.
The coach to which I sat listening rumbled
up to the gate and stopped. Puzzled for
the moment, and feeling as inhospitable as I
knew how, I went down to the door. The
driver was already on the steps, with a bundle
in his arms that proved to be a rather minute
child; and a lady, veiled, was just stepping from
the carriage into the rain. Of course I came
to my senses at that, and, calling to Phœbe that
Mrs. Forceythe had come, sent her out an umbrella.
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She surprised me by running lightly up the
steps. I had imagined a somewhat advanced
age and a sedate amount of infirmities, to
be necessary concomitants of aunthood. She
came in all sparkling with rain-drops, and,
gently pushing aside the hand with which I
was trying to pay her driver, said, laughing: —
“Here we are, bag and baggage, you see,
`big trunk, little trunk,' &c., &c. You did not
expect me? Ah, my letter missed then. It is
too bad to take you by storm in this way.
Come, Faith! No, don't trouble about the
trunks just now. Shall I go right in here?”
Her voice had a sparkle in it, like the drops
on her veil, but it was low and very sweet. I
took her in by the dining-room fire, and was
turning to take off the little girl's things, when
a soft hand stayed me, and I saw that she had
drawn off the wet veil. A face somewhat
pale looked down at me, — she is taller than
I, — with large, compassionate eyes.
“I am too wet to kiss you, but I must have a
look,” she said, smiling. “That will do. You
are like your mother, very like.”
I don't know what possessed me, whether it
was the sudden, sweet feeling of kinship with
something alive, or whether it was her face or
her voice, or all together, but I said: —
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“I don't think you are too wet to be
kissed,” and threw my arms about her neck, —
I am not of the kissing kind, either, and I had
on my new bombazine, and she was very wet.
I thought she looked pleased.
Phœbe was sent to open the register in the
blue room, and as soon as it was warm I went
up with them, leading Faith by the hand. I
am unused to children, and she kept stepping
on my dress, and spinning around and tipping
over, in the most astonishing manner. It strikingly
reminded me of a top at the last gasp.
Her mother observed that she was tired and
sleepy. Phœbe was waiting around awkwardly
up stairs, with fresh towels on her arm.
Aunt Winifred turned and held out her hand.
“Well, Phœbe, I am glad to see you. This
is Phœbe, I am sure? You have altered with
everything else since I was here before. You
keep bright and well, I hope, and take good
care of Miss Mary?”
It was a simple enough thing, to be sure, her
taking the trouble to notice the old servant
with whom she had scarcely ever exchanged a
half-dozen words; but I liked it. I liked the
way, too, in which it was done. It reminded
me of Roy's fine, well-bred manner towards his
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inferiors, — always cordial, yet always appropriate;
I have heard that our mother had
much the same.
I tried to make things look as pleasant as
I could down stairs, while they were making
ready for tea. The grate was raked up a little,
a bright supper-cloth laid on the table, and the
curtains drawn. Phœbe mixed a hasty cake
of some sort, and brought out the heavier
pieces of silver, — tea-pot, &c., which I do not
use when I am alone, because it is so much
trouble to take care of them, and because I
like the little Wedgwood set that Roy had
for his chocolate.
“How pleasant!” said Aunt Winifred, as she
sat down with Faith in a high chair beside her.
Phœbe had a great hunt up garret for that
chair; it has been stowed away there since it
and I parted company. “How pleasant everything
is here! I believe in bright dining-rooms.
There is an indescribable dinginess to most
that I have seen, which tends to anything but
thankfulness. Homesick, Faith? No; that 's
right. I don't think we shall be homesick at
Cousin Mary's.”
If she had not said that, the probabilities
are that they would have been, for I have
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fallen quite out of the way of active housekeeping,
and have almost forgotten how to entertain
a friend. But I do not want her good
opinion wasted, and mean they shall have a
good time if I can make it for them.
It was a little hard at first to see her opposite
me at the table; it was Roy's place.
While she was sitting there in the light, with
the dust and weariness of travel brushed away
a little, I was able to make up my mind what
this aunt of mine looks like.
She is young, then, to begin with, and I find
it necessary to reiterate the fact, in order to
get it into my stupid brain. The cape and
spectacles, the little old woman's shawl and invalid's
walk, for which I had prepared myself,
persist in hovering before my bewildered eyes,
ready to drop down on her at a moment's
notice. Just thirty-five she is by her own
showing; older than I, to be sure; but as we
passed in front of the mirror together, once to-night,
I could not see half that difference between
us. The peace of her face and the pain
of mine contrast sharply, and give me an old,
worn look, beside her. After all, though, to
one who had seen much of life, hers would be
the true maturity perhaps, — the maturity of
-- 041 --
[figure description] Page 041.[end figure description]
repose. A look in her eyes once or twice gave
me the impression that she thinks me rather
young, though she is far too wise and delicate
to show it. I don't like to be treated like a
girl. I mean to find out what she does think.
My eyes have been on her face the whole
evening, and I believe it is the sweetest face—
woman's face — that I have ever seen. Yet
she is far from being a beautiful woman. It
is difficult to say what makes the impression;
scarcely any feature is accurate, yet the tout ensemble
seems to have no fault. Her hair, which
must have been bright bronze once, has grown
gray — quite gray — before its time. I really
do not know of what color her eyes are; blue,
perhaps, most frequently, but they change with
every word that she speaks; when quiet, they
have a curious, far-away look, and a steady,
lambent light shines through them. Her
mouth is well cut and delicate, yet you do not
so much notice that as its expression. It looks
as if it held a happy secret, with which, however
near one may come to her, one can never
intermeddle. Yet there are lines about it and
on her forehead, which are proof plain enough
that she has not always floated on summer
seas. She yet wears her widow's black, but
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relieves it pleasantly by white at the throat
and wrists. Take her altogether, I like to
look at her.
Faith is a round, rolling, rollicking little
piece of mischief, with three years and a half of
experience in this very happy world. She has
black eyes and a pretty chin, funny little pink
hands all covered with dimples, and a dimple
in one cheek besides. She has tipped over
two tumblers of water, scratched herself all
over playing with the cat, and set her apron on
fire already since she has been here. I stand
in some awe of her; but, after I have become
initiated, I think that we shall be very good
friends.
“Of all names in the catalogue,” I said to
her mother, when she came down into the parlor
after putting her to bed, “Faith seems to
be about the most inappropriate for this solid-bodied,
twinkling little bairn of yours, with her
pretty red cheeks, and such an appetite for
supper!”
“Yes,” she said, laughing, “there is nothing
spirituelle about Faith. But she means just
that to me. I could not call her anything
else. Her father gave her the name.” Her
face changed, but did not sadden; a quietness
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crept into it and into her voice, but that was
all.
“I will tell you about it sometime, — perhaps,”
she added, rising and standing by the
fire. “Faith looks like him.” Her eyes assumed
their distant look, “like the eyes of
those who see the dead,” and gazed away, —
so far away, into the fire, that I felt that she
would not be listening to anything that I
might say, and therefore said nothing.
We spent the evening chatting cosily. After
the fire had died down in the grate (I had
Phœbe light a pine-knot there, because I noticed
that Aunt Winifred fancied the blaze in
the dining-room), we drew up our chairs into
the corner by the register, and roasted away to
our hearts' content. A very bad habit, to sit
over the register, and Aunt Winifred says she
shall undertake to break me of it. We talked
about everything under the sun, — uncles,
aunts, cousins, Kansas and Connecticut, the
surrenders and the assassination, books, pictures,
music, and Faith, — O, and Phœbe and
the cat. Aunt Winifred talks well, and does
not gossip nor exhaust her resources; one feels
always that she has material in reserve on
any subject that is worth talking about.
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For one thing I thank her with all my heart:
she never spoke of Roy.
Upon reflection, I find that I have really
passed a pleasant evening.
She knocked at my door just now, after I
had written the last sentence, and had put
away the book for the night. Thinking that
it was Phœbe, I called, “Come in,” and did not
turn. She had come to the bureau where I
stood unbraiding my hair, and touched my arm,
before I saw who it was. She had on a crimson
dressing-gown of warm flannel, and her
hair hung down on her shoulders. Although
so gray, her hair is massive yet, and coils
finely when she is dressed.
“I beg your pardon,” she said, “but I
thought you would not be in bed, and I came
in to say, — let me sit somewhere else at the
breakfast-table, if you like. I saw that I had
taken `the vacant place.' Good night, my
dear.”
It was such a little thing! I wonder how
many people would have noticed it or taken
the trouble to speak of it. The quick perception,
the unusual delicacy, — these too are like
Roy.
-- 045 --
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I almost wish that she had stayed a little
longer. I almost think that I could bear to
have her speak to me about him.
Faith, in the next room, seems to have wakened
from a frightened dream, and I can hear
their voices through the wall. Her mother is
soothing and singing to her in the broken
words of some old lullaby with which Phœbe
used to sing Roy and me to sleep, years and
years ago. The unfamiliar, home like sound
is pleasant in the silent house. Phœbe, on her
way to bed, is stopping on the garret-stairs to
listen to it. Even the cat comes mewing up
to the door, and purring as I have not heard
the creature purr since the old Sunday-night
singing, hushed so long ago.
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V.
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May 7.
I was awakened and nearly smothered this
morning by a pillow thrown directly at my
head.
Somewhat unaccustomed, in the respectable,
old maid's life that I lead, to such a pleasant
little method of salutation, I jerked myself upright,
and stared. There stood Faith in her
night-dress, laughing as if she would suffocate,
and her mother in search of her was just
knocking at the open door.
“She insisted on going to wake Cousin Mary,
and would n't be washed till I let her; but I
stipulated that she should kiss you softly on
both your eyes.”
“I did,” said Faith, stoutly; “I kissed her
eyes, both two of 'em, and her nose, and her
mouth and her neck; then I pulled her hair,
and then I spinched her; but I thought she 'd
have to be banged a little. Was n't it a bang,
though!”
-- 047 --
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It really did me good to begin the day with
a hearty laugh. The days usually look so
long and blank at the beginning, that I can
hardly make up my mind to step out into
them. Faith's pillow was the famous pebble
in the pond, to which authors of original
imagination invariably resort; I felt its
little circles widening out all through the
day. I wonder if Aunt Winifred thought of
that. She thinks of many things.
For instance, afraid apparently that I should
think I was afflicted with one of those professional
visitors who hold that a chance relationship
justifies them in imposing on one from
the beginning to the end of the chapter, she
managed to make me understand, this morning,
that she was expecting to go back to
Uncle Forceythe's brother on Saturday. I
was surprised at myself to find that this
proposition struck me with dismay. I insisted
with all my heart on keeping her for a week
at the least, and sent forth a fiat that her
trunks should be unpacked.
We have had a quiet, homelike day. Faith
found her way to the orchard, and installed
herself there for the day, overhauling the
muddy grass with her bare hands to find
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dandelions. She came in at dinner-time as
brown as a little nut, with her hat hanging
down her neck, her apron torn, and just about
as dirty as I should suppose it possible for a
clean child to succeed in making herself. Her
mother, however, seemed to be quite used to
it, and the expedition with which she made her
presentable I regard as a stroke of genius.
While Faith was disposed of, and the house
still, auntie and I took our knitting and spent
a regular old woman's morning at the south
window in the dining-room. In the afternoon
Mrs. Bland came over, babies and all, and
sent up her card to Mrs. Forceythe.
Supper-time came, and still there had not
been a word of Roy. I began to wonder at,
while I respected, this unusual silence.
While her mother was putting Faith to bed,
I went into my room alone, for a few moments'
quiet. An early dark had fallen, for it
had clouded up just before sunset. The dull,
gray sky and narrow horizon shut down and
crowded in everything. A soldier from the
village, who has just come home, was walking
down the street with his wife and sister. The
crickets were chirping in the meadows. The
faint breath of the maple came up.
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I sat down by the window, and hid my
face in both my hands. I must have sat
there some time, for I had quite forgotten
that I had company to entertain, when the
door softly opened and shut, and some one
came and sat down on the couch beside me.
I did not speak, for I could not, and, the first
I knew, a gentle arm crept about me, and she
had gathered me into her lap and laid my
head on her shoulder, as she might have gathered
Faith.
“There,” she said, in her low, lulling voice,
“now tell Auntie all about it.”
I don't know what it was, whether the voice,
or touch, or words, but it came so suddenly, —
and nobody had held me for so long, — that
everything seemed to break up and unlock in
a minute, and I threw up my hands and cried.
I don't know how long I cried.
She passed her hand softly to and fro across
my hair, brushing it away from my temples,
while they throbbed and burned; but she did
not speak. By and by I sobbed out: —
“Auntie, Auntie, Auntie!” as Faith sobs out
in the dark. It seemed to me that I must
have help or die.
“Yes, dear. I understand. I know how
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hard it is. And you have been bearing it
alone so long! I am going to help you, and
you must tell me all you can.”
The strong, decided words, “I am going to
help you,” gave me the first faint hope I have
had, that I could be helped, and I could tell
her — it was not sacrilege — the pent-up story
of these weeks. All the time her hand
went softly to and fro across my hair.
Presently, when I was weak and faint with
the new comfort of my tears, “Aunt Winifred,”
I said, “I don't know what it means to
be resigned; I don't know what it means!”
Still her hand passed softly to and fro
across my hair.
“To have everything stop all at once! without
giving me any time to learn to bear it.
Why, you do not know, — it is just as if a
great black gate had swung to and barred
out the future, and barred out him, and left
me all alone in any world that I can ever live
in, forever and forever.”
“My child,” she said, with emphasis solemn
and low upon the words, — “my child, I do
know. I think you forget — my husband.”
I had forgotten. How could I? We are
most selfishly blinded by our own griefs. No
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[figure description] Page 051.[end figure description]
other form than ours ever seems to walk with
us in the furnace. Her few words made me
feel, as I could not have felt if she had said
more, that this woman who was going to
help me had suffered too; had suffered perhaps
more than I, — that, if I sat as a little
child at her feet, she could teach me through
the kinship of her pain.
“O my dear,” she said, and held me close,
“I have trodden every step of it before you,—
every single step.”
“But you never were so wicked about it!
You never felt — why, I have been afraid I
should hate God! You never were so wicked
as that.”
Low under her breath she answered “Yes,”—
this sweet, saintly woman who had come to
me in the dark as an angel might.
Then, turning suddenly, her voice trembled
and broke: —
“Mary, Mary, do you think He could have
lived those thirty-three years, and be cruel to
you now? Think that over and over; only
that. It may be the only thought you dare
to have, — it was all I dared to have once, —
but cling to it; cling with both hands, Mary,
and keep it.”
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I only put both hands about her neck and
clung there; but I hope — it seems, as if I
clung a little to the thought besides; it was
as new and sweet to me as if I had never
heard of it in all my life; and it has not left
me yet.
“And then, my dear,” she said, when she
had let me cry a little longer, “when you
have once found out that Roy's God loves
you more than Roy does, the rest comes
more easily. It will not be as long to wait
as it seems now. It is n't as if you never
were going to see him again.”
I looked up bewildered.
“What 's the matter, dear?”
“Why, do you think I shall see him, —
really see him?”
“Mary Cabot,” she said abruptly, turning
to look at me, “who has been talking to you
about this thing?”
“Deacon Quirk,” I answered faintly, —
“Deacon Quirk and Dr. Bland.”
She put her other arm around me with a
quick movement, as if she would shield me
from Deacon Quirk and Dr. Bland.
“Do I think you will see him again? You
might as well ask me if I thought God made
-- 053 --
[figure description] Page 053.[end figure description]
you and made Roy, and gave you to each
other. See him! Why, of course you will
see him as you saw him here.”
“As I saw him here! Why, here I looked
into his eyes, I saw him smile, I touched him.
Why, Aunt Winifred, Roy is an angel!”
She patted my hand with a little, soft, comforting
laugh.
“But he is not any the less Roy for that, —
not any the less your own real Roy, who will
love you and wait for you and be very glad to
see you, as he used to love and wait and be
glad when you came home from a journey on
a cold winter night.”
“And he met me at the door, and led me in
where it was light and warm!” I sobbed.
“So he will meet you at the door in this
other home, and lead you into the light and
the warmth. And cannot that make the cold
and dark a little shorter? Think a minute!”
“But there is God, — I thought we went to
Heaven to worship Him, and —”
“Shall you worship more heartily or less,
for having Roy again? Did Mary love the
Master more or less, after Lazarus came back?
Why, my child, where did you get your ideas
of God? Don't you suppose He knows how
you love Roy?”
-- 054 --
[figure description] Page 054.[end figure description]
I drank in the blessed words without doubt
or argument. I was too thirsty to doubt
or argue. Some other time I may ask her
how she knows this beautiful thing, but not
now. All I can do now is to take it into
my heart and hold it there.
Roy my own again, — not only to look at
standing up among the singers, — but close to
me; somehow or other to be as near as — to
be nearer than — he was here, really mine
again! I shall never let this go.
After we had talked awhile, and when it
came time to say good night, I told her a little
about my conversation with Deacon Quirk,
and what I said to him about the Lord's will.
I did not know but that she would blame me.
“Some time,” she said, turning her great,
compassionate eyes on me, — I could feel
them in the dark, — and smiling, “you will
find out all at once, in a happy moment, that
you can say those words with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your
strength; it will come, even in this world, if
you will only let it. But, until it does, you do
right, quite right, not to scorch your altar with
a false burnt-offering. God is not a God to be
mocked. He would rather have only the old
-- 055 --
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cry: `I believe; help mine unbelief,' and wait
till you can say the rest.
“It has often grated on my ears,” she added,
“to hear people speak those words unworthily.
They seem to me the most solemn words that
the Bible contains, or that Christian experience
can utter. As far as my observation goes, the
good people — for they are good people —
who use them when they ought to know better
are of two sorts. They are people in actual
agony, bewildered, racked with rebellious
doubts, unaccustomed to own even to themselves
the secret seethings of sin; really persuaded
that because it is a Christian duty to
have no will but the Lord's, they are under
obligations to affirm that they have no will
but the Lord's. Or else they are people who
know no more about this pain of bereavement
than a child. An affliction has passed over
them, put them into mourning, made them
feel uncomfortable till the funeral was over,
or even caused them a shallow sort of grief,
of which each week evaporates a little, till it is
gone. These mourners air their trouble the
longest, prate loudest about resignation, and
have the most to say to you or me about our
`rebellious state of mind.' Poor things! One
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can hardly be vexed at them for pity. Think
of being made so!”
“There is still another class of the cheerfully
resigned,” I suggested, “who are even
more ready than these to tell you of your desperate
wickedness —”
“People who have never had even the
semblance of a trouble in all their lives,” she
interrupted. “Yes. I was going to speak of
them. Of all miserable comforters, they are
the most arrogant.”
“As to real instant submission,” she said
presently, “there is some of it in the world.
There are sweet, rare lives capable of great
loves and great pains, which yet are kept
so attuned to the life of Christ, that the cry
in the Garden comes scarcely less honestly
from their lips, than from his. Such, like
the St. John, are but one among the Twelve.
Such, it will do you and me good, dear, at least
to remember.”
“Such,” I thought when I was left alone,
“you new dear friend of mine, who have
come with such a blessed coming into my
lonely days, — such you must be now, whatever
you were once.”
If I should tell her that, how she would
open her soft eyes!
-- 057 --
VI.
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May 9.
As I was looking over the green book last
night, Aunt Winifred came up behind me and
softly laid a bunch of violets down between
the leaves.
By an odd contrast, the contented, passionless
things fell against those two verses that
were copied from the German, and completely
covered them from sight. I lifted the flowers,
and held up the page for her to see.
As she read, her face altered strangely; her
eyes dilated, her lip quivered, a flush shot over
her cheeks and dyed her forehead up to the
waves of her hair. I turned away quickly,
feeling that I had committed a rudeness in
watching her, and detecting in her, however
involuntarily, some far, inner sympathy,
or shadow of a long-past sympathy, with the
desperate words.
“Mary,” she said, laying down the book, “I
believe Satan wrote that.”
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She laughed a little then, nervously, and
paled back into her quiet, peaceful self.
“I mean that he inspired it. They are
wicked words. You must not read them
over. You will outgrow them sometime with
a beautiful growth of trust and love. Let
them alone till that time comes. See, I will
blot them out of sight for you with colors
as blue as heaven, — the real heaven, where
God will be loved the most.”
She shook apart the thick, sweet nosegay,
and, taking a half-dozen of the little blossoms,
pinned them, dripping with fragrant dew, upon
the lines. There I shall let them stay, and,
since she wishes it, I shall not lift them to
see the reckless words till I can do it safely.
This afternoon Aunt Winifred has been
telling me about herself. Somewhat more,
or of a different kind, I should imagine, from
what she has told most people. She seems to
love me a little, not in a proper kind of way,
because I happen to be her niece, but for my
own sake. It surprises me to find how
pleased I am that she should.
That Kansas life must have been very hard
to her, in contrast as it was with the smooth
elegance of her girlhood; she was very young,
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too, when she undertook it. I said something
of the sort to her.
“They have been the hardest and the easiest,
the saddest and the happiest, years of all
my life,” she answered.
I pondered the words in my heart, while I listened
to her story. She gave me vivid pictures
of the long, bright bridal journey, overshadowed
with a very mundane weariness of jolting
coaches and railway accidents before its close;
of the little neglected hamlet which waited
for them, twenty miles from a post-office and
thirty from a school-house; of the parsonage,
a log-hut among log-huts, distinguished and
adorned by a little lath and plastering, glass
windows, and a doorstep; — they drew in sight
of it at the close of a tired day, with a red
sunset lying low on the flats.
Uncle Forceythe wanted mission-work, and
mission-work he found here with — I should
say with a vengeance, if the expression were
exactly suited to an elegantly constructed and
reflective journal.
“My heart sank for a moment, I confess,”
she said, “but it never would do, you know, to
let him suspect that, so I smiled away as well
as I knew how, shook hands with one or two
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women in red calico who had been “slickin'
up inside,” they said; went in by the fire, — it
was really a pleasant fire, — and, as soon as
they had left us alone, I climbed into John's
lap, and, with both arms around his neck, told
him that I knew we should be very happy.
And I said —”
“Said what?”
She blushed a little, like a girl.
“I believe I said I should be happy in
Patagonia, — with him. I made him laugh at
last, and say that my face and words were
like a beautiful prophecy. And, Mary, if they
were, it was beautifully fulfilled. In the
roughest times, — times of ragged clothes and
empty flour-barrels, of weakness and sickness
and quack doctors, of cold and discouragement,
of prairie fires and guerillas, — from trouble
to trouble, from year's end to year's end,
we were happy together, we two. As long as
we could have each other, and as long as we
could be about our Master's business, we felt
as if we did not dare to ask for anything
more, lest it should seem that we were ungrateful
for such wealth of mercy.”
It would take too long to write out here the
half that she told me, though I wish I could,
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for it interested me more than any story that
I have ever read.
After years of Christ-like toiling to help those
rough old farmers and wicked bushwhackers
to Heaven, the call to Lawrence came, and it
seemed to Uncle Forceythe that he had better
go. It was a pleasant, influential parish, and
there, though not less hard at work, they found
fewer rubs and more comforts; there Faith
came, and there were their pleasant days, till
the war. — I held my breath to hear her tell
about Quantrell's raid. There, too, Uncle
wasted through that death-in-life, consumption;
there he “fell on sleep,” she said, and
there she buried him.
She gave me no further description of his
death than those words, and she spoke them
with her far-away, tearless eyes looking off
through the window, and after she had
spoken she was still for a time.
The heart knoweth its own bitterness; that
grew distinct to me, as I sat, shut out by her
silence. Yet there was nothing bitter about
her face.
“Faith was six months old when he went,”
she said presently. “We had never named
her: Baby was name enough at first for such
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a wee thing; then she was the only one, and
had come so late, that it seemed to mean more
to us than to most to have a baby all to ourselves,
and we liked the sound of the word.
When it became quite certain that John must
go, we used to talk it over, and he said that he
would like to name her, but what, he did not
tell me.
“At last, one night, after he had lain for a
while thinking with closed eyes, he bade me
bring the child to him. The sun was setting,
I remember, and the moon was rising. He
had had a hard day; the life was all scorched
out of the air. I moved the bed up by the
window, that he might have the breath of the
rising wind. Baby was wide awake, cooing
softly to herself in the cradle, her bits of damp
curls clinging to her head, and her pink feet
in her hands. I took her up and brought her
just as she was, and knelt down by the bed.
The street was still. We could hear the frogs
chanting a mile away. He lifted her little
hands upon his own, and said — no matter
about the words — but he told me that as he
left the child, so he left the name, in my sacred
charge, — that he had chosen it for me, — that,
when he was out of sight, it might help me to
have it often on my lips.
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“So there in the sunset and the moonrise,
we two alone together, he baptized her, and
we gave our little girl to God.”
When she had said this, she rose and went
over to the window, and stood with her face
from me. By and by, “It was the fourteenth,”
she said, as if musing to herself, — “the fourteenth
of June.”
I remember now that Uncle Forceythe died
on the fourteenth of June. It may have been
that the words of that baptismal blessing
were the last that they heard, either child or
mother.
May 10.
It has been a pleasant day; the air shines
like transparent gold; the wind sweeps like
somebody's strong arms over the flowers, and
gathers up a crowd of perfumes that wander
up and down about one. The church bells
have rung out like silver all day. Those
bells — especially the Second Advent at the
further end of the village — are positively
ghastly when it rains.
Aunt Winifred was dressed bright and early
for church. I, in morning dress and slippers,
sighed and demurred.
“Auntie, do you expect to hear anything
new?”
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“Judging from your diagnosis of Dr. Bland,—
no.”
“To be edified, refreshed, strengthened, or
instructed?”
“Perhaps not.”
“Bored, then?”
“Not exactly.”
“What do you expect?”
“There are the prayers and singing. Generally
one can, if one tries, wring a little devotion
from the worst of them. As to a minister,
if he is good and commonplace, young
and earnest and ignorant, and I, whom he
cannot help one step on the way to Heaven,
consequently stay at home, Deacon Quirk,
whom he might carry a mile or two, by and
by stays at home also. If there is to be a
`building fitly joined together,' each stone
must do its part of the upholding. I feel
better to go half a day always. I never compel
Faith to go, but I never have a chance, for
she teases not to be left at home.”
“I think it 's splendid to go to church most
the time,” put in Faith, who was squatted on
the carpet, counting sugared caraway seeds,—
“all but the sermon. That is n't splendid.
I don't like the gre-at big prayers 'n' things.
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I like caramary seeds, though; mother always
gives 'em to me in meeting 'cause I 'm a good
girl. Don't you wish you were a good girl,
Cousin Mary, so 's you could have some? Besides,
I 've got on my best hat and my button-boots.
Besides, there used to be a real funny
little boy up in meeting at home, and he gave
me a little tin dorg once over the top the pew.
Only mother made me give it back. O, you
ought to seen the man that preached down at
Uncle Calvin's! I tell you he was a bully old
minister, — he banged the Bible like everything!”
“There 's a devotional spirit for you!” I said
to her mother.
“Well,” she answered, laughing, “it is better
than that she should be left to play
dolls and eat preserves, and be punished
for disobedience. Sunday would invariably
become a guilty sort of holiday at that rate.
Now, caraways or `bully old ministers' notwithstanding,
she carries to bed with her a
dim notion that this has been holy time and
pleasant time. Besides, the associations of a
church-going childhood, if I can manage them
genially, will be a help to her when she is
older. Come, Faith! go and pull off Cousin
-- 066 --
[figure description] Page 066.[end figure description]
Mary's slippers, and bring down her boots,
and then she 'll have to go to church. No, I
did n't say that you might tickle her feet!”
Feeling the least bit sorry that I had
set the example of a stay-at-home Christian
before the child, I went directly up stairs
to make ready, and we started after all in
good season.
Dr. Bland was in the pulpit. I observed
that he looked — as indeed did the congregation
bodily — with some curiosity into our
slip, where it has been a rare occurrence of
late to find me, and where the light, falling
through the little stained glass oriel, touched
Aunt Winifred's thoughtful smile. I wondered
whether Dr. Bland thought it was wicked
for people to smile in church. No, of course
he has too much sense. I wonder what it is
about Dr. Bland that always suggests such
questions.
It has been very warm all day, — that aggravating,
unseasonable heat, which is apt to come
in spasms in the early part of May, and which,
in thick spring alpaca and heavy sack, one
finds intolerable. The thermometer stood at
75° on the church porch; every window was
shut, and everybody's fan was fluttering.
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Now, with this sight before him, what should
our observant minister do, but give out as
his first hymn: “Thine earthly Sabbaths.”
“Thine earthly Sabbaths” would be a beautiful
hymn, if it were not for those lines about
the weather: —
“No midnight shade, no clouded sun,
But sacred, high, eternal noon”!
There was a great hot sunbeam striking directly
on my black bonnet. My fan was broken.
I gasped for air. The choir went over
and over and over the words, spinning them
into one of those indescribable tunes, in which
everybody seems to be trying to get through
first. I don't know what they called them, —
they always remind me of a game of “Tag.”
I looked at Aunt Winifred. She took it
more coolly than I, but an amused little
smile played over her face. She told me after
church that she had repeatedly heard that
hymn given out at noon of an intense July
day. Her husband, she said, used to save
it for the winter, or for cloudy afternoons.
“Using means of grace,” he called that.
However, Dr. Bland did better the second
time, Aunt Winifred joined in the singing,
-- 068 --
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and I enjoyed it, so I will not blame the poor
man. I suppose he was so far lifted above
this earth, that he would not have known
whether he was preaching in Greenland's icy
mountains, or on India's coral strand.
When he announced his text, “For our conversation
is in Heaven,” Aunt Winifred and I
exchanged glances of content. We had been
talking about heaven on the way to church;
at least, till Faith, not finding herself entertained,
interrupted us by some severe speculations
as to whether Maltese kitties were mulattoes,
and “why the bell-ringer did n't jump off
the steeple some night, and see if he could n't
fly right up, the way Elijah did.”
I listened to Dr. Bland as I have not listened
for a long time. The subject was of all subjects
nearest my heart. He is a scholarly
man, in his way. He ought to know, I
thought, more about it than Aunt Winifred.
Perhaps he could help me.
His sermon, as nearly as I can recall it, was
substantially this.
“The future life presented a vast theme to
our speculation. Theories `too numerous to
mention,' had been held concerning it. Pagans
had believed in a coming state of rewards
-- 069 --
[figure description] Page 069.[end figure description]
and punishments. What natural theology
had dimly foreshadowed, Revelation had
brought in, like a full-orbed day, with healing
on its wings.” I am not positive about the
metaphors.
“As it was fitting that we should at times
turn our thoughts upon the threatenings of
Scripture, it was eminently suitable also that
we should consider its promises.
“He proposed in this discourse to consider
the promise of heaven, the reward offered by
Christ to his good and faithful servants.
“In the first place: What is heaven?”
I am not quite clear in my mind what it
was, though I tried my best to find out. As
nearly as I can recollect, however, —
“Heaven is an eternal state.
“Heaven is a state of holiness.
“Heaven is a state of happiness.”
Having heard these observations before, I
will not enlarge as he did upon them, but
leave that for the “vivid imagination” of the
green book.
“In the second place: What will be the
employments of heaven?
“We shall study the character of God.
“An infinite mind must of necessity be
-- 070 --
[figure description] Page 070.[end figure description]
eternally an object of study to a finite mind.
The finite mind must of necessity find in such
study supreme delight. All lesser joys and
interests will pale. He felt at moments, in
reflecting on this theme, that that good
brother who, on being asked if he expected to
see the dead wife of his youth in heaven, replied,
`I expect to be so overwhelmed by the
glory of the presence of God, that it may be
thousands of years before I shall think of my
wife,' — he felt that perhaps this brother was
near the truth.”
Poor Mrs. Bland looked exceedingly uncomfortable.
“We shall also glorify God.”
He enlarged upon this division, but I have
forgotten exactly how. There was something
about adoration, and the harpers harping with
their harps, and the sea of glass, and crying,
Worthy the Lamb! and a great deal more that
bewildered and disheartened me so that I
could scarcely listen to it. I do not doubt
that we shall glorify God primarily and happily,
but can we not do it in some other way
than by harping and praying?
“We shall moreover love each other with a
universal and unselfish love.”
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“That we shall recognize our friends in
heaven, he was inclined to think, after mature
deliberation, was probable. But there would
be no special selfish affections there. In this
world we have enmities and favoritisms. In
the world of bliss our hearts would glow with
holy love alike to all other holy hearts.”
I wonder if he really thought that would
make “a world of bliss.” Aunt Winifred
slipped her hand into mine under her cloak.
Ah, Dr. Bland, if you had known how that
little soft touch was preaching against you!
“In the words of an eminent divine, who
has long since entered into the joys of which
he spoke: `Thus, whenever the mind roves
through the immense region of heaven, it will
find, among all its innumerable millions, not
an enemy, not a stranger, not an indifferent
heart, not a reserved bosom. Disguise here,
and even concealment, will be unknown.
The soul will have no interests to conceal, no
thoughts to disguise. A window will be
opened in every breast, and show to every eye
the rich and beautiful furniture within!'
“Thirdly: How shall we fit for heaven?”
He mentioned several ways, among which,—
“We should subdue our earthly affections to
God.
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“We must not love the creature as the Creator.
My son, give me thy heart. When he
removes our friends from the scenes of time
(with a glance in my direction), we should
resign ourselves to his will, remembering that
the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away
in mercy; that He is all in all; that He will
never leave us nor forsake us; that He can
never change or die.”
As if that made any difference with the
fact, that his best treasures change or die!
“In conclusion, —
“We infer from our text that our hearts
should not be set upon earthly happiness.
(Enlarged.)
“That the subject of heaven should be often
in our thoughts and on our lips.” (Enlarged.)
Of course I have not done justice to the
filling up of the sermon; to the illustrations,
metaphors, proof-texts, learning, and eloquence,—
for, though Dr. Bland cannot seem to think
outside of the old grooves, a little eloquence
really flashes through the tameness of his
style sometimes, and when he was talking
about the harpers, etc., some of his words were
well chosen. “To be drowned in light,” I
have somewhere read, “may be very
-- 073 --
[figure description] Page 073.[end figure description]
beautiful; it is still to be drowned.” But I have
given the skeleton of the discourse, and I have
given the sum of the impressions that it left
on me, an attentive hearer. It is fortunate
that I did not hear it while I was alone; it
would have made me desperate. Going hungry,
hopeless, blinded, I came back empty,
uncomforted, groping. I wanted something
actual, something pleasant, about this place
into which Roy has gone. He gave me glittering
generalities, cold commonplace, vagueness,
unreality, a God and a future at which I
sat and shivered.
Dr. Bland is a good man. He had, I know,
written that sermon with prayer. I only wish
that he could be made to see how it glides
over and sails splendidly away from wants
like mine.
But thanks be to God who has provided a
voice to answer me out of the deeps.
Auntie and I walked home without any
remarks (we overheard Deacon Quirk observe
to a neighbor: “That 's what I call a good
gospel sermon, now!”), sent Faith away to
Phœbe, sat down in the parlor, and looked at
each other.
“Well?” said I.
-- 074 --
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“I know it,” said she.
Upon which we both began to laugh.
“But did he say the dreadful truth?”
“Not as I find it in my Bible.”
“That it is probable, only probable that we
shall recognize —”
“My child, do not be troubled about that.
It is not probable, it is sure. If I could find
no proof for it, I should none the less believe
it, as long as I believe in God. He gave you
Roy, and the capacity to love him. He has
taught you to sanctify that love through love
to Him. Would it be like Him to create such
beautiful and unselfish loves, — most like the
love of heaven of any type we know, — just
for our threescore years and ten of earth?
Would it be like Him to suffer two souls to
grow together here, so that the separation of a
day is pain, and then wrench them apart for
all eternity? It would be what Madame de
Gasparin calls, `fearful irony on the part of
God.'”
“But there are lost loves. There are lost
souls.”
“How often would I have gathered you,
and ye would not! That is not his work.
He would have saved both soul and love.
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They had their own way. We were speaking
of His redeemed. The object of having this
world at all, you know, is to fit us for another.
Of what use will it have been, if on passing out
of it we must throw by forever its gifts, its lessons,
its memories? God links things together
better than that. Be sure, as you are sure
of Him, that we shall be ourselves in heaven.
Would you be yourself not to recognize Roy?—
consequently, not to love Roy, for to love
and to be separated is misery, and heaven is
joy.”
“I understand. But you said you had other
proof.”
“So I have; plenty of it. If `many shall
come from the East and from the West, and
shall sit down in the kingdom of God with
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,' will they not be
likely to know that they are with Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob? or will they think it is Shadrach,
Meshech, and Abednego?
“What is meant by such expressions as
`risen together,' `sitting together at the right
hand of God,' `sitting together in heavenly
places'? If they mean anything, they mean
recognitions, friendships, enjoyments.
“Did not Peter and the others know Moses
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[figure description] Page 076.[end figure description]
when they saw him? — know Elias when they
saw him? Yet these men were dead hundreds
of years before the favored fishermen were
born.
“How was it with those `saints which slept
and arose' when Christ hung dead there in the
dark? Were they not seen of many?”
“But that was a miracle.”
“They were risen dead, such as you and
I shall be some day. The miracle consisted
in their rising then and there. Moreover, did
not the beggar recognize Abraham? and —
Well, one might go through the Bible finding
it full of this promise in hints or assertions, in
parables or visions. We are `heirs of God,'
`joint heirs with Christ'; having suffered with
Him, we shall be `glorified together.' Christ
himself has said many sure things: `I will
come and receive you, that where I am, there
ye may be.' `I will that they be with me
where I am.' Using, too, the very type of
Godhead to signify the eternal nearness and
eternal love of just such as you and Roy, as
John and me, he prays: `Holy Father, keep
them whom Thou hast given me, that they
may be one as we are.'
“There is one place, though, where I find
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what I like better than all the rest; you remember
that old cry wrung from the lips of
the stricken king, — `I shall go to him; but
he will not return to me.'”
“I never thought before how simple and
direct it is; and that, too, in those old blinded
days.”
“The more I study the Bible,” she said,
“and I study not entirely in ignorance of the
commentators and the mysteries, the more
perplexed I am to imagine where the current
ideas of our future come from. They certainly
are not in this book of gracious promises. That
heaven which we heard about to-day was Dr.
Bland's, not God's. `It 's aye a wonderfu'
thing to me,' as poor Lauderdale said, `the
way some preachers take it upon themselves
to explain matters to the Almighty!'”
“But the harps and choirs, the throne, the
white robes, are all in Revelation. Deacon
Quirk would put his great brown finger on the
verses, and hold you there triumphantly.”
“Can't people tell picture from substance,
a metaphor from its meaning? That book of
Revelation is precisely what it professes to be,—
a vision; a symbol. A symbol of something,
to be sure, and rich with pleasant hopes,
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[figure description] Page 078.[end figure description]
but still a symbol. Now, I really believe that
a large proportion of Christian church-members,
who have studied their Bible, attended
Sabbath schools, listened to sermons all their
lives, if you could fairly come at their most
definite idea of the place where they expect to
spend eternity, would own it to be the golden
city, with pearl gates, and jewels in the wall.
It never occurs to them, that, if one picture is
literal, another must be. If we are to walk
golden streets, how can we stand on a sea of
glass? How can we `sit on thrones'? How
can untold millions of us `lie in Abraham's
bosom'?”
“But why have given us empty symbols?
Why not a little fact?”
“They are not empty symbols. And why
God did not give us actual descriptions of
actual heavenly life, I don't trouble myself to
wonder. He certainly had his reasons, and
that is enough for me. I find from these symbols,
and from his voice in my own heart,
many beautiful things, — I will tell you some
more of them at another time, — and, for the
rest, I am content to wait. He loves me, and
he loves mine. As long as we love Him, He
will never separate Himself from us, or us from
each other. That, at least, is sure.”
-- 079 --
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“If that is sure, the rest is of less importance; —
yes. But Dr. Bland said an awful
thing!”
“The quotation from a dead divine?”
“Yes. That there will be no separate interests,
no thoughts to conceal.”
“Poor good man! He has found out by
this time that he should not have laid down
nonsense like that, without qualification or
demur, before a Bible-reading hearer. It was
simply his opinion, not David's, or Paul's, or
John's, or Isaiah's. He had a perfect right
to put it in the form of a conjecture. Nobody
would forbid his conjecturing that the inhabitants
of heaven are all deaf and dumb, or
wear green glasses, or shave their heads, if he
chose, provided he stated that it was conjecture,
not revelation.”
“But where does the Bible say that we shall
have power to conceal our thoughts? — and
I would rather be annihilated than to spend
eternity with heart laid bare, — the inner temple
thrown open to be trampled on by every
passing stranger!”
“The Bible specifies very little about the
minor arrangements of eternity in any way.
But I doubt if, under any circumstances, it
-- 080 --
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would have occurred to inspired men to inform
us that our thoughts shall continue to be
our own. The fact is patent on the face of
things. The dead minister's supposition would
destroy individuality at one fell swoop. We
should be like a man walking down a room
lined with mirrors, who sees himself reflected
in all sizes, colors, shades, at all angles and in
all proportions, according to the capacity of
the mirror, till he seems no longer to belong
to himself, but to be cut up into ellipses and
octagons and prisms. How soon would he
grow frantic in such companionship, and beg
for a corner where he might hide and hush
himself in the dark?
“That we shall in a higher life be able to
do what we cannot in this, — judge fairly of
each other's moral worth, — is undoubtedly
true. Whatever the Judgment Day may mean,
that is the substance of it. But this promiscuous
theory of refraction; — never!
“Besides, wherever the Bible touches the
subject, it premises our individuality as a
matter of course. What would be the use of
talking, if everybody knew the thoughts of
everybody else?”
“You don't suppose that people talk in
heaven?”
-- 081 --
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“I don't suppose anything else. Are we to
spend ages of joy, a company of mutes together?
Why not talk?”
“I supposed we should sing, — but —”
“Why not talk as well as sing? Does not
song involve the faculty of speech? — unless
you would like to make canaries of us.”
“Ye-es. Why, yes.”
“There are the visitors at the beautiful
Mount of Transfiguration again. Did not they
talk with each other and with Christ? Did
not John talk with the angel who `shewed him
those things'?”
“And you mean to say —”
“I mean to say that if there is such a thing
as common sense, you will talk with Roy as
you talked with him here, — only not as you
talked with him here, because there will be no
troubles nor sins, no anxieties nor cares, to
talk about; no ugly shades of cross words or
little quarrels to be made up; no fearful looking-for
of separation.”
I laid my head upon her shoulder, and
could hardly speak for the comfort that she
gave me.
“Yes, I believe we shall talk and laugh and
joke and play —”
-- 082 --
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“Laugh and joke in heaven?”
“Why not?”
“But it seems so — so — why, so wicked
and irreverent and all that, you know.”
Just then Faith, who, mounted out on the
kitchen table, was preaching at Phœbe in comical
mimicry of Dr. Bland's choicest intonations,
laughed out like the splash of a little
wave.
The sound came in at the open door, and we
stopped to listen till it had rippled away.
“There!” said her mother, “put that child,
this very minute, with all her little sins forgiven,
into one of our dear Lord's many mansions,
and do you suppose that she would be any the
less holy or less reverent for a laugh like that?
Is he going to check all the sparkle and blossom
of life when he takes us to himself? I
don't believe any such thing.
“There were both sense and Christianity
in what somebody wrote on the death of a
humorous poet: —
`Does nobody laugh there, where he has gone, —
This man of the smile and the jest?'
— provided there was any hope that the poor
fellow had gone to heaven; if not, it was bad
philosophy and worse religion.
-- 083 --
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“Did not David dance before the Lord with
all his might? A Bible which is full of happy
battle-cries: `Rejoice in the Lord! make a
joyful noise unto him! Give thanks unto
the Lord, for his mercy endureth!' — a Bible
which exhausts its splendid wealth of rhetoric
to make us understand that the coming life
is a life of joy, no more threatens to make nuns
than mutes of us. I expect that you will
hear some of Roy's very old jokes, see the
sparkle in his eye, listen to his laughing voice,
lighten up the happy days as gleefully as you
may choose; and that —”
Faith appeared upon the scene just then,
with the interesting information that she had
bitten her tongue; so we talked no more.
How pleasant — how pleasant this is! I
never supposed before that God would let
any one laugh in heaven.
I wonder if Roy has seen the President.
Aunt Winifred says she does not doubt it.
She thinks that all the soldiers must have
crowded up to meet him, and “O,” she says,
“what a sight to see!”
-- 084 --
VII.
[figure description] Page 084.[end figure description]
May 12th.
Aunt Winifred has said something about
going, but I cannot yet bear to hear of such
a thing. She is to stay a while longer.
16th.
We have been over to-night to the grave.
She proposed to go by herself, thinking, I saw,
with the delicacy with which she always thinks,
that I would rather not be there with another.
Nor should I, nor could I, with any other than
this woman. It is strange. I wished to go
there with her. I had a vague, unreasoning
feeling that she would take away some of the
bitterness of it, as she has taken the bitterness
of much else.
It is looking very pleasant there now. The
turf has grown fine and smooth. The low
arbor-vitæ hedge and knots of Norway spruce,
that father planted long ago for mother, drop
cool, green shadows that stir with the wind.
My English ivy has crept about and about the
-- 085 --
[figure description] Page 085.[end figure description]
cross. Roy used to say that he should fancy
a cross to mark the spot where he might lie;
I think he would like this pure, unveined marble.
May-flowers cover the grave now, and
steal out among the clover-leaves with a flush
like sunrise. By and by there will be roses,
and, in August, August's own white lilies.
We went silently over, and sat silently down
on the grass, the field-path stretching away to
the little church behind us, and beyond, in
front, the slope, the flats, the river, the hills cut
in purple distance melting far into the east.
The air was thick with perfume. Golden bees
hung giddily over the blush in the grass. In
the low branches that swept the grave a little
bird had built her nest.
Aunt Winifred did not speak to me for a
time, nor watch my face. Presently she laid
her hand upon my lap, and I put mine into it.
“It is very pleasant here,” she said then, in
her very pleasant voice.
“I meant that it should be,” I answered,
trying not to let her see my lips quiver. “At
least it must not look neglected. I don't suppose
it makes any difference to him.”
“I do not feel sure of that.”
“What do you mean?”
-- 086 --
[figure description] Page 086.[end figure description]
“I do not feel sure that anything he has
left makes no `difference' to him.”
“But I don't understand. He is in heaven.
He would be too happy to care for anything
that is going on in this woful world.”
“Perhaps that is so,” she said, smiling a
sweet contradiction to her words, “but I don't
believe it.”
“What do you believe?”
“Many things that I have to say to you, but
you cannot bear them now.”
“I have sometimes wondered, for I cannot
help it,” I said, “whether he is shut off from
all knowledge of me for all these years till I
can go to him. It will be a great while. It
seems hard. Roy would want to know something,
if it were only a little, about me.”
“I believe that he wants to know, and that
he knows, Mary; though, since the belief must
rest on analogy and conjecture, you need not
accept it as demonstrated mathematics,” she
answered, with another smile.
“Roy never forgot me here!” I said, not
meaning to sob.
“That is just it. He was not constituted
so that he, remaining himself, Roy, could forget
you. If he goes out into this other life
-- 087 --
[figure description] Page 087.[end figure description]
forgetting, he becomes another than himself.
That is a far more unnatural way of creeping
out of the difficulty than to assume that he loves
and remembers. Why not assume that? In
fact, why assume anything else? Neither reason,
nor the Bible, nor common sense, forbids
it. Instead of starting with it as an hypothesis
to be proved if we can, I lay it down as one of
those probabilities for which Butler would say,
`the presumption amounts nearly to certainty';
and if any one can disprove it, I will hear what
he has to say. There!” she broke off, laughing
softly, “that is a sufficient dose of metaphysics
for such a simple thing. It seems
to me to lie just here: Roy loved you. Our
Father, for some tender, hidden reason, took
him out of your sight for a while. Though
changed much, he can have forgotten nothing.
Being only out of sight, you remember, not
lost, nor asleep, nor annihilated, he goes on
loving. To love must mean to think of, to
care for, to hope for, to pray for, not less out
of a body than in it.”
“But that must mean — why, that must
mean —”
“That he is near you. I do not doubt it.”
The sunshine quivered in among the ivy-leaves,
and I turned to watch it, thinking.
-- 088 --
[figure description] Page 088.[end figure description]
“I do not doubt,” she went on, speaking
low, — “I cannot doubt that our absent dead
are very present with us. He said, `I am with
you alway,' knowing the need we have of him,
even to the end of the world. He must understand
the need we have of them. I cannot
doubt it.”
I watched her as she sat with her absent
eyes turned eastward, and her peculiar look —
I have never seen it on another face — as of
one who holds a happy secret; and while I
watched I wondered.
“There is a reason for it,” she said, rousing
as if from a pleasant dream, — “a good sensible
reason, too, it strikes me, independent of
Scriptural or other proof.”
“What is that?”
“That God keeps us briskly at work in this
world.
I did not understand.
“Altogether too briskly, considering that it
is a preparative world, to intend to put us from
it into an idle one. What more natural than
that we shall spend our best energies as we
spent them here, — in comforting, teaching,
helping, saving people whose very souls we
love better than our own? In fact, it would
be very unnatural if we did not.”
-- 089 --
[figure description] Page 089.[end figure description]
“But I thought that God took care of us,
and angels, like Gabriel and the rest, if I ever
thought anything about it, which I am inclined
to doubt.”
“`God works by the use of means,' as the
preachers say. Why not use Roy as well as
Gabriel? What archangel could understand
and reach the peculiarities of your nature as
he could? or, even if understanding, could so
love and bear with you? What is to be done?
Will they send Roy to the planet Jupiter to
take care of somebody's else sister?”
I laughed in spite of myself; nor did the
laugh seem to jar upon the sacred stillness
of the place. Her words were drawing away
the bitterness, as the sun was blotting the dull,
dead greens of the ivy into its glow of golden
color.
“But the Bible, Aunt Winifred.”
“The Bible does not say a great deal on this
point,” she said, “but it does not contradict
me. In fact. it helps me; and, moreover, it
would uphold me in black and white if it
were n't for one little obstacle.”
“And that?”
“That frowning `original Greek,' which Gail
Hamilton denounces with her righteous
-- 090 --
[figure description] Page 090.[end figure description]
indignation. No sooner do I find a pretty verse
that is exactly what I want, than up hops a
commentator, and says, this is n't according
to text, and means something entirely different;
and Barnes says this, and Stuart believes
that, and Olshausen has demonstrated
the other, and very ignorant it is in you, too,
not to know it! Here the other day I ferreted
out a sentence in Revelation that seemed to
prove beyond question that angels and redeemed
men were the same; where the angel
says to John, you know, `Am I not of thy
brethren the prophets?' I thought that I had
discovered a delightful thing which all the
Fathers of the church had overlooked, and
went in great glee to your Uncle Calvin, to be
told that something was the matter, — a noun
left out, or some other unanswerable and unreasonable
horror, I don't know what; and that
it did n't mean that he was of thy brethren
the prophets at all!
“You see, if it could be proved that the
Christian dead become angels, we could have
all that we need, direct from God, about — to
use the beautiful old phrase — the communion
of saints. From Genesis to Revelation the
Bible is filled with angels who are at work on
-- 091 --
[figure description] Page 091.[end figure description]
earth. They hold sweet converse with Abraham
in his tent. They are intrusted to save
the soul of Lot. An angel hears the wail of
Hagar. The beautiful feet of an angel bring
the good tidings to maiden Mary. An angel's
noiseless step guides Peter through the barred
and bolted gate. Angels rolled the stone from
the buried Christ, and angels sat there in the
solemn morning, — O Mary! if we could
have seen them!
“Then there is that one question, direct,
comprehensive, — we should not need anything
else, — `Are they not all ministering spirits, sent
forth to minister to the heirs of salvation?'
“But you see it never seems to have entered
those commentators' heads that all these beautiful
things refer to any but a superior race of
beings, like those from whose ranks Lucifer
fell.”
“How stupid in them!”
“I take comfort in thinking so; but, to be
serious, even admitting that these passages
refer to a superior race, must there not be some
similarity in the laws which govern existence
in the heavenly world? Since these gracious
deeds are performed by what we are accustomed
to call `spiritual beings,' why may they
-- 092 --
[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]
not as well be done by people from this world
as from anywhere else? Besides, there is
another point, and a reasonable one, to be
made. The word angel in the original* means,
strictly, a messenger. It applies to any servant
of God, animate or inanimate. An east wind
is as much an angel as Michael. Again, the
generic terms, `spirits,' `gods,' `sons of God,'
are used interchangeably for saints and for
angels. So, you see, I fancy that I find a way
for you and Roy and me and all of us, straight
into the shining ministry. Mary, Mary,
would n't you like to go this very afternoon?”
She lay back in the grass, with her face upturned
to the sky, and drew a long breath,
wearily. I do not think she meant me to hear
it. I did not answer her, for it came over me
with such a hopeless thrill, how good it
would be to be taken to Roy, there by his
beautiful grave, with the ivy and the May-flowers
and the sunlight and the clover-leaves
round about; and that it could not be, and
how long it was to wait, — it came over me so
that I could not speak.
“There!” she said, suddenly rousing, “what
a thoughtless, wicked thing it was to say!
-- 093 --
[figure description] Page 093.[end figure description]
And I meant to give you only the good cheer
of a cheery friend. No, I do not care to go this
afternoon, nor any afternoon, till my Father
is ready for me. Wherever he has most
for me to do, there I wish, — yes, I think I
wish to stay. He knows best.”
After a pause, I asked again, “Why did He
not tell us more about this thing, — about their
presence with us? You see if I could know
it!”
“The mystery of the Bible lies not so much
in what it says, as in what it does not say,” she
replied. “But I suppose that we have been
told all that we can comprehend in this world.
Knowledge on one point might involve knowledge
on another, like the links of a chain, till
it stretched far beyond our capacity. At any
rate, it is not for me to break the silence.
That is God's affair. I can only accept the
fact. Nevertheless, as Dr. Chalmers says: `It
were well for us all could we carefully draw
the line between the secret things which belong
to God and the things which are revealed
and belong to us and to our children.' Some
one else, — Whately, I think, — I remember to
have noticed as speaking about these very subjects
to this effect, — that precisely because we
-- 094 --
[figure description] Page 094.[end figure description]
know so little of them, it is the more important
that we `should endeavor so to dwell on them
as to make the most of what little knowledge
we have.'”
“Aunt Winifred, you are such a comfort!”
“It needs our best faith,” she said, “to bear
this reticence of God. I cannot help thinking
sometimes of a thing Lauderdale said, — I am
always quoting him, — from `Son of the Soil,'
you remember: `It 's an awfu' marvel, beyond
my reach, when a word of communication
would make a' the difference, why it 's no permitted,
if it were but to keep a heart from
breaking now and then.' Think of poor
Eugénie de Guèrin, trying to continue her
little journal `To Maurice in Heaven,' till the
awful, answerless stillness shut up the book
and laid aside the pen.
“But then,” she continued, “there is this
to remember, — I may have borrowed the
idea, or it may be my own, — that if we could
speak to them, or they to us, there would
be no death, for there would be no separation.
The last, the surest, in some cases the
only test of loyalty to God, would thus be
taken away. Roman Catholic nature is human
nature, when it comes upon its knees
-- 095 --
[figure description] Page 095.[end figure description]
before a saint. Many lives — all such lives as
yours and mine — would become —”
“Would become what?”
“One long defiance to the First Commandment.”
I cannot become used to such words from
such quiet lips. Yet they give me a curious
sense of the trustworthiness of her peace.
“Founded upon a rock,” it seems to be. She
has done what it takes a lifetime for some of us
to do; what some of us go into eternity,
leaving undone; what I am afraid I shall never
do, — sounded her own nature. She knows
the worst of herself, and faces it as fairly, I believe,
as anybody can do in this world. As
for the best of herself, she trusts that to Christ,
and he knows it, and we. I hope she, in her
sweet humbleness, will know it some day.
“I suppose, nevertheless,” she said, “that
Roy knows what you are doing and feeling as
well as, perhaps better than, he knew it three
months ago. So he can help you without
harming you.”
I asked her, turning suddenly, how that
could be, and yet heaven be heaven, — how he
could see me suffer what I had suffered, could
see me sometimes when I supposed none but
-- 096 --
[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]
God had seen me, — and sing on and be
happy.
“You are not the first, Mary, and you will
not be the last, to ask that question. I cannot
answer it, and I never heard of any who
could. I feel sure only of this, — that he would
suffer far less to see you than to know nothing
about you; and that God's power of inventing
happiness is not to be blocked by an obstacle
like this. Perhaps Roy sees the end from the
beginning, and can bear the sight of pain for
the peace that he watches coming to meet
you. I do not know, — that does not perplex
me now; it only makes me anxious for one
thing.”
“What is that?”
“That you and I shall not do anything to
make them sorry.”
“To make them sorry?”
“Roy would care. Roy would be disappointed
to see you make life a hopeless thing
for his sake, or to see you doubt his Saviour.”
“Do you think that?”
“Some sort of mourning over sin enters
that happy life. God himself `was grieved'
forty years long over his wandering people.
Among the angels there has been `silence,'
-- 097 --
[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]
whatever that mysterious pause may mean,
just as there is joy over one sinner that
repenteth; another of my proof-texts that, to
show that they are allowed to keep us in
sight.”
“Then you think, you really think, that Roy
remembers and loves and takes care of me;
that he has been listening, perhaps, and is —
why, you don't think he may be here?”
“Yes, I do. Here, close beside you all this
time, trying to speak to you through the blessed
sunshine and the flowers, trying to help
you, and sure to love you, — right here, dear.
I do not believe God means to send him away
from you, either.”
My heart was too full to answer her.
Seeing how it was, she slipped away, and, strolling
out of sight with her face to the eastern
hills, left me alone.
And yet I did not seem alone. The low
branches swept with a little soft sigh across
the grave; the May-flowers wrapped me in
with fragrance thick as incense; the tiny
sparrow turned her soft eyes at me over the
edge of the nest, and chirped contentedly; the
“blessed sunshine” talked with me as it
touched the edges of the ivy-leaves to fire.
-- 098 --
[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]
I cannot write it even here, how these
things stole into my heart and hushed me. If
I had seen him standing by the stainless cross,
it would not have frightened or surprised me.
There — not dead or gone, but there — it helps
me, and makes me strong!
“Mamie! little Mamie!”
O Roy, I will try to bear it all, if you will
only stay!
eaf734n1* .
-- 099 --
VIII.
[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]
May 20.
The nearer the time has come for Aunt
Winifred to go, the more it has seemed impossible
to part with her. I have run away from
the thought like a craven, till she made me
face it this morning, by saying decidedly that
she should go on the first of the week.
I dropped my sewing; the work-basket
tipped over, and all my spools rolled away
under the chairs. I had a little time to think
while I was picking them up.
“There is the rest of my visit at Norwich to
be made, you know,” she said, “and while I
am there I shall form some definite plans for
the summer; I have hardly decided what, yet.
I had better leave here by the seven o'clock
train, if such an early start will not incommode
you.”
I wound up the last spool, and turned away
to the window. There was a confused, dreary
sky of scurrying clouds, and a cold wind was
-- 100 --
[figure description] Page 100.[end figure description]
bruising the apple-buds. I hate a cold wind
in May. It made me choke a little, thinking
how I should sit and listen to it after she was
gone, — of the old, blank, comfortless days that
must come and go, — of what she had brought,
and what she would take away. I was a bit
faint, I think, for a minute. I had not really
thought the prospect through, before.
“Mary,” she said, “what 's the matter?
Come here.”
I went over, and she drew me into her lap,
and I put my arms about her neck.
“I can not bear it,” said I, “and that is the
matter.”
She smiled, but her smile faded when she
looked at me.
And then I told her, sobbing, how it was;
that I could not go into my future alone, — I
could not do it! that she did not know how
weak I was, — and reckless, — and wicked; that
she did not know what she had been to me.
I begged her not to leave me. I begged her
to stay and help me bear my life.
“My dear! you are as bad as Faith when I
put her to bed alone.”
“But,” I said, “when Faith cries, you go to
her, you know.”
-- 101 --
[figure description] Page 101.[end figure description]
“Are you quite in earnest, Mary?” she
asked, after a pause. “You don't know very
much about me, after all, and there is the
child. It is always an experiment, bringing
two families into lifelong relations under one
roof. If I could think it best, you might repent
your bargain.”
“I am not `a family,'” I said, feebly trying
to laugh. “Aunt Winifred, if you and Faith
only will make this your home, I can never
thank you, never. I shall be entertaining my
good angels, and that is the whole of it.”
“I have had some thought of not going back,”
she said at last, in a low, constrained voice, as
if she were touching something that gave her
great pain, “for Faith's sake. I should like to
educate her in New England, if — I had intended
if we stayed to rent or buy a little
home of our own somewhere, but I had been
putting off a decision. We are most weak
and most selfish sometimes when we think
ourselves strongest and noblest, Mary. I love
my husband's people. I think they love me.
I was almost happy with them. It seemed as
if I were carrying on his work for him. That
was so pleasant!”
She put me down out of her arms and walked
across the room.
-- 102 --
[figure description] Page 102.[end figure description]
“I will think the matter over,” she said, by
and by, in her natural tones, “and let you know
to-night.”
She went away up stairs then, and I did not
see her again until to-night. I sent Faith up
with her dinner and tea, judging that she
would rather see the child than me. I observed,
when the dishes came down, that she
had touched nothing but a cup of coffee.
I began to understand, as I sat alone in the
parlor through the afternoon, how much I had
asked of her. In my selfish distress at losing
her, I had not thought of that. Faces that
her husband loved, meadows and hills and sunsets
that he has watched, the home where his
last step sounded and his last word was spoken,
the grave where she has laid him, — this last
more than all, — call after her, and cling to
her with yearning closeness. To leave them,
is to leave the last faint shadow of her beautiful
past. It hurts, but she is too brave to cry out.
Tea was over, and Faith in bed, but still she
did not come down. I was sitting by the window,
watching a little crescent moon climb over
the hills, and wondering whether I had better
go up, when she came in and stood behind me,
and said, attempting to laugh: —
-- 103 --
[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]
“Very impolite in me to run off so, was n't
it? Cowardly, too, I think. Well, Mary?”
“Well, Auntie?”
“Have you not repented your proposition
yet?”
“You would excel as an inquisitor, Mrs.
Forceythe!”
“Then it shall be as you say; as long as
you want us you shall have us, — Faith and
me.”
I turned to thank her, but could not when
I saw her face. It was very pale; there was
something inexpressibly sad about her mouth,
and her eyelids drooped heavily, like one weary
from a great struggle.
Feeling for the moment guilty and ashamed
before her, as if I had done her wrong, “It is
going to be very hard for you,” I said.
“Never mind about that,” she answered,
quickly. “We will not talk about that. I
knew, though I did not wish to know, that it
was best for Faith. Your hands about my
neck have settled it. Where the work is, there
the laborer must be. It is quite plain now.
I have been talking it over with them all the
afternoon; it seems to be what they want.”
“With them”? I started at the words; who
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had been in her lonely chamber? Ah, it is
simply real to her. Who, indeed, but her
Saviour and her husband?
She did not seem inclined to talk, and stole
away from me presently, and out of doors; she
was wrapped in her blanket shawl, and had
thrown a shimmering white hood over her gray
hair. I wondered where she could be going,
and sat still at the window watching her. She
opened and shut the gate softly; and, turning
her face towards the churchyard, walked up
the street and out of my sight.
She feels nearer to him in the resting-place
of the dead. Her heart cries after the grave
by which she will never sit and weep again;
on which she will never plant the roses any
more.
As I sat watching and thinking this, the
faint light struck her slight figure and little
shimmering hood again, and she walked down
the street and in with steady step.
When she came up and stood beside me,
smiling, with the light knitted thing thrown
back on her shoulders, her face seemed to rise
from it as from a snowy cloud; and for her
look, — I wish Raphael could have had it for
one of his rapt Madonnas.
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“Now, Mary,” she said, with the sparkle
back again in her voice, “I am ready to be
entertaining, and promise not to play the
hermit again very soon. Shall I sit here on
the sofa with you? Yes, my dear, I am happy,
quite happy.”
So then we took this new promise of home
that has come to make my life, if not joyful,
something less than desolate, and analyzed it
in its practical bearings. What a pity that all
pretty dreams have to be analyzed! I had
some notion about throwing our little incomes
into a joint family fund, but she put a veto to
that; I suppose because mine is the larger.
She prefers to take board for herself and Faith;
but, if I know myself, she shall never be suffered
to have the feeling of a boarder, and I
will make her so much at home in my house
that she shall not remember that it is not her
own.
Her visit to Norwich she has decided to put
off until the autumn, so that I shall have her
to myself undisturbed all summer.
I have been looking at Roy's picture a long
time, and wondering how he would like the
new plan. I said something of the sort to her.
“Why put any `would' in that sentence?”
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she said, smiling. “It belongs in the present
tense.”
“Then I am sure he likes it,” I answered,—
“he likes it,” and I said the words over till
I was ready to cry for rest in their sweet
sound.
22d.
It is Roy's birthday. But I have not spoken
of it. We used to make a great deal of these
little festivals, — but it is of no use to write
about that.
I am afraid I have been bearing it very badly
all day. She noticed my face, but said nothing
till to-night. Mrs. Bland was down stairs, and
I had come away alone up here in the dark.
I heard her asking for me, but would not go
down. By and by Aunt Winifred knocked,
and I let her in.
“Mrs. Bland cannot understand why you
don't see her, Mary,” she said, gently. “You
know you have not thanked her for those
English violets that she sent the other day.
I only thought I would remind you; she might
feel a little pained.”
“I can't to-night, — not to-night, Aunt Winifred.
You must excuse me to her somehow.
I don't want to go down.”
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“Is it that you don't `want to,' or is it that
you can't?” she said, in that gentle, motherly
way of hers, at which I can never take offence.
“Mary, I wonder if Roy would not a little
rather that you would go down?”
It might have been Roy himself who spoke.
I went down.
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IX.
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June 1.
Aunt Winifred went to the office this morning,
and met Dr. Bland, who walked home
with her. He always likes to talk with her.
A woman who knows something about fate,
free-will, and foreknowledge absolute, who is
not ignorant of politics, and talks intelligently
of Agassiz's latest fossil, who can understand a
German quotation, and has heard of Strauss
and Neander, who can dash her sprightliness
ably against his old dry bones of metaphysics
and theology, yet never speak an accent above
that essentially womanly voice of hers, is, I
imagine, a phenomenon in his social experience.
I was sitting at the window when they came
up and stopped at the gate. Dr. Bland lifted
his hat to me in his grave way, talking the
while; somewhat eagerly, too, I could see.
Aunt Winifred answered him with a peculiar
smile and a few low words that I could not
hear.
“But, my dear madam,” he said, “the glory
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of God, you see, the glory of God is the primary
consideration.”
“But the glory of God involves these lesser
glories, as a sidereal system, though a splendid
whole, exists by the multiplied differing of one
star from another star. Ah, Dr. Bland, you
make a grand abstraction out of it, but it
makes me cold,” — she shivered, half playfully,
half involuntarily, — “it makes me cold. I am
very much alive and human; and Christ was
human God.”
She came in smiling a little sadly, and stood
by me, watching the minister walk over the
hill.
“How much does that man love his wife
and children?” she asked abruptly.
“A good deal. Why?”
“I am afraid that he will lose one of them
then, before many more years of his life are
past.”
“What! he has n't been telling you that
they are consumptive or anything of the
sort?”
“O dear me, no,” with a merry laugh which
died quickly away: “I was only thinking, —
there is trouble in store for him; some intense
pain, — if he is capable of intense pain,
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— which shall shake his cold, smooth theorizing
to the foundation. He speaks a foreign
tongue when he talks of bereavement, of death,
of the future life. No argument could convince
him of that, though, which is the worst
of it.”
“He must think you shockingly heterodox.”
“I don't doubt it. We had a little talk this
morning, and he regarded me with an expression
of mingled consternation and perplexity
that was curious. He is a very good man.
He is not a stupid man. I only wish that he
would stop preaching and teaching things that
he knows nothing about.
“He is only drifting with the tide, though,”
she added, “in his views of this matter. In
our recoil from the materialism of the Romish
Church, we have, it seems to me, nearly
stranded ourselves on the opposite shore.
Just as, in a rebound from the spirit which
would put our Saviour on a level with Buddha
or Mahomet, we have been in danger of forgetting
`to begin as the Bible begins,' with his
humanity. It is the grandeur of inspiration,
that it knows how to balance truth.”
It had been in my mind for several days to
ask Aunt Winifred something, and, feeling in
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the mood, I made her take off her things and
devote herself to me. My question concerned
what we call the “intermediate state.”
“I have been expecting that,” she said;
“what about it?”
“What is it?”
“Life and activity.”
“We do not go to sleep, of course.”
“I believe that notion is about exploded,
though clear thinkers like Whately have appeared
to advocate it. Where it originated, I
do not know, unless from the frequent comparisons
in the Scriptures of death with sleep,
which refer solely, I am convinced, to the
condition of body, and which are voted down
by an overwhelming majority of decided
statements relative to the consciousness, happiness,
and tangibility of the life into which we
immediately pass.”
“It is intermediate, in some sense, I suppose.”
“It waits between two other conditions, —
yes; I think the drift of what we are taught
about it leads to that conclusion. I expect to
become at once sinless, but to have a broader
Christian character many years hence; to be
happy at once, but to be happier by and by;
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to find in myself wonderful new tastes and
capacities, which are to be immeasurably ennobled
and enlarged after the Resurrection,
whatever that may mean.”
“What does it mean?”
“I know no more than you, but you shall
hear what I think, presently. I was going to
say that this seems to be plain enough in the
Bible. The angels took Lazarus at once to
Abraham. Dives seems to have found no
interval between death and consciousness of
suffering.”
“They always tell you that that is only a
parable.”
“But it must mean something. No story in
the Bible has been pulled to pieces and twisted
about as that has been. We are in danger
of pulling and twisting all sense out of it.
Then Judas, having hanged his wretched self,
went to his own place. Besides, there was
Christ's promise to the thief.”
I told her that I had heard Dr. Bland say
that we could not place much dependence on
that passage, because “Paradise” did not necessarily
mean heaven.
“But it meant living, thinking, enjoying; for
`To-day thou shalt be with me.' Paul's
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beautiful perplexed revery, however, would be enough
if it stood alone; for he did not know whether
he would rather stay in this world, or depart
and be with Christ, which is far better. With
Christ, you see; and His three mysterious days,
which typify our intermediate state, were
over then, and he had ascended to his Father.
Would it be `far better' either to leave this
actual tangible life throbbing with hopes and
passions, to leave its busy, Christ-like working,
its quiet joys, its very sorrows which are near
and human, for a nap of several ages, or even
for a vague, lazy, half-alive, disembodied existence?”
“Disembodied? I supposed, of course, that
it was disembodied.”
“I do not think so. And that brings us to
the Resurrection. All the tendency of Revelation
is to show that an embodied state is superior
to a disembodied one. Yet certainly we
who love God are promised that death will
lead us into a condition which shall have the
advantage of this: for the good apostle to die
`was gain.' I don't believe, for instance, that
Adam and Eve have been wandering about in
a misty condition all these thousands of years.
I suspect that we have some sort of body
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immediately after passing out of this, but that
there is to come a mysterious change, equivalent,
perhaps, to a re-embodiment, when our capacities
for action will be greatly improved, and
that in some manner this new form will be connected
with this `garment by the soul laid by.'”
“Deacon Quirk expects to rise in his own
entire, original body, after it has lain in the
First Church cemetery a proper number of
years, under a black slate headstone, adorned
by a willow, and such a `cherubim' as that
poor boy shot, — by the way, if I 've laughed
at that story once, I have fifty times.”
“Perhaps Deacon Quirk would admire a
work of art that I found stowed away on the
top of your Uncle Calvin's bookcases. It was
an old woodcut — nobody knows how old —
of an interesting skeleton rising from his grave,
and, in a sprightly and modest manner, drawing
on his skin, while Gabriel, with apoplectic
cheeks, feet uppermost in the air, was blowing
a good-sized tin trumpet in his ear!
“No; some of the popular notions of resurrection
are simple physiological impossibilities,
from causes `too tedious to specify.' Imagine,
for instance, the resurrection of two Hottentots,
one of whom has happened to make a
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dinner of the other some fine day. A little
complication there! Or picture the touching
scene, when that devoted husband, King Mausolas,
whose widow had him burned and ate
the ashes, should feel moved to institute a
search for his body! It is no wonder that
the infidel argument has the best of it, when
we attempt to enforce a natural impossibility.
It is worth while to remember that Paul expressly
stated that we shall not rise in our
entire earthly bodies. The simile which he
used is the seed sown, dying in, and mingling
with, the ground. How many of its original
particles are found in the full-grown corn?”
“Yet you believe that something belonging
to this body is preserved for the completion of
another?”
“Certainly. I accept God's statement about
it, which is as plain as words can make a statement.
I do not know, and I do not care to
know, how it is to be effected. God will not
be at a loss for a way, any more than he is at a
loss for a way to make his fields blossom every
spring. For aught we know, some invisible
compound of an annihilated body may hover,
by a divine decree, around the site of death
till it is wanted, — sufficient to preserve identity
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as strictly as a body can ever be said to preserve
it; and stranger things have happened.
You remember the old Mohammedan belief
in the one little bone which is imperishable.
Prof. Bush's idea of our triune existence is
suggestive, for a notion. He believed, you
know, that it takes a material body, a spiritual
body, and a soul, to make a man. The spiritual
body is enclosed within the material, the
soul within the spiritual. Death is simply the
slipping off of the outer body, as a husk slips
off from its kernel. The deathless frame
stands ready then for the soul's untrammelled
occupation. But it is a waste of time to speculate
over such useless fancies, while so many
remain that will vitally affect our happiness.”
It is singular; but I never gave a serious
thought — and I have done some thinking
about other matters — to my heavenly body,
till that moment, while I sat listening to her.
In fact, till Roy went, the Future was a miserable,
mysterious blank, to be drawn on and
on in eternal and joyless monotony, and to
which, at times, annihilation seemed preferable.
I remember, when I was a child, asking father
once, if I were so good that I had to go to
heaven, whether, after a hundred years, God
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would not let me “die out.” More or less of
the disposition of that same desperate little
sinner I suspect has always clung to me. So
I asked Aunt Winifred, in some perplexity,
what she supposed our bodies would be like.
“It must be nearly all `suppose,'” she said,
“for we are nowhere definitely told. But this
is certain. They will be as real as these.”
“But these you can see, you can touch.”
“What would be the use of having a body
that you can't see and touch? A body is a
body, not a spirit. Why should you not, having
seen Roy's old smile and heard his own voice,
clasp his hand again, and feel his kiss on your
happy lips?
“It is really amusing,” she continued, “to
sum up the notions that good people — excellent
people — even thinking people — have of
the heavenly body. Vague visions of floating
about in the clouds, of balancing — with a
white robe on, perhaps — in stiff rows about
a throne, like the angels in the old pictures,
converging to an apex, or ranged in semicircles
like so many marbles. Murillo has one
charming exception. I always take a secret
delight in that little cherub of his, kicking the
clouds, in the right-hand upper corner of
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the Immaculate Conception; he seems to be
having a good time of it, in genuine baby-fashion.
The truth is, that the ordinary idea,
if sifted accurately, reduces our eternal personality
to — gas.
“Isaac Taylor holds, that, as far as the abstract
idea of spirit is concerned, it may just
as reasonably be granite as ether.
“Mrs. Charles says a pretty thing about
this. She thinks these `super-spiritualized
angels' very `unsatisfactory' beings, and that
`the heart returns with loving obstinacy to
the young men in long white garments' who
sat waiting in the sepulchre.
“Here again I cling to my conjecture about
the word `angel'; for then we should learn emphatically
something about our future selves.
“`As the angels in heaven,' or `equal unto
the angels,' we are told in another place, — that
may mean simply what it says. At least, if
we are to resemble them in the particular
respect of which the words were spoken, —
and that one of the most important which
could well be selected, — it is not unreasonable
to infer that we shall resemble them in others.
`In the Resurrection,' by the way, means, in
that connection and in many others, simply
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future state of existence, without any reference
to the time at which the great bodily change
is to come.
“`But this is a digression,' as the novelists
say. I was going to say, that it bewilders me
to conjecture where students of the Bible have
discovered the usual foggy nonsense about the
corporeity of heaven.
“If there is anything laid down in plain
statement, devoid of metaphor or parable, simple
and unequivocal, it is the definite contradiction
of all that. Paul, in his preface to that
sublime apostrophe to death, repeats and reiterates
it, lest we should make a mistake in
his meaning.
“`There are celestial bodies.' `It is raised
a spiritual body.' `There is a spiritual body.'
`It is raised in incorruption.' `It is raised
in glory.' `It is raised in power.' Moses, too,
when he came to the transfigured mount in
glory, had as real a body as when he went
into the lonely mount to die.”
“But they will be different from these?”
“The glory of the terrestrial is one, the
glory of the celestial another. Take away
sin and sickness and misery, and that of itself
would make difference enough.”
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“You do not suppose that we shall look
as we look now?”
“I certainly do. At least, I think it more
than possible that the `human form divine,'
or something like it, is to be retained. Not
only from the fact that risen Elijah bore it;
and Moses, who, if he had not passed through
his resurrection, does not seem to have looked
different from the other, — I have to use those
two poor prophets on all occasions, but, as
we are told of them neither by parable nor
picture, they are important, — and that angels
never appeared in any other, but because, in
sinless Eden, God chose it for Adam and Eve.
What came in unmarred beauty direct from
His hand cannot be unworthy of His other
Paradise `beyond the stars.' It would chime
in pleasantly, too, with the idea of Redemption,
that our very bodies, free from all the
distortion of guilt, shall return to something
akin to the pure ideal in which He moulded
them. Then there is another reason, and
stronger.”
“What is that?”
“The human form has been borne and dignified
forever by Christ. And, further than
that, He ascended to His Father in it, and lives
there in it as human God to-day.”
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I had never thought of that, and said so.
“Yes, with the very feet which trod the dusty
road to Emmaus; the very wounded hands
which Thomas touched, believing; the very
lips which ate of the broiled fish and honey-comb;
the very voice which murmured `Mary!'
in the garden, and which told her that He ascended
unto His Father and her Father, to His
God and her God, He `was parted from them,'
and was `received up into heaven.' His
death and resurrection stand forever the great
prototype of ours. Otherwise, what is the
meaning of such statements as these: `When
He shall appear, we shall be like Him'; `The
first man (Adam) is of the earth; the second
man is the Lord. As we have borne the image
of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of
the heavenly'? And what of this, when we
are told that our `vile bodies,' being changed,
shall be fashioned `like unto His glorious
body'?”
I asked her if she inferred from that, that
we should have just such bodies as the freedom
from pain and sin would make of these.
“Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom,”
she said. “There is no escaping that,
even if I had the smallest desire to escape
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it, which I have not. Whatever is essentially
earthly and temporary in the arrangements of
this world will be out of place and unnecessary
there. Earthly and temporary, flesh and
blood certainly are.”
“Christ said `A spirit hath not flesh and
bones, as ye see me have.”
“A spirit hath not; and who ever said that
it did? His body had something that appeared
like them, certainly. That passage, by
the way, has led some ingenious writer on
the Chemistry of Heaven to infer that our
bodies there will be like these, minus blood!
I don't propose to spend my time over such
investigations. Summing up the meaning of
the story of those last days before the Ascension,
and granting the shade of mystery which
hangs over them, I gather this, — that the spiritual
body is real, is tangible, is visible, is human,
but that `we shall be changed.' Some
indefinable but thorough change had come
over Him. He could withdraw Himself from
the recognition of Mary, and from the disciples,
whose `eyes were holden,' as it pleased
Him. He came and went through barred and
bolted doors. He appeared suddenly in a certain
place, without sound of footstep or flutter
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of garment to announce His approach. He
vanished, and was not, like a cloud. New and
wonderful powers had been given to Him, of
which, probably, His little bewildered group
of friends saw but a few illustrations.”
“And He was yet man?”
“He was Jesus of Nazareth until the sorrowful
drama of human life that He had taken
upon Himself was thoroughly finished, from
manger to sepulchre, and from sepulchre to
the right hand of His Father.”
“I like to wonder,” she said, presently, “what
we are going to look like and be like. Ourselves,
in the first place. `It is I Myself,'
Christ said. Then to be perfectly well, never
a sense of pain or weakness, — imagine how
much solid comfort, if one had no other, in
being forever rid of all the ills that flesh is
heir to! Beautiful, too, I suppose we shall be,
every one. Have you never had that come
over you, with a thrill of compassionate thankfulness,
when you have seen a poor girl shrinking,
as only girls can shrink, under the life-long
affliction of a marred face or form? The loss
or presence of beauty is not as slight a deprivation
or blessing as the moralists would make
it out. Your grandmother, who was the most
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beautiful woman I ever saw, the belle of the
county all her young days, and the model for
artists' fancy sketching even in her old ones,
as modest as a violet and as honest as the sunshine,
used to have the prettiest little way
when we girls were in our teens, and she
thought that we must be lectured a bit on
youthful vanity, of adding, in her quiet voice,
smoothing down her black silk apron as she
spoke, `But still it is a thing to be thankful
for, my dear, to have a comely countenance.'
“But to return to the track and our future
bodies. We shall find them vastly convenient,
undoubtedly, with powers of which there is no
dreaming. Perhaps they will be so one with the
soul that to will will be to do, — hindrance out
of the question. I, for instance, sitting here
by you, and thinking that I should like to
be in Kansas, would be there. There is an
interesting bit of a hint in Daniel about
Gabriel, who, `being caused to fly swiftly,
touched him about the time of the evening
oblation.'”
“But do you not make a very material kind
of heaven out of such suppositions?”
“It depends upon what you mean by `material.
' The term does not, to my thinking, imply
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degradation, except so far as it is associated
with sin. Dr. Chalmers has the right of it,
when he talks about `spiritual materialism.'
He says in his sermon on the New Heavens
and Earth, — which, by the way, you should
read, and from which I wish a few more of
our preachers would learn something, — that
we `forget that on the birth of materialism,
when it stood out in the freshness of those
glories which the great Architect of Nature
had impressed upon it, that then the “morning
stars sang together, and all the sons of God
shouted for joy.'” I do not believe in a gross
heaven, but I believe in a reasonable one.”
4th.
We have been devoting ourselves to feminine
vanities all day out in the orchard. Aunt
Winifred has been making her summer bonnet,
and I some linen collars. I saw, though she
said nothing, that she thought the crêpe a little
gloomy, and I am going to wear these in the
mornings to please her.
She has an accumulation of work on hand,
and in the afternoon I offered to tuck a little
dress for Faith, — the prettiest pink barège
affair, pale as a blush rose, and about as
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delicate. Faith, who had been making mud-pies
in the swamp, and was spattered with black
peat from curls to stockings, looked on approvingly,
and wanted it to wear on a flag-root
expedition to-morrow. It seemed to do me
good to do something for somebody after all
this lonely and — I suspect — selfish idleness.
6th.
I read a little of Dr. Chalmers to-day, and
went laughing to Aunt Winifred with the first
sentence.
“There is a limit to the revelations of the
Bible about futurity, and it were a mental or
spiritual trespass to go beyond it.”
“Ah! but,” she said, “look a little farther
down.”
And I read, “But while we attempt not to
be `wise above that which is written,' we should
attempt, and that most studiously, to be wise
up to that which is written.”
8th.
It occurred to me to-day, that it was a noticeable
fact, that, among all the visits of angels to
this world of which we are told, no one seems
to have discovered in any the presence of a
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dead friend. If redeemed men are subject to
the same laws as they, why did such a thing
never happen? I asked Aunt Winifred, and
she said that the question reminded her of
St. Augustine's lonely cry thirty years after
the death of Monica: “Ah, the dead do not
come back; for, had it been possible, there
has not been a night when I should not have
seen my mother!” There seemed to be two
reasons, she said, why there should be no exceptions
to the law of silence imposed between
us and those who have left us; one of which
was, that we should be overpowered with familiar
curiosity about them, which nobody seems
to have dared to express in the presence of
angels, and the secrets of their life God has
decreed that it is unlawful to utter.
“But Lazarus, and Jairus's little daughter,
and the dead raised at the Crucifixion, — what
of them?” I asked.
“I cannot help conjecturing that they were
suffered to forget their glimpse of spiritual
life,” she said. “Since their resurrection was a
miracle, there might be a miracle throughout.
At least, their lips must have been sealed, for
not a word of their testimony has been saved.
When Lazarus dined with Simon, after he
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had come back to life, — and of that feast
we have a minute account in, I believe, every
Gospel, — nobody seems to have asked, or he
to have answered, any questions about it.
“The other reason is a sorrowfully sufficient
one. It is that every lost darling has not gone
to heaven. Of all the mercies that our Father
has given, this blessed uncertainty, this long
unbroken silence, may be the dearest. Bitterly
hard for you and me, but what are thousands
like you and me weighed against one who
stands beside a hopeless grave? Think a
minute what mourners there have been, and
whom they have mourned! Ponder one such
solitary instance as that of Vittoria Colonna,
wondering, through her widowed years, if she
could ever be `good enough' to join wicked
Pescara in another world! This poor earth
holds — God only knows how many, God make
them very few! — Vittorias. Ah, Mary, what
right have we to complain?”
9th.
To-night Aunt Winifred had callers, — Mrs.
Quirk and (O Homer aristocracy!) the butcher's
wife, — and it fell to my lot to put Faith
to bed.
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The little maiden seriously demurred. Cousin
Mary was very good, — O yes, she was good
enough, — but her mamma was a great deal
gooder; and why could n't little peoples sit up
till nine o'clock as well as big peoples, she
should like to know!
Finally, she came to the gracious conclusion
that perhaps I 'd do, made me carry her all
the way up stairs, and dropped, like a little
lump of lead, half asleep, on my shoulder,
before two buttons were unfastened.
Feeling under some sort of theological obligation
to hear her say her prayers, I pulled
her curls a little till she awoke, and went
through with “Now I lay me down to
sleep, I pway ve Lord,” triumphantly. I
supposed that was the end, but it seems that
she has been also taught the Lord's Prayer,
which she gave me promptly to understand.
“O, see here! That is n't all. I can say
Our Father, and you 've got to help me a
lot!”
This very soon became a self-evident proposition;
but by our united efforts we managed,
after tribulations manifold, to arrive successfully
at “For ever 'n' ever 'n' ever 'n' A-men.”
“Dear me,” she said, jumping up with a
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yawn, “I think that 's a dreadful long-tailed
prayer, — don't you, Cousin Mary?”
“Now I must kiss mamma good night,” she
announced, when she was tucked up at last.
“But mamma kissed you good night before
you came up.”
“O, so she did. Yes, I 'member. Well,
it 's papa I 've got to kiss. I knew there was
somebody.”
I looked at her in perplexity.
“Why, there!” she said, “in the upper
drawer, — my pretty little papa in a purple
frame. Don't you know?”
I went to the bureau-drawer, and found in a
case of velvet a small ivory painting of her
father. This I brought, wondering, and the
child took it reverently and kissed the pictured
lips.
“Faith,” I said, as I laid it softly back, “do
you always do this?”
“Do what? Kiss papa good night? O
yes, I 've done that ever since I was a little
girl, you know. I guess I 've always kissed
him pretty much. When I 'm a naughty girl
he feels real sorry. He 's gone to heaven. I
like him. O yes, and then, when I 'm through
kissing, mamma kisses him too.”
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X.
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June 11.
I was in her room this afternoon while she
was dressing. I like to watch her brush her
beautiful gray hair; it quite alters her face to
have it down; it seems to shrine her in like a
cloud, and the outlines of her cheeks round
out, and she grows young.
“I used to be proud of my hair when I was
a girl,” she said with a slight blush, as she saw
me looking at her; “it was all I had to be
vain of, and I made the most of it. Ah well!
I was dark-haired three years ago.
“O you regular old woman!” she added,
smiling at herself in the mirror, as she twisted
the silver coils flashing through her fingers.
“Well, when I am in heaven, I shall have my
pretty brown hair again.”
It seemed odd enough to hear that; then the
next minute it did not seem odd at all, but the
most natural thing in the world.
June 14.
She said nothing to me about the anniversary,
and, though it has been in my thoughts
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all the time, I said nothing to her. I thought
that she would shut herself up for the day, and
was rather surprised that she was about as
usual, busily at work, chatting with me, and
playing with Faith. Just after tea, she went
away alone for a time, and came back a little
quiet, but that was all. I was for some reason
impressed with the feeling that she kept the
day in memory, not so much as the day of her
mourning, as of his release.
Longing to do something for her, yet not
knowing what to do, I went into the garden
while she was away, and, finding some carnations,
that shone like stars in the dying light, I
gathered them all, and took them to her room,
and, filling my tiny porphyry vase, left them on
the bracket, under the photograph of Uncle
Forceythe that hangs by the window.
When she found them, she called me, and
kissed me.
“Thank you, dear,” she said, “and thank
God too, Mary, for me. That he should have
been happy, — happy and out of pain, for
three long beautiful years! O, think of that!”
When I was in her room with the flowers, I
passed the table on which her little Bible lay
open. A mark of rich ribbon — a black
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ribbon — fell across the pages; it bore in silver
text these words:—
“Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
20th.
“I thank thee, my God, the river of Lethe
may indeed flow through the Elysian Fields, —
it does not water the Christian's Paradise.”
Aunt Winifred was saying that over to herself
in a dreamy undertone this morning, and
I happened to hear her.
“Just a quotation, dear,” she said, smiling,
in answer to my look of inquiry, “I could n't
originate so pretty a thing. Is n't it pretty?”
“Very; but I am not sure that I understand
it.”
“You thought that forgetfulness would be
necessary to happiness?”
“Why, — yes; as far as I had ever thought
about it; that is, after our last ties with this
world are broken. It does not seem to me
that I could be happy to remember all that I
have suffered and all that I have sinned here.”
“But the last of all the sins will be as if it
had never been. Christ takes care of that.
No shadow of a sense of guilt can dog you, or
affect your relations to Him or your other
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friends. The last pain borne, the last tear,
the last sigh, the last lonely hour, the last
unsatisfied dream, forever gone by; why
should not the dead past bury its dead?”
“Then why remember it?”
“`Save but to swell the sense of being
blest.' Besides, forgetfulness of the disagreeable
things of this life implies forgetfulness of
the pleasant ones. They are all tangled together.”
“To be sure. I don't know that I should
like that.”
“Of course you would n't. Imagine yourself
in a state of being where you and Roy
had lost your past; all that you had borne and
enjoyed, and hoped and feared, together; the
pretty little memories of your babyhood, and
first `half-days' at school, when he used to
trudge along beside you, — little fellow! how
many times I have watched him! — holding you
tight by the apron-sleeve or hat-string, or bits
of fat fingers, lest you should run away or fall.
Then the old Academy pranks, out of which
you used to help each other; his little chivalry
and elder-brotherly advice; the mischief in
his eyes; some of the `Sunday-night talks';
the first novel that you read and dreamed over
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together; the college stories; the chats over
the corn-popper by firelight; the earliest, earnest
looking-on into life together, its temptations
conquered, its lessons learned, its disappointments
faced together, — always you two,—
would you like to, are you likely to, forget
all this?
“Roy might as well be not Roy, but a
strange angel, if you should. Heaven will be
not less heaven, but more, for this pleasant
remembering. So many other and greater
and happier memories will fill up the time
then, that after years these things may —
probably will — seem smaller than it seems to
us now they can ever be; but they will, I
think, be always dear; just as we look back to
our baby-selves with a pitying sort of fondness,
and, though the little creatures are of small
enough use to us now, yet we like to keep
good friends with them for old times' sake.
“I have no doubt that you and I shall sit
down some summer afternoon in heaven and
talk over what we have been saying to-day,
and laugh perhaps at all the poor little dreams
we have been dreaming of what has not entered
into the heart of man. You see it is
certain to be so much better than anything
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that I can think of; which is the comfort of it.
And Roy —”
“Yes; some more about Roy, please.”
“Supposing he were to come right into the
room now, — and I slipped out, — and you
had him all to yourself again — Now, dear,
don't cry, but wait a minute!” Her caressing
hand fell on my hair. “I did not mean to
hurt you, but to say that your first talk with
him, after you stand face to face, may be like
that.
“Remembering this life is going to help us
amazingly, I fancy, to appreciate the next,” she
added, by way of period. “Christ seems to
have thought so, when he called to the minds
of those happy people what, in that unconscious
ministering of lowly faith which may
never reap its sheaf in the field where the seed
was sown, they had not had the comfort of
finding out before, — `I was sick and in prison,
and ye visited me.' And to come again to
Abraham in the parable, did he not say, `Son,
remember that thou in thy lifetime hadst good
things and Lazarus evil'?”
“I wonder what it is going to look like,” I
said, as soon as I could put poor Dives out of
my mind.
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“Heaven? Eye hath not seen, but I have
my fancies. I think I want some mountains,
and very many trees.”
“Mountains and trees!”
“Yes; mountains as we see them at sunset
and sunrise, or when the maples are on fire
and there are clouds enough to make great
purple shadows chase each other into lakes of
light, over the tops and down the sides, — the
ideal of mountains which we catch in rare
glimpses, as we catch the ideal of everything.
Trees as they look when the wind cooes
through them on a June afternoon; elms or
lindens or pines as cool as frost, and yellow
sunshine trickling through on moss. Trees
in a forest so thick that it shuts out the world,
and you walk like one in a sanctuary. Trees
pierced by stars, and trees in a bath of summer
moons to which the thrill of `Love's
young dream' shall cling forever — But there
is no end to one's fancies. Some water, too,
I would like.”
“There shall be no more sea.”
“Perhaps not; though, as the sea is the
great type of separation and of destruction,
that may be only figurative. But I 'm not
particular about the sea, if I can have rivers
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and little brooks, and fountains of just the
right sort; the fountains of this world don't
please me generally. I want a little brook to
sit and sing to Faith by. O, I forgot! she will
be a large girl probably, won't she?”
“Never too large to like to hear your mother
sing, will you, Faith?”
“O no,” said Faith, who bobbed in and out
again like a canary, just then, — “not unless
I 'm dreadful big, with long dresses and a waterfall,
you know. I s'pose, maybe, I 'd have
to have little girls myself to sing to, then.
I hope they 'll behave better 'n Mary Ann does.
She 's lost her other arm, and all her sawdust
is just running out. Besides, Kitty thought
she was a mouse, and ran down cellar with
her, and she 's all shooken up, somehow. She
don't look very pretty.”
“Flowers, too,” her mother went on, after the
interruption. “Not all amaranth and asphodel,
but of variety and color and beauty unimagined;
glorified lilies of the valley, heavenly
tea-rose buds, and spiritual harebells among
them. O, how your poor mother used to say,—
you know flowers were her poetry, — coming
in weak and worn from her garden in the
early part of her sickness, hands and lap and
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basket full: `Winifred, if I only supposed I
could have some flowers in heaven I should n't
be half so afraid to go!' I had not thought
as much about these things then as I have
now, or I should have known better how to
answer her. I should like, if I had my choice,
to have day-lilies and carnations fresh under
my windows all the time.”
“Under your windows?”
“Yes. I hope to have a home of my own.”
“Not a house?”
“Something not unlike it. In the Father's
house are many mansions. Sometimes I fancy
that those words have a literal meaning which
the simple men who heard them may have
understood better than we, and that Christ is
truly `preparing' my home for me. He must
be there, too, you see, — I mean John.”
I believe that gave me some thoughts that
I ought not to have, and so I made no reply.
“If we have trees and mountains and flowers
and books,” she went on, smiling, “I don't
see why not have houses as well. Indeed,
they seem to me as supposable as anything
can be which is guess-work at the best; for
what a homeless, desolate sort of sensation
it gives one to think of people wandering over
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the `sweet fields beyond the flood' without a
local habitation and a name. What could be
done with the millions who, from the time of
Adam, have been gathering there, unless they
lived under the conditions of organized society?
Organized society involves homes, not unlike
the homes of this world.
“What other arrangement could be as pleasant,
or could be pleasant at all? Robertson's
definition of a church exactly fits. `More
united in each other, because more united in
God.' A happy home is the happiest thing
in the world. I do not see why it should not
be in any world. I do not believe that all the
little tendernesses of family ties are thrown by
and lost with this life. In fact, Mary, I cannot
think that anything which has in it the elements
of permanency is to be lost, but sin.
Eternity cannot be — it cannot be the great
blank ocean which most of us have somehow
or other been brought up to feel that it is,
which shall swallow up, in a pitiless, glorified
way, all the little brooks of our delight. So
I expect to have my beautiful home, and my
husband, and Faith, as I had them here; with
many differences and great ones, but mine
just the same. Unless Faith goes into a
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home of her own, — the little creature! I
suppose she can't always be a baby.
“Do you remember what a pretty little
wistful way Charles Lamb has of wondering
about all this?
“`Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting
the smiling indications which point me to
them here, — the “sweet assurance of a look”?
Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks,
and summer holidays, and the greenness of
fields, and the delicious juices of meats and
fish, and society,.... and candle-light and
fireside conversations, and innocent vanities,
and jests, and irony itself, — do these things
go out with life?'”
“Now, Aunt Winifred!” I said, sitting up
straight, “what am I to do with these beautiful
heresies? If Deacon Quirk should hear!”
“I do not see where the heresy lies. As I
hold fast by the Bible, I cannot be in much
danger.”
“But you don't glean your conjectures from
the Bible.”
“I conjecture nothing that the Bible contradicts.
I do not believe as truth indisputable
anything that the Bible does not give me.
But I reason from analogy about this, as we
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all do about other matters. Why should we not
have pretty things in heaven? If this `bright
and beautiful economy' of skies and rivers, of
grass and sunshine, of hills and valleys, is not
too good for such a place as this world, will
there be any less variety of the bright and beautiful
in the next? There is no reason for supposing
that the voice of God will speak to us
in thunder-claps, or that it will not take to itself
the thousand gentle, suggestive tongues
of a nature built on the ruins of this, an unmarred
system of beneficence.
“There is a pretty argument in the fact
that just such sunrises, such opening of buds,
such fragrant dropping of fruit, such bells in the
brooks, such dreams at twilight, and such hush
of stars, were fit for Adam and Eve, made holy
man and woman. How do we know that the
abstract idea of a heaven needs imply anything
very much unlike Eden? There is some reason
as well as poetry in the conception of a `Paradise
Regained.' A `new earth wherein dwelleth
righteousness.'”
“But how far is it safe to trust to this kind
of argument?”
“Bishop Butler will answer you better than
I. Let me see, — Isaac Taylor says something
about that.”
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She went to the bookcase for his “Physical
Theory of Another Life,” and, finding her
place, showed me this passage: —
“If this often repeated argument from analogy
is to be termed, as to the conclusions it
involves, a conjecture merely, we ought then
to abandon altogether every kind of abstract
reasoning; nor will it be easy afterwards to
make good any principle of natural theology.
In truth, the very basis of reasoning is shaken
by a scepticism so sweeping as this.”
And in another place: —
“None need fear the consequences of such
endeavors who have well learned the prime
principle of sound philosophy, namely, not to
allow the most plausible and pleasing conjectures
to unsettle our convictions of truth....
resting upon positive evidence. If there be
any who frown upon all such attempts,....
they would do well to consider, that although
individually, and from the constitution of their
minds, they may find it very easy to abstain
from every path of excursive meditation, it is
not so with others who almost irresistibly are
borne forward to the vast field of universal
contemplation, — a field from which the human
mind is not to be barred, and which is better
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taken possession of by those who reverently
bow to the authority of Christianity, than left
open to impiety.”
“Very good,” I said, laying down the book.
“But about those trees and houses, and the
rest of your `pretty things'? Are they to be
like these?”
“I don't suppose that the houses will be made
of oak and pine and nailed together, for instance.
But I hope for heavenly types of nature
and of art. Something that will be to us
then what these are now. That is the amount
of it. They may be as `spiritual' as you
please; they will answer all the purpose to
us. As we are not spiritual beings yet, however,
I am under the necessity of calling them
by their earthly names. You remember Plato's
old theory, that the ideal of everything exists
eternally in the mind of God. If that is so, —
and I do not see how it can be otherwise, —
then whatever of God is expressed to us in
this world by flower, or blade of grass, or
human face, why should not that be expressed
forever in heaven by something corresponding
to flower, or grass, or human face? I do not
mean that the heavenly creation will be less real
than these, but more so. Their `spirituality'
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is of such a sort that our gardens and forests
and homes are but shadows of them.
“You don't know how I amuse myself at
night thinking this all over before I go to
sleep; wondering what one thing will be like,
and another thing; planning what I should
like; thinking that John has seen it all, and
wondering if he is laughing at me because
I know so little about it! I tell you, Mary,
there's a `deal o' comfort in 't,' as Phœbe says
about her cup of tea.”
July 5.
Aunt Winifred has been hunting up a Sunday
school class for herself and one for me;
which is a venture that I never was persuaded
into undertaking before. She herself is fast
becoming acquainted with the poorer people
of the town.
I find that she is a thoroughly busy Christian,
with a certain “week-day holiness” that
is strong and refreshing, like a west wind.
Church-going, and conversations on heaven,
by no means exhaust her vitality.
She told me a pretty thing about her class;
it happened the first Sabbath that she took it.
Her scholars are young girls of from fourteen
to eighteen years of age, children of
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churchmembers, most of them. She seemed to have
taken their hearts by storm. She says, “They
treated me very prettily, and made me love
them at once.”
Clo Bentley is in the class; Clo is a pretty,
soft-eyed little creature, with a shrinking mouth,
and an absorbing passion for music, which she
has always been too poor to gratify. I suspect
that her teacher will make a pet of her. She
says that in the course of her lesson, or, in
her words, —
“While we were all talking together, somebody
pulled my sleeve, and there was Clo in
the corner, with her great brown eyes fixed on
me. `See here!' she said in a whisper, `I
can't be good! I would be good if I could
only just have a piano!' `Well, Clo,' I said,
`if you will be a good girl, and go to heaven,
I think you will have a piano there, and play
just as much as you care to.'
“You ought to have seen the look the child
gave me! Delight and fear and incredulous
bewilderment tumbled over each other, as if
I had proposed taking her into a forbidden
fairy-land.
“`Why, Mrs. Forceythe! Why, they won't
let anybody have a piano up there! not in
heaven?'
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“I laid down the question-book, and asked
what kind of place she supposed that heaven
was going to be.
“`O,' she said, with a dreary sigh, `I never
think about it when I can help it. I suppose
we shall all just stand there!'
“And you?” I asked of the next, a bright
girl with snapping eyes.
“`Do you want me to talk good, or tell the
truth?' she answered me. Having been given
to understand that she was not expected to
`talk good' in my class, she said, with an approving,
decided nod: `Well, then! I don't
think it 's going to be anything nice anyway.
No, I don't! I told my last teacher so, and
she looked just as shocked, and said I never
should go there as long as I felt so. That
made me mad, and I told her I did n't see but
I should be as well off in one place as another,
except for the fire.'
“A silent girl in the corner began at this
point to look interested. `I always supposed,'
said she, `that you just floated round in heaven—
you know — all together — something like
ju-jube paste!'
“Whereupon I shut the question-book entirely,
and took the talking to myself for a while.
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“`But I never thought it was anything like
that,' interrupted little Clo, presently, her
cheeks flushed with excitement. `Why, I
should like to go, if it is like that! I never
supposed people talked, unless it was about
converting people, and saying your prayers,
and all that.'
“Now, were n't those ideas* alluring and
comforting for young girls in the blossom of
warm human life? They were trying with all
their little hearts to `be good,' too, some of
them, and had all of them been to church and
Sunday school all their lives. Never, never, if
Jesus Christ had been Teacher and Preacher
to them, would He have pictured their blessed
endless years with Him in such bleak colors.
They are not the hues of His Bible.”
eaf734n2* Facts.
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XI.
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July 16.
We took a trip to-day to East Homer
for butter. Neither angels nor principalities
could convince Phœbe that any butter but
“Stephen David's” might, could, would, or
should be used in this family. So to Mr. Stephen
David's, a journey of four miles, I meekly
betake myself at stated periods in the domestic
year, burdened with directions about firkins
and half-firkins, pounds and half-pounds, salt
and no salt, churning and “working-over”;
some of which I remember and some of which
I forget, and to all of which Phœbe considers
me sublimely incapable of attending.
The afternoon was perfect, and we took
things leisurely, letting the reins swing from
the hook, — an arrangement to which Mr.
Tripp's old gray was entirely agreeable, —
and, leaning back against the buggy-cushions,
wound along among the strong, sweet pine-smells,
lazily talking or lazily silent, as the
spirit moved, and as only two people who
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thoroughly understand and like each other
can talk or be silent.
We rode home by Deacon Quirk's, and, as
we jogged by, there broke upon our view a
blooming vision of the Deacon himself, at work
in his potato-field with his son and heir, who,
by the way, has the reputation of being the
most awkward fellow in the township.
The amiable church-officer, having caught
sight of us, left his work, and coming up to the
fence “in rustic modesty unscared,” guiltless
of coat or vest, his calico shirt-sleeves rolled
up to his huge brown elbows, and his dusty
straw hat flapping in the wind, rapped on the
rails with his hoe-handle as a sign for us to
stop.
“Are we in a hurry?” I asked, under my
breath.
“O no,” said Aunt Winifred. “He has somewhat
to say unto me, I see by his eyes. I
have been expecting it. Let us hear him out.
Good afternoon, Deacon Quirk.”
“Good afternoon, ma'am. Pleasant day?”
She assented to the statement, novel as it
was.
“A very pleasant day,” repeated the Deacon,
looking for the first time in his life, to my
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knowledge, a little undecided as to what he
should say next. “Remarkable fine day for
riding. In a hurry?”
“Well, not especially. Did you want anything
of me?”
“You 're a church-member, are n't you,
ma'am?” asked the Deacon, abruptly.
“I am.”
“Orthodox?”
“O yes,” with a smile. “You had a reason
for asking?”
“Yes, ma'am; I had, as you might say, a
reason for asking.”
The Deacon laid his hoe on the top of the
fence, and his arms across it, and pushed his
hat on the back of his head in a becoming
and argumentative manner.
“I hope you don't consider that I 'm taking
liberties if I have a little religious conversation
with you, Mrs. Forceythe.”
“It is no offence to me if you are,” replied
Mrs. Forceythe, with a twinkle in her eye;
but both twinkle and words glanced off from
the Deacon.
“My wife was telling me last night,” he began,
with an ominous cough, “that her niece,
Clotildy Bentley — Moses Bentley's daughter,
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you know, and one of your sentimental girls
that reads poetry, and is easy enough led away
by vain delusions and false doctrine — was
under your charge at Sunday school. Now
Clotildy is intimate with my wife, — who is her
aunt on her mother's side, and always tries to
do her duty by her, — and she told Mrs. Quirk
what you 'd been a saying to those young
minds on the Sabbath.”
He stopped, and observed her impressively,
as if he expected to see the guilty blushes of
arraigned heresy covering her amused, attentive
face.
“I hope you will pardon me, ma 'am, for
repeating it, but Clotildy said that you told
her she should have a pianna in heaven. A
pianna, ma 'am!”
“I certainly did,” she said quietly.
“You did? Well, now, I did n't believe it,
nor I would n't believe it, till I 'd asked you!
I thought it warn't more than fair that I
should ask you, before repeating it, you know.
It 's none of my business, Mrs. Forceythe, any
more than that I take a general interest in the
spiritooal welfare of the youth of our Sabbath
school; but I am very much surprised! I am
very much surprised!”
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“I am surprised that you should be, Deacon
Quirk. Do you believe that God would take
a poor little disappointed girl like Clo, who
has been all her life here forbidden the enjoyment
of a perfectly innocent taste, and keep
her in His happy heaven eternal years, without
finding means to gratify it? I don't.”
“I tell Clotildy I don't see what she
wants of a pianna-forte,” observed “Clotildy's”
uncle, sententiously. “She can go
to singin' school, and she 's been in the
choir ever since I have, which is six years
come Christmas. Besides, I don't think
it 's our place to speckylate on the mysteries
of the heavenly spere. My wife told
her that she must n't believe any such things
as that, which were very irreverent, and contrary
to the Scriptures, and Clo went home
crying. She said: `It was so pretty to think
about.' It is very easy to impress these
delusions of fancy on the young.”
“Pray, Deacon Quirk,” said Aunt Winifred,
leaning earnestly forward in the carriage, “will
you tell me what there is `irreverent' or `unscriptural'
in the idea that there will be instrumental
music in heaven?”
“Well,” replied the Deacon after some
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consideration, “come to think of it, there will
be harps, I suppose. Harpers harping with
their harps on the sea of glass. But I don't
believe there will be any piannas. It 's a
dreadfully material way to talk about that
glorious world, to my thinking.”
“If you could show me wherein a harp is
less `material' than a piano, perhaps I should
agree with you.”
Deacon Quirk looked rather nonplussed for
a minute.
“What do you suppose people will do in
heaven?” she asked again.
“Glorify God,” said the Deacon, promptly
recovering himself, — “glorify God, and sing
Worthy the Lamb! We shall be clothed in
white robes with palms in our hands, and bow
before the Great White Throne. We shall be
engaged in such employments as befit sinless
creatures in a spiritooal state of existence.”
“Now, Deacon Quirk,” replied Aunt Winifred,
looking him over from head to foot, — old
straw hat, calico shirt, blue overalls, and cow-hide
boots, coarse, work-worn hands, and
“narrow forehead braided tight,” — “just imagine
yourself, will you? taken out of this life
this minute, as you stand here in your
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potato-field (the Deacon changed his position with
evident uneasiness), and put into another life,—
not anybody else, but yourself, just as you
left this spot, — and do you honestly think that
you should be happy to go and put on a white
dress and stand still in a choir with a green
branch in one hand and a singing-book in the
other, and sing and pray and never do anything
but sing and pray, this year, next year,
and every year forever?”
“We-ell,” he replied, surprised into a momentary
flash of carnal candor, “I can't say
that I should n't wonder for a minute, maybe,
how Abinadab would ever get those potatoes hoed
without me. — Abinadab! go back to your
work!”
The graceful Abinadab had sauntered up
during the conversation, and was listening,
hoe in hand and mouth open. He slunk away
when his father spoke, but came up again
presently on tiptoe when Aunt Winifred was
talking. There was an interested, intelligent
look about his square and pitifully embarrassed
face, which attracted my notice.
“But then,” proceeded the Deacon, re-enforced
by the sudden recollection of his duties
as a father and a church-member, “that
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could n't be a permanent state of feeling, you
know. I expect to be transformed by the
renewing of my mind to appreciate the glories
of the New Jerusalem, descending out of heaven
from God. That 's what I expect, marm.
Now I heerd that you told Mrs. Bland, or that
Mary told her, or that she heerd it someway,
that you said you supposed there were trees
and flowers and houses and such in heaven.
I told my wife I thought your deceased husband
was a Congregational minister, and I
did n't believe you ever said it; but that 's the
rumor.”
Without deeming it necessary to refer to
her “deceased husband,” Aunt Winifred replied
that “rumor” was quite right.
“Well!” said the Deacon, with severe significance,
“I believe in a spiritooal heaven.”
I looked him over again, — hat, hoe, shirt,
and all; scanned his obstinate old face with its
stupid, good eyes and animal mouth. Then I
glanced at Aunt Winifred as she leaned
forward in the afternoon light; the white,
finely cut woman, with her serene smile and
rapt, saintly eyes, — every inch of her, body
and soul, refined not only by birth and training,
but by the long nearness of her heart to
Christ.
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“Of the earth, earthy. Of the heavens,
heavenly.” The two faces sharpened themselves
into two types. Which, indeed, was
the better able to comprehend a “spiritooal
heaven”?
“It is distinctly stated in the Bible, by
which I suppose we shall both agree,” said
Aunt Winifred, gently, “that there shall be a
new earth, as well as new heavens. It is noticeable,
also, that the descriptions of heaven,
although a series of metaphors, are yet singularly
earthlike and tangible ones. Are flowers
and skies and trees less `spiritual' than
white dresses and little palm-branches? In
fact, where are you going to get your little
branches without trees? What could well be
more suggestive of material modes of living,
and material industry, than a city marked into
streets and alleys, paved solidly with gold,
walled in and barred with gates whose jewels
are named and counted, and whose very length
and breadth are measured with a celestial
surveyor's chain?”
“But I think we 'd ought to stick to what
the Bible says,” answered the Deacon, stolidly.
“If it says golden cities and does n't say
flowers, it means cities and does n't mean
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flowers. I dare say you 're a good woman,
Mrs. Forceythe, if you do hold such oncommon
doctrine, and I don't doubt you mean well
enough, but I don't think that we ought to
trouble ourselves about these mysteries of a
future state. I 'm willing to trust them to
God!”
The evasion of a fair argument by this self-sufficient
spasm of piety was more than I
could calmly stand, and I indulged in a subdued
explosion. — Auntie says it sounded like
Fourth of July crackers touched off under a
wet barrel.
“Deacon Quirk! do you mean to imply
that Mrs. Forceythe does not trust it to God?
The truth is, that the existence of such a world
as heaven is a fact from which you shrink.
You know you do! She has twenty thoughts
about it where you have one; yet you set up
a claim to superior spirituality!”
“Mary, Mary, you are a little excited, I fear.
God is a spirit, and they that worship him
must worship him in spirit and in truth!”
The relevancy of this last, I confess myself
incapable of perceiving, but the good man
seemed to be convinced that he had made a
point, and we rode off leaving him under that
blissful delusion.
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“If he were n't a good man!” I sighed.
“But he is, and I must respect him for it.”
“Of course you must; nor is he to blame
that he is narrow and rough. I should scarcely
have argued as seriously as I did with him,
but that, as I fancy him to be a representative
of a class, I wanted to try an experiment.
Is n't he amusing, though? He is precisely
one of Mr. Stopford Brooke's men `who can
understand nothing which is original.'”
“Are there, or are there not, more of such
men in our church than in others?”
“Not more proportionately to numbers.
But I would not have them thinned out. The
better we do Christ's work, the more of uneducated,
neglected, or debased mind will be
drawn to try and serve Him with us. He
sought out the lame, the halt, the blind, the
stupid, the crotchety, the rough, as well as the
equable, the intelligent, the refined. Untrained
Christians in any sect will always have
their eccentricities and their littlenesses, at
which the silken judgment of high places,
where the Carpenter's Son would be a strange
guest, will sneer. That never troubles me. It
only raises the question in my mind whether
cultivated Christians generally are sufficiently
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cultivators, scattering their golden gifts on
wayside ground.”
“Now take Deacon Quirk,” I suggested,
when we had ridden along a little way under
the low, green arches of the elms, “and put
him into heaven as you proposed, just as he is,
and what is he going to do with himself? He
can dig potatoes and sell them without cheating,
and give generously of their proceeds to
foreign missions; but take away his potatoes,
and what would become of him? I don't
know a human being more incapacitated to
live in such a heaven as he believes in.”
“Very true, and a good, common-sense
argument against such a heaven. I don't
profess to surmise what will be found for him
to do, beyond this, — that it will be some very
palpable work that he can understand. How
do we know that he would not be appointed
guardian of his poor son here, to whom I suspect
he has not been all that father might be in
this life, and that he would not have his body
as well as his soul to look after, his farm as
well as his prayers? to him might be committed
the charge of the dews and the rains and
the hundred unseen influences that are at
work on this very potato-field.”
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“But when his son has gone in his turn,
and we have all gone, and there are no more
potato-fields? An Eternity remains.”
“You don't know that there would n't be
any potato-fields; there may be some kind of
agricultural employments even then. To
whomsoever a talent is given, it will be given
him wherewith to use it. Besides, by that
time the good Deacon will be immensely
changed. I suppose that the simple transition
of death, which rids him of sin and of grossness,
will not only wonderfully refine him, but will
have its effect upon his intellect.”
“If a talent is given, use will be found for it?
Tell me some more about that.”
“I fancy many things about it; but of
course can feel sure of only the foundation
principle. This life is a great school-house.
The wise Teacher trains in us such gifts as, if
we graduate honorably, will be of most service
in the perfect manhood and womanhood that
come after. He sees, as we do not, that a
power is sometimes best trained by repression.
`We do not always lose an advantage when
we dispense with it,' Goethe says. But the
suffocated lives, like little Clo's there, make
my heart ache sometimes. I take comfort in
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thinking how they will bud and blossom up in
the air, by and by. There are a great many
of them. We tread them underfoot in our
careless stepping now and then, and do not see
that they have not the elasticity to rise from
our touch. `Heaven may be a place for those
who failed on earth,' the Country Parson
says.”
“Then there will be air enough for all?”
“For all; for those who have had a little
bloom in this world, as well. I suppose the
artist will paint his pictures, the poet sing his
happy songs, the orator and author will not find
their talents hidden in the eternal darkness of
a grave; the sculptor will use his beautiful gift
in the moulding of some heavenly Carrara; `as
well the singer as the player on instruments
shall be there.' Christ said a thing that has
grown on me with new meanings lately: — `He
that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.'
It, you see, — not another man's life, not a
strange compound of powers and pleasures,
but his own familiar aspirations. So we shall
best `glorify God,' not less there than here, by
doing it in the peculiar way that He himself
marked out for us. But — ah, Mary, you see
it is only the life `lost' for His sake that shall
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be so beautifully found. A great man never
goes to heaven because he is great. He must
go, as the meanest of his fellow-sinners go,
with face towards Calvary, and every golden
treasure used for love of Him who showed him
how.”
“What would the old Pagans — and modern
ones, too, for that matter — say to that?
Was n't it Tacitus who announced it as his
belief, that immortality was granted as a special
gift to a few superior minds? For the
people who persisted in making up the rest of
the world, poor things! as it could be of little
consequence what became of them, they might
die as the brute dieth.”
“It seems an unbearable thing to me sometimes,”
she went on, “the wreck of a gifted
soul. A man who can be, if he chooses, as
much better and happier than the rest of us
as the ocean reflects more sky than a mill-pond,
must also be, if he chooses, more wicked
and more miserable. It takes longer to reach
sea-shells than river-pebbles. I am compelled
to think, also, that intellectual rank must in
heaven bear some proportion to goodness.
There are last and there are first that shall
have changed places. As the tree falleth,
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there shall it lie, and with that amount of
holiness of which a man leaves this life the
possessor, he must start in another. I have
seen great thinkers, `foremost men' in science,
in theology, in the arts, who, I solemnly
believe, will turn aside in heaven, — and will
turn humbly and heartily, — to let certain day-laborers
and paupers whom I have known go
up before them as kings and priests unto
God.”
“I believe that. But I was going to ask, —
for poor creatures like your respected niece,
who has n't a talent, nor even a single absorbing
taste, for one thing above another thing,—
what shall she do?”
“Whatever she liketh best; something very
useful, my dear, don't be afraid, and very
pleasant. Something, too, for which this life
has fitted you; though you may not understand
how that can be, better than did poor Heine
on his `matrazzen-gruft,' reading all the books
that treated of his disease. `But what good
this reading is to do me I don't know,' he said,
`except that it will qualify me to give lectures
in heaven on the ignorance of doctors on earth
about diseases of the spinal marrow.'”
“I don't know how many times I have
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thought of — I believe it was the poet Gray,
who said that his idea of heaven was to lie on
the sofa and read novels. That touches the
lazy part of us, though.”
“Yes, they will be the active, outgoing,
generous elements of our nature that will be
brought into use then, rather than the self-centred
and dreamy ones. Though I suppose
that we shall read in heaven, — being influenced
to be better and nobler by good and noble
teachers of the pen, not less there than here.”
“O think of it! To have books, and music,—
and pictures?”
“All that Art, `the handmaid of the Lord,'
can do for us, I have no doubt will be done.
Eternity will never become monotonous. Variety
without end, charms unnumbered within
charms, will be devised by Infinite ingenuity
to minister to our delight. Perhaps, —
this is just my fancying, — perhaps there will
be whole planets turned into galleries of art,
over which we may wander at will; or into
orchestral halls where the highest possibilities
of music will be realized to singer and to
hearer. Do you know, I have sometimes had
a flitting notion that music would be the
language of heaven? It certainly differs in
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some indescribable manner from the other arts.
We have most of us felt it in our different ways.
It always seems to me like the cry of a great,
sad life dragged to use in this world against its
will. Pictures and statues and poems fit themselves
to their work more contentedly. Symphony
and song struggle in fetters. That
sense of conflict is not good for me. It is
quite as likely to harm as to help. Then
perhaps the mysteries of sidereal systems will
be spread out like a child's map before us.
Perhaps we shall take journeys to Jupiter and
to Saturn and to the glittering haze of nebulæ,
and to the site of ruined worlds whose `extinct
light is yet travelling through space.' Occupation
for explorers there, you see!”
“You make me say with little Clo, `O, why,
I want to go!' every time I hear you talk.
But there is one thing, — you spoke of families
living together.”
“Yes.”
“And you spoke of — your husband. But
the Bible —”
“Says there shall be no marrying nor giving
in marriage. I know that. Nor will there be
such marrying or giving in marriage as there
is in a world like this. Christ expressly goes
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on to state, that we shall be as the angels in
heaven. How do we know what heavenly
unions of heart with heart exist among the
angels? It leaves me margin enough to live
and be happy with John forever, and it holds
many possibilities for the settlement of all
perplexing questions brought about by the
relations of this world. It is of no use to talk
much about them. But it is on that very verse
that I found my unshaken belief that they will
be smoothed out in some natural and happy
way, with which each one shall be content.”
“But O, there is a great gulf fixed; and on
one side one, and on the other another, and
they loved each other.”
Her face paled, — it always pales, I notice,
at the mention of this mystery, — but her eyes
never lost by a shade their steadfast trust.
“Mary, don't question me about that. That
belongs to the unutterable things. God will
take care of it. I think I could leave it to him
even if he brought it for me myself to face. I
feel sure that he will make it all come out
right. Perhaps He will be so dear to us, that
we could not love any one who hated him. In
some way the void must be filled, for he shall
wipe away tears. But it seems to me that the
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only thought in which there can be any rest,
and in that there can, is this: that Christ, who
loves us even as his Father loves him, can be
happy in spite of the existence of a hell. If
it is possible to him, surely he can make it
possible to us.”
“Two things that He has taught us,” she
said after a silence, “give me beautiful assurance
that none of these dreams with which I
help myself can be beyond his intention to
fulfil. One is, that eye hath not seen it, nor
ear heard it, nor the heart conceived it, — this
lavishness of reward which he is keeping for
us. Another is, that `I shall be satisfied
when I awake.'”
“With his likeness.”
“With his likeness. And about that I
have other things to say.”
But Old Gray stopped at the gate and
Phœbe was watching for her butter, and it was
no time to say them then.
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XII.
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July 22.
Aunt Winifred has connected herself with
our church. I think it was rather hard for
her, breaking the last tie that bound her to her
husband's people; but she had a feeling, that,
if her work is to be done and her days ended
here, she had better take up all such little
threads of influence to make herself one with
us.
25th.
To-day what should Deacon Quirk do but
make a solemn call on Mrs, Forceythe, for the
purpose of asking — and this with a hint that
he wished he had asked before she became a
member of the Homer First Congregational
Church — whether there were truth in the
rumors, now rife about town, that she was a
Swedenborgian!
Aunt Winifred broke out laughing, and
laughed merrily. The Deacon frowned.
“I used to fancy that I believed in
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Swedenborg,” she said, as soon as she could sober
down a little.
The Deacon pricked up his ears, with visions
of excommunications and councils reflected
on every feature.
“Until I read his books,” she finished.
“Oh!” said the Deacon. He waited for
more, but she seemed to consider the conversation
at an end.
“So then you — if I understand — are not
a Swedenborgian, ma'am?”
“If I were, I certainly should have had no
inducement to join myself to your church,” she
replied, with gentle dignity. “I believe, with
all my heart, in the same Bible and the same
creed that you believe in, Deacon Quirk.”
“And you live your creed, which all such
genial Christians do not find it necessary to
do,” I thought, as the Deacon in some perplexity
took his departure, and she returned with a
smile to her sewing.
I suppose the call came about in this way.
We had the sewing-circle here last week, and
just before the lamps were lighted, and when
people had dropped their work to group and
talk in the corners, Meta Tripp came up with
one or two other girls to Aunt Winifred, and
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begged “to hear some of those queer things
people said she believed about heaven.” Auntie
is never obtrusive with her views on this or
any other matter, but, being thus urged, she
answered a few questions that they put to her,
to the extreme scandal of one or two old ladies,
and the secret delight of the rest.
“Well,” said little Mrs. Bland, squeezing
and kissing her youngest, who was at that
moment vigorously employed in sticking very
long darning-needles into his mother's water-fall,
“I hope there 'll be a great many babies
there. I should be perfectly happy if I always
could have babies to play with!”
The look that Aunt Winifred shot over at
me was worth seeing.
She merely replied, however, that she supposed
all our “highest aspirations,” — with an
indescribable accent to which Mrs. Bland was
safely deaf, — if good ones, would be realized;
and added, laughing, that Swedenborg said
that the babies in heaven — who outnumber
the grown people — will be given into the
charge of those women especially fond of
them.
“Swedenborg is suggestive, even if you can't
accept what seem to the uninitiated to be his
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natural impossibilities,” she said, after we had
discussed Deacon Quirk awhile. “He says a
pretty thing, too, occasionally. Did I ever
read you about the houses?”
She had not, and I wished to hear, so she
found the book on Heaven and Hell, and
read: —
“As often as I have spoken with the angels
mouth to mouth, so often I have been with
them in their habitations: their habitations
are altogether like the habitations on earth
which are called houses, but more beautiful;
in them are parlors, rooms, and chambers in
great numbers; there are also courts, and
round about are gardens, shrubberies, and
fields. Palaces of heaven have been seen,
which were so magnificent that they could not
be described; above, they glittered as if they
were of pure gold, and below, as if they were
of precious stones; one palace was more splendid
than another; within, it was the same; the
rooms were ornamented with such decorations
as neither words nor sciences are sufficient to
describe. On the side which looked to the
south there were paradises, where all things in
like manner glittered, and in some places
the leaves were as of silver, and the fruits
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as of gold; and the flowers on their beds presented
by colors as it were rainbows; at the
boundaries again were palaces, in which the
view terminated.”
Aunt Winifred says that our hymns, taken
all together, contain the worst and the best
pictures of heaven that we have in any branch
of literature.
“It seems to me incredible,” she says, “that
the Christian Church should have allowed that
beautiful `Jerusalem' in its hymnology so long,
with the ghastly couplet, —
`Where congregations ne'er break up,
And Sabbaths have no end.'
The dullest preachers are sure to give it
out, and that when there are the greatest
number of restless children wondering when it
will be time to go home. It is only within
ten years that modern hymn-books have altered
it, returning in part to the original.
“I do not think we have chosen the best
parts of that hymn for our `service of song.'
You never read the whole of it? You don't
know how pretty it is! It is a relief from the
customary palms and choirs. One's whole heart
is glad of the outlet of its sweet refrain, —
`Would God that I were there!'
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before one has half read it. You are quite
ready to believe that
`There is no hunger, heat, nor cold,
But pleasure every way.'
Listen to this: —
`Thy houses are of ivory,
Thy windows crystal clear,
Thy tiles are made of beaten gold;
O God, that I were there!
`We that are here in banishment
Continually do moan.
`Our sweet is mixed with bitter gall,
Our pleasure is but pain,
Our joys scarce last the looking on,
Our sorrows still remain.
`But there they live in such delight,
Such pleasure and such play,
As that to them a thousand years
Doth seem as yesterday.'
And this: —
`Thy gardens and thy gallant walks
Continually are green;
There grow such sweet and pleasant flowers
As nowhere else are seen.
`There cinnamon, there sugar grows,
There nard and balm abound,
What tongue can tell, or heart conceive
The joys that there are found?
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`Quite through the streets, with silver sound,
The flood of life doth flow,
Upon whose banks, on every side,
The wood of life doth grow.'
I tell you we may learn something from
that grand old Catholic singer. He is far
nearer to the Bible than the innovators on
his MSS. Do you not notice how like his
images are to the inspired ones, and yet how
pleasant and natural is the effect of the entire
poem?
“There is nobody like Bonar, though, to sing
about heaven. There is one of his, `We shall
meet and rest,' — do you know it?”
I shook my head, and knelt down beside her
and watched her face, — it was quite unconscious
of me, the musing face, — while she
repeated dreamily: —.
“Where the faded flower shall freshen, —
Freshen nevermore to fade;
Where the shaded sky shall brighten, —
Brighten nevermore to shade;
Where the sun-blaze never scorches;
Where the star-beams cease to chill;
Where no tempest stirs the echoes
Of the wood, or wave, or hill;....
Where no shadow shall bewilder;
Where life's vain parade is o'er;
Where the sleep of sin is broken,
And the dreamer dreams no more;
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Where the bond is never severed, —
Partings, claspings, sob and moan,
Midnight waking, twilight weeping,
Heavy noontide, — all are done;
Where the child has found its mother;
Where the mother finds the child;
Where dear families are gathered,
That were scattered on the wild;....
Where the hidden wound is healed;
Where the blighted life reblooms;
Where the smitten heart the freshness
Of its buoyant youth resumes;....
Where we find the joy of loving,
As we never loved before, —
Loving on, unchilled, unhindered,
Loving once, forevermore.”....
30th.
Aunt Winifred was weeding her day-lilies
this morning, when the gate creaked timidly,
and then swung noisily, and in walked Abinadab
Quirk, with a bouquet of China pinks in the
button-hole of his green-gray linen coat. He
had taken evident pains to smarten himself up
a little, for his hair was combed into two horizontal
dabs over his ears, and the green-gray
coat and blue-checked shirt-sleeves were quite
clean; but he certainly is the most uncouth
specimen of six feet five that it has ever been
my privilege to behold. I feel sorry for him,
though. I heard Meta Tripp laughing at him
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in Sunday school the other day, — “Quadrangular
Quirk,” she called him, a little too
loud, and the poor fellow heard her. He half
turned, blushing fiercely; then slunk down in
his corner with as pitiable a look as is often
seen upon a man's face.
He came up to Auntie awkwardly, — a part
of the scene I saw from the window, and the
rest she told me, — head hanging, and the tiny
bouquet held out.
“Clo sent these to you,” he stammered out,—
“my cousin Clo. I was coming 'long, and
she thought, you know, — she 'd get me, you
see, to — to — that is, to — bring them. She
sent her — that is — let me see. She sent her
respect — ful — respectful — no, her love; that
was it. She sent her love 'long with 'em.”
Mrs. Forceythe dropped her weeds, and held
out her white, shapely hands, wet with the
heavy dew, to take the flowers.
“O, thank you! Clo knows my fancy for
pinks. How kind in you to bring them!
Won't you sit down a few moments? I was
just going to rest a little. Do you like flowers?”
Abinadab eyed the white hands, as his huge
fingers just touched them, with a sort of awe;
and, sighing, sat down on the very edge of the
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garden bench beside her. After a singular
variety of efforts to take the most uncomfortable
position of which he was capable, he succeeded
to his satisfaction, and, growing then
somewhat more at his ease, answered her
question.
“Flowers are sech gassy things. They just
blow out and that 's the end of 'em. I like
machine-shops best.”
“Ah! well, that is a very useful liking. Do
you ever invent machinery yourself?”
“Sometimes,” said Abinadab, with a bashful
smile. “There 's a little improvement of mine
for carpet-sweepers up before the patent-office
now. Don't know whether they 'll run it
through. Some of the chaps I saw in Boston
told me they thought they would do 't in time;
it takes an awful sight of time. I 'm alwers
fussing over something of the kind; alwers
did, sence I was a baby; had my little windmills
and carts and things; used to sell 'em to
the other young uns. Father don't like it.
He wants me to stick to the farm. I don't
like farming. I feel like a fish out of water.—
Mrs. Forceythe, marm!”
He turned on her with an abrupt change of
tone, so funny that she could with difficulty
retain her gravity.
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“I heard you saying a sight of queer things
the other day about heaven. Clo, she 's been
telling me a sight more. Now, I never
believed in heaven!”
“Why?”
“Because I don't believe,” said the poor fellow,
with sullen decision, “that a benevolent
God ever would ha' made sech a derned awkward
chap as I am!”
Aunt Winifred replied by stepping into the
house, and bringing out a fine photography of
one of the best of the St. Georges, — a rapt, yet
very manly face, in which the saint and the
hero are wonderfully blended.
“I suppose,” she said, putting it into his
hands, “that if you should go to heaven, you
would be as much fairer than that picture as
that picture is fairer than you are now.”
“No! Why, would I, though? Jim-miny!
Why, it would be worth going for, would n't
it?”
The words were no less reverently spoken
than the vague rhapsodies of his father; for
the sullenness left his face, and his eyes —
which are pleasant, and not unmanly, when
one fairly sees them — sparkled softly, like a
child's.
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“Make it all up there, maybe?” musing,—
“the girls laughing at you all your life, and
all? That would be the bigger heft of the two
then, would n't it? for they say there ain't any
end to things up there. Why, so it might be
fair in Him after all; more 'n fair, perhaps.
See here, Mrs. Forceythe, I 'm not a church-member,
you know, and father, he 's dreadful
troubled about me; prays over me like a span
of ministers, the old gentleman does, every
Sunday night. Now, I don't want to go to
the other place any more than the next man,
and I 've had my times, too, of thinking I 'd
keep steady and say my prayers reg'lar, — it
makes a chap feel on a sight better terms with
himself, — but I don't see how I 'm going to
wear white frocks and stand up in a choir, —
never could sing no more 'n a frog with a cold
in his head, — it tires me more now, honest, to
think of it, than it does to do a week's mowing.
Look at me! Do you s'pose I 'm fit for it?
Father, he 's always talking about the thrones,
and the wings, and the praises, and the palms,
and having new names in your foreheads,
(should n't object to that, though, by any
means), till he drives me into the tool-house,
or off on a spree. I tell him if God hain't got
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a place where chaps like me can do something
He 's fitted 'em to do in this world, there 's no
use thinking about it anyhow.”
So Auntie took the honest fellow into her
most earnest thought for half an hour, and
argued, and suggested, and reproved, and
helped him, as only she could do; and at the
end of it seemed to have worked into his mind
some distinct and not unwelcome ideas of
what a Christ-like life must mean to him, and
of the coming heaven which is so much more
real to her than any life outside of it.
“And then,” she told him, “I imagine that
your fancy for machinery will be employed in
some way. Perhaps you will do a great deal
more successful inventing there than you ever
will here.”
“You don't say so!” said radiant Abinadab.
“God will give you something to do, certainly,
and something that you will like.”
“I might turn it to some religious purpose,
you know!” said Abinadab, looking bright.
“Perhaps I could help 'em build a church, or
hist some of their pearl gates, or something
like!”
Upon that he said that it was time to be at
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home and see to the oxen, and shambled awkwardly
away.
Clo told us this afternoon that he begged the
errand and the flowers from her. She says:
“'Bin thinks there never was anybody like you,
Mrs. Forceythe, and 'Bin is n't the only one,
either.” At which Mrs. Forceythe smiles
absently, thinking — I wonder of what.
Monday night.
I saw as funny and as pretty a bit of a
drama this afternoon as I have seen for a long
time.
Faith had been rolling out in the hot hay
ever since three o'clock, with one of the little
Blands, and when the shadows grew long they
came in with flushed cheeks and tumbled hair,
to rest and cool upon the door-steps. I was
sitting in the parlor, sewing energetically on
some sun-bonnets for some of Aunt Winifred's
people down town, — I found the heat to be
more bearable if I kept busy, — and could see,
unseen, all the little tableaux into which the
two children grouped themselves; a new one
every instant; in the shadow now, — now in a
quiver of golden glow; the wind tossing their
hair about, and their chatter chiming down the
hall like bells.
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“O what a funny little sunset there 's going
to be behind the maple-tree,” said the blond-haired
Bland, in a pause.
“Funny enough,” observed Faith, with her
superior smile, “but it 's going to be a great
deal funnier up in heaven, I tell you, Molly
Bland.”
“Funny in heaven? Why, Faith!” Molly
drew herself up with a religious air, and looked
the image of her father.
“Yes, to be sure. I 'm going to have some
little pink blocks made out of it when I go;
pink and yellow and green and purple and —
O, so many blocks! I 'm going to have a little
red cloud to sail round in, like that one up
over the house, too, I should n't wonder.”
Molly opened her eyes.
“O, I don't believe it!”
“You don't know much!” said Miss Faith,
superbly. “I should n't s'pose you would believe
it. P'r'aps I 'll have some strawberries
too, and some ginger-snaps, — I 'm not going
to have any old bread and butter up there, —
O, and some little gold apples, and a lot of
playthings; nicer playthings — why, nicer
than they have in the shops in Boston, Molly
Bland! God 's keeping 'em up there a purpose.”
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“Dear me!” said incredulous Molly, “I
should just like to know who told you that
much. My mother never told it at me. Did
your mother tell it at you?”
“O, she told me some of it, and the rest I
thinked out myself.”
“Let 's go and play One Old Cat,” said
Molly, with an uncomfortable jump; “I wish
I had n't got to go to heaven!”
“Why, Molly Bland! why, I think heaven 's
splendid! I 've got my papa up there, you
know. `Here 's my little girl!' That 's what
he 's going to say. Mamma, she 'll be there,
too, and we 're all going to live in the prettiest
house. I have dreadful hurries to go this
afternoon sometimes when Phœbe 's cross and
won't give me sugar. They don't let you in,
though, 'nless you 're a good girl.”
“Who gets it all up?” asked puzzled Molly.
“Jesus Christ will give me all these beautiful
fings,” said Faith, evidently repeating her
mother's words, — the only catechism that she
has been taught.
“And what will he do when he sees you?”
asked her mother, coming down the stairs and
stepping up behind her.
“Take me up in His arms and kiss me.”
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“And what will Faith say?”
“Fank — you!” said the child, softly.
In another minute she was absorbed, body
and soul, in the mysteries of One Old Cat.
“But I don't think she will feel much like
being naughty for half an hour to come,”
her mother said; “hear how pleasantly her
words drop! Such a talk quiets her, like a
hand laid on her head. Mary, sometimes I
think it is His very hand, as much as when He
touched those other little children. I wish
Faith to feel at home with Him and His home.
Little thing! I really do not think that she is
conscious of any fear of dying; I do not think
it means anything to her but Christ, and her
father, and pink blocks, and a nice time, and
never disobeying me, or being cross. Many a
time she wakes me up in the morning talking
away to herself, and when I turn and look at
her, she says: `O mamma, won't we go to
heaven to-day, you fink? When will we go,
mamma?'”
“If there had been any pink blocks and
ginger-snaps for me when I was at her age, I
should not have prayed every night to `die
out.' I think the horrors of death that children
live through, unguessed and unrelieved,
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are awful. Faith may thank you all her life
that she has escaped them.”
“I should feel answerable to God for the
child's soul, if I had not prevented that. I
always wanted to know what sort of mother
that poor little thing had, who asked, if she
were very good up in heaven, whether they
would n't let her go down to hell Saturday
afternoons, and play a little while!”
“I know. But think of it, — blocks and
ginger-snaps!”
“I treat Faith just as the Bible treats us, by
dealing in pictures of truth that she can understand.
I can make Clo and Abinadab
Quirk comprehend that their pianos and machinery
may not be made of literal rosewood
and steel, but will be some synonyme of the
thing, which will answer just such wants of
their changed natures as rosewood and steel
must answer now. There will be machinery
and pianos in the same sense in which there
will be pearl gates and harps. Whatever enjoyment
any or all of them represent now,
something will represent then.
“But Faith, if I told her that her heavenly
ginger-snaps would not be made of molasses
and flour, would have a cry, for fear that she
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was not going to have any ginger-snaps at all;
so, until she is older, I give her unqualified
ginger-snaps. The principal joy of a child's
life consists in eating. Faith begins, as soon
as the light wanes, to dream of that gum-drop
which she is to have at bedtime. I don't suppose
she can outgrow that at once by passing
out of her little round body. She must begin
where she left off, — nothing but a baby, though
it will be as holy and happy a baby as Christ
can make it. When she says: “Mamma, I
shall be hungery and want my dinner, up
there,” I never hesitate to tell her that she
shall have her dinner. She would never, in
her secret heart, though she might not have
the honesty to say so, expect to be otherwise
than miserable in a dinnerless eternity.”
“You are not afraid of misleading the
child's fancy?”
“Not so long as I can keep the two ideas —
that Christ is her best friend, and that heaven
is not meant for naughty girls — pre-eminent
in her mind. And I sincerely believe that He
would give her the very pink blocks which she
anticipates, no less than He would give back a
poet his lost dreams, or you your brother.
He has been a child; perhaps, incidentally
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to the unsolved mysteries of atonement, for
this very reason, — that He may know how to
`prepare their places' for them, whose angels
do always behold His Father. Ah, you may
be sure that, if of such is the happy Kingdom,
He will not scorn to stoop and fit it to their
little needs.
“There was that poor little fellow whose
guinea-pig died, — do you remember?”
“Only half; what was it?”
“`O mamma,'” he sobbed out, behind his
handkerchief, `don't great big elephants have
souls?'
“`No, my son.'
“`Nor camels, mamma?'
“`No.'
“`Nor bears, nor alligators, nor chickens?'
“`O no, dear.'
“`O mamma, mamma! Don't little CLEAN —
white — guinea-pigs have souls?'
“I never should have had the heart to say
no to that; especially as we have no positive
proof to the contrary.
“Then that scrap of a boy who lost his little
red balloon the morning he bought it, and,
broken-hearted, wanted to know whether it
had gone to heaven. Don't I suppose if he
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had been taken there himself that very minute,
that he would have found a little balloon in
waiting for him? How can I help it?”
“It has a pretty sound. If people would
not think it so material and shocking —”
“Let people read Martin Luther's letter to
his little boy. There is the testimony of a
pillar in good and regular standing! I don't
think you need be afraid of my balloon, after
that.”
I remembered that there was a letter of his
on heaven, but, not recalling it distinctly, I
hunted for it to-night, and read it over. I
shall copy it, the better to retain it in mind.
“Grace and peace in Christ, my dear little
son. I see with pleasure that thou learnest
well, and prayed diligently. Do so, my son,
and continue. When I come home I will
bring thee a pretty fairing.
“I know a pretty, merry garden wherein are
many children. They have little golden coats,
and they gather beautiful apples under the
trees, and pears, cherries, plums, and wheat-plums; —
they sing, and jump, and are merry.
They have beautiful little horses, too, with gold
bits and silver saddles. And I asked the man
to whom the garden belongs, whose children
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they were. And he said: `They are the children
that love to pray and to learn, and are
good.' Then said I: `Dear man, I have a son,
too; his name is Johnny Luther. May he not
also come into this garden and eat these beautiful
apples and pears, and ride these fine
horses?' Then the man said: `If he loves to
pray and to learn, and is good, he shall come
into this garden, and Lippus and Jost too; and
when they all come together, they shall have
fifes and trumpets, lutes and all sorts of music,
and they shall dance, and shoot with little
cross-bows.'
“And he showed me a fine meadow there in
the garden, made for dancing. There hung
nothing but golden fifes, trumpets, and fine
silver cross-bows. But it was early, and the
children had not yet eaten; therefore I could
not wait the dance, and I said to the man:
`Ah, dear sir! I will immediately go and write
all this to my little son Johnny, and tell him
to pray diligently, and to learn well, and to
be good, so that he also may come to this
garden. But he has an Aunt Lehne, he must
bring her with him.' Then the man said: `It
shall be so; go, and write him so.'
“Therefore, my dear little son Johnny, learn
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and pray away! and tell Lippus and Jost, too,
that they must learn and pray. And then you
shall come to the garden together. Herewith
I commend thee to Almighty God. And
greet Aunt Lehne, and give her a kiss for my
sake.
“Thy dear Father,
“Martinus Luther.
“Anno 1530.”
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XIII.
[figure description] Page 192.[end figure description]
August 3.
The summer is sliding quietly away, — my
desolate summer which I dreaded; with the
dreams gone from its wild flowers, the crown
from its sunsets, the thrill from its winds and
its singing.
But I have found out a thing. One can live
without dreams and crowns and thrills.
I have not lost them. They lie under the
ivied cross with Roy for a little while. They
will come back to me with him. “Nothing is
lost,” she teaches me. And until they come
back, I see — for she shows me — fields groaning
under their white harvest, with laborers
very few. Ruth followed the sturdy reapers,
gleaning a little. I, perhaps, can do as much.
The ways in which I must work seem so small
and insignificant, so pitifully trivial sometimes,
that I do not even like to write them down
here. In fact, they are so small that, six
months ago, I did not see them at all. Only
to be pleasant to old Phœbe, and charitable to
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[figure description] Page 193.[end figure description]
Meta Tripp, and faithful to my not very interesting
little scholars, and a bit watchful of
worn-out Mrs. Bland, and — But dear me, I
won't! They are so little!
But one's self becomes of less importance,
which seems to be the point.
It seems very strange to me sometimes,
looking back to those desperate winter days,
what a change has come over my thoughts of
Roy. Not that he is any less — O, never any
less to me. But it is almost as if she had
raised him from the grave. Why seek ye the
living among the dead? Her soft, compassionate
eyes shine with the question every hour.
And every hour he is helping me, — ah, Roy,
we understand one another now.
How he must love Aunt Winifred! How
pleasant the days will be when we can talk
her over, and thank her together!
“To be happy because Roy is happy.” I
remember how those first words of hers
struck me. It does not seem to me impossible,
now.
Aunt Winifred and I laugh at each other
for talking so much about heaven. I see that
the green book is filled with my questions and
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[figure description] Page 194.[end figure description]
her answers. The fact is, not that we do not
talk as much about mundane affairs as other
people, but that this one thing interests us
more.
If, instead, it had been flounces, or babies,
or German philosophy, the green book would
have filled itself just as unconsciously with
flounces, or babies, or German philosophy.
This interest in heaven is of course no sign of
especial piety in me, nor could people with
young, warm, uncrushed hopes throbbing
through their days be expected to feel the
same. It is only the old principle of, where
the treasure is — the heart.
“How spiritual-minded Mary has grown!”
Mrs. Bland observes, regarding me respectfully.
I try in vain to laugh her out of the
conviction. If Roy had not gone before, I
should think no more, probably, about the
coming life, than does the minister's wife herself.
But now — I cannot help it — that is the
reality, this the dream; that the substance,
this the shadow.
The other day Aunt Winifred and I had a
talk which has been of more value to me than
all the rest.
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Faith was in bed; it was a cold, rainy evening;
we were secure from callers; we lighted
a few kindlers in the parlor grate; she rolled
up the easy-chair, and I took my cricket at
her feet.
“Paul at the feet of Gamaliel! This is
what I call comfort. Now, Auntie, let us go
to heaven awhile.”
“Very well. What do you want there
now?”
I paused a moment, sobered by a thought
that has been growing steadily upon me of
late.
“Something more, Aunt Winifred. All
these other things are beautiful and dear; but
I believe I want — God.
“You have not said much about Him. The
Bible says a great deal about Him. You have
given me the filling-up of heaven in all its
pleasant promise, but — I don't know — there
seems to be an outline wanting.”
She drew my hand up into hers, smiling.
“I have not done my painting by artistic
methods, I know; but it was not exactly accidental.
“Tell me, honestly, — is God more to you or
less, a more distinct Being or a more vague
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one, than He was six months ago? Is He, or
is He not, dearer to you now than then?”
I thought about it a minute, and then turned
my face up to her.
“Mary, what a light in your eyes! How
is it?”
It came over me slowly, but it came with
such a passion of gratitude and unworthiness,
that I scarcely knew how to tell her — that He
never has been to me, in all my life, what he is
now at the end of these six months. He was
once an abstract Grandeur which I struggled
more in fear than love to please. He has become
a living Presence, dear and real.
“No dead fact stranded on the shore
Of the oblivious years;
But warm, sweet, tender, even yet
A present help.”....
He was an inexorable Mystery who took
Roy from me to lose him in the glare of a
more inexorable heaven. He is a Father who
knew better than we that we should be parted
for a while; but He only means it to be a little
while. He is keeping him for me to find in
the flush of some summer morning, on which I
shall open my eyes no less naturally than I
open them on June sunrises now. I always
have that fancy of going in the morning.
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She understood what I could not tell her,
and said, “I thought it would be so.”
“You, His interpreter, have done it,” I answered
her. “His heaven shows what He is, —
don't you see? — like a friend's letter. I could
no more go back to my old groping relations to
Him, than I could make of you the dim and
somewhat apocryphal Western Auntie that you
were before I saw you.”
“Which was precisely why I have dealt with
this subject as I have,” she said. “You had all
your life been directed to an indefinite heaven,
where the glory of God was to crowd out all
individuality and all human joy from His most
individual and human creatures, till the “Glory
of God” had become nothing but a name and
a dread to you. So I let those three words
slide by, and tried to bring you to them, as
Christ brought the Twelve to believe in him,
`for the works' sake.'
“Yes, my child; clinging human loves,
stifled longings, cries for rest, forgotten hopes,
shall have their answer. Whatever the bewilderment
of beauties folded away for us in
heavenly nature and art, they shall strive with
each other to make us glad. These things
have their pleasant place. But, through
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eternity, there will be always something beyond
and dearer than the dearest of them. God
himself will be first, — naturally and of necessity,
without strain or struggle, first.”
When I sat here last winter with my dead
in my house, those words would have roused
in me an agony of wild questionings. I should
have beaten about them and beaten against
them, and cried in my honest heart that they
were false. I knew that I loved Roy more
than I loved such a Being as God seemed to
me then to be. Now, they strike me as simply
and pleasantly true. The more I love
Roy, the more I love Him. He loves us both.
“You see it could not be otherwise,” she
went on, speaking low. “Where would you be,
or I, or they who seem to us so much dearer
and better than ourselves, if it were not for
Jesus Christ? What can heaven be to us, but
a song of the love that is the same to us yesterday,
to-day, and forever, — that, in the mystery
of an intensity which we shall perhaps
never understand, could choose death and be
glad in the choosing, and, what is more than
that, could live life for us for three-and-thirty
years?
“I cannot strain my faith — or rather my
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common sense — to the rhapsodies with which
many people fill heaven. But it seems to me
like this: A friend goes away from us, and it
may be seas or worlds that lie between us, and
we love him. He leaves behind him his little
keepsakes; a lock of hair to curl about our
fingers; a picture that has caught the trick of
his eyes or smile; a book, a flower, a letter.
What we do with the curling hair, what we
say to the picture, what we dream over the
flower and the letter, nobody knows but ourselves.
People have risked life for such mementoes.
Yet who loves the senseless gift
more than the giver, — the curl more than the
young forehead on which it fell, — the letter
more than the hand which traced it?
“So it seems to me that we shall learn to
see in God the centre of all possibilities of joy.
The greatest of these lesser delights is but the
greater measure of His friendship. They will
not mean less of pleasure, but more of Him.
They will not “pale,” as Dr. Bland would
say. Human dearness will wax, not wane, in
heaven; but human friends will be loved for
love of Him.”
“I see; that helps me; like a torch in a dark
room. But there will be shadows in the
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corners. Do you suppose that we shall ever fully
feel it in the body?”
“In the body, probably not. We see through
a glass so darkly that the temptation to idolatry
is always our greatest. Golden images
did not die with Paganism. At times I fancy
that, somewhere between this world and
another, a revelation will come upon us like
a flash, of what sin really is, — such a revelation,
lighting up the lurid background of our
past in such colors, that the consciousness of
what Christ has done for us will be for a time
as much as heart can bear. After that, the
mystery will be, not how to love Him most, but
that we ever could have loved any creature or
thing as much.”
“We serve God quite as much by active
work as by special prayer, here,” I said after
some thought; “how will it be there?”
“We must be busily at work certainly; but
I think there must naturally be more communion
with Him then. Now, this phrase
“communion with God” has been worn, and
not always well worn.
“Prayer means to us, in this life, more often
penitent confession than happy interchange of
thought with Him. It is associated, too, with
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[figure description] Page 201.[end figure description]
aching limbs and sleepy eyes, and nights when
the lamp goes out. Obstacles, moral and
physical, stand in the way of our knowing exactly
what it may mean in the ideal of it.
“My best conception of it lies in the friendship
of the man Christ Jesus. I suppose he
will bear with him, eternally, the humanity
which he took up with him from the Judean
hills. I imagine that we shall see him in visible
form like ourselves, among us, yet not of
us; that he, himself, is “Gott mit inhen”;
that we shall talk with him as a man talketh
with his friend. Perhaps, bowed and hushed
at his dear feet, we shall hear from his own
lips the story of Nazareth, of Bethany, of Golgotha,
of the chilly mountains where he used
to pray all night long for us; of the desert
places where he hungered; of his cry for help—
think, Mary — His! — when there was not
one in all the world to hear it, and there was
silence in heaven, while angels strengthened
him and man forsook him. Perhaps his voice—
the very voice which has sounded whispering
through our troubled life — “Could ye not
watch one hour?” — shall unfold its perplexed
meanings; shall make its rough places plain;
shall show us step by step the merciful way
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by which he led us to that hour; shall point
out to us, joy by joy, the surprises that he has
been planning for us, just as the old father in
the story planned to surprise his wayward boy
come home.
“And such a `communion,' — which is not
too much, nor yet enough, to dare to expect of
a God who was the `friend' of Abraham,
who `walked' with Enoch, who did not call
fishermen his servants, — such will be that
`presence of God,' that `adoration,' on which
we have looked from afar off with despairing
eyes that wept, they were so dazzled, and
turned themselves away as from the thing they
greatly feared.”
I think we neither of us cared to talk for a
while after this. Something made me forget
even that I was going to see Roy in heaven.
“Three-and-thirty years. Three-and-thirty
years.” The words rang themselves over.
“It is on the humanity of Christ,” she said
after some musing, “that all my other reasons
for hoping for such a heaven as I hope for, rest
for foundation. He knows exactly what we
are, for he has been one of us; exactly what
we hope and fear and crave, for he has hoped
and feared and craved, not the less humanly,
but only more intensely.
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“`If it were not so,' — do you take in the
thoughtful tenderness of that? A mother, stilling
her frightened child in the dark, might
speak just so, — `if it were not so, I would have
told you.' That brooding love makes room for
all that we can want. He has sounded every
deep of a troubled and tempted life. Who so
sure as he to understand how to prepare a
place where troubled and tempted lives may
grow serene? Further than this; since he
stands as our great Type, no less in death and
after than before it, he answers for us many
of these lesser questions on the event of which
so much of our happiness depends.
“Shall we lose our personality in a vague
ocean of ether, — you one puff of gas, I another? —
“He, with his own wounded body, rose and
ate and walked and talked.
“Is all memory of this life to be swept
away? —
“He, arisen, has forgotten nothing. He
waits to meet his disciples at the old, familiar
places; as naturally as if he had never been
parted from them, he falls in with the current
of their thoughts.
“Has any one troubled us with fears that in
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the glorified crowds of heaven we may miss a
face dearer than all the world to us? —
“He made himself known to his friends;
Mary, and the two at Emmaus, and the bewildered
group praying and perplexed in their
bolted room.
“Do we weary ourselves with speculations
whether human loves can outlive the shock of
death? —
“Mary knew how He loved her, when, turning,
she heard him call her by her name.
They knew, whose hearts `burned within
them while he talked with them by the way,
and when he tarried with them, the day being
far spent.'”
“And for the rest?”
“For the rest, about which He was silent, we
can trust him, and if, trusting, we please ourselves
with fancies, he would be the last to
think it blame to us. There is one promise
which grows upon me the more I study it, `He
that spared not his own Son, how shall he not
also with him freely give us all things?'
Sometimes I wonder if that does not infold a
beautiful double entendre, a hint of much that
you and I have conjectured, — as one throws
down a hint of a surprise to a child.
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“Then there is that pledge to those who
seek first His kingdom: `All these things shall
be added unto you.' `These things,' were food
and clothing, were varieties of material delight,
and the words were spoken to men who lived
hungry, beggared, and died the death of out-casts.
If this passage could be taken literally,
it would be very significant in its bearing on
the future life; for Christ must keep his promise
to the letter, in one world or another. It
may be wrenching the verse, not as a verse,
but from the grain of the argument, to insist
on the literal interpretation, — though I am
not sure.”
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XIV.
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August 15.
I asked the other day, wondering whether
all ministers were like Dr. Bland, what Uncle
Forceythe used to believe about heaven.
“Very much what I do,” she said. “These
questions were brought home to him, early in
life, by the death of a very dear sister; he had
thought much about them. I think one of the
things that so much attached his people to
him was the way he had of weaving their
future life in with this, till it grew naturally
and pleasantly into their frequent thought.
O yes, your uncle supplied me with half of my
proof-texts.”
Aunt Winifred has not looked quite well of
late, I fancy; though it may be only fancy.
She has not spoken of it, except one day when
I told her that she looked pale. It was the
heat, she said.
20th.
Little Clo came over to-night. I believe
she thinks Aunt Winifred the best friend she
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has in the world. Auntie has become much
attached to all her scholars, and has a rare
power of winning her way into their confidence.
They come to her with all their little
interests, — everything, from saving their souls
to trimming a bonnet. Clo, however, is the
favorite, as I predicted.
She looked a bit blue to-night, as girls will
look; in fact, her face always has a tinge of
sadness about it. Aunt Winifred, understanding
at a glance that the child was not in a
mood to talk before a third, led her away into
the garden, and they were gone a long time.
When it grew dark, I saw them coming up the
path, Clo's hand locked in her teacher's, and
her face, which was wet, upturned like a child's.
They strolled to the gate, lingered a little to
talk, and then Clo said good night without
coming in.
Auntie sat for a while after she had gone,
thinking her over, I could see.
“Poor thing!” she said at last, half to herself,
half to me, — “poor little foolish thing!
This is where the dreadful individuality of a
human soul irks me. There comes a point,
beyond which you can't help people.”
“What has happened to Clo?”
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“Nothing, lately. It has been happening for
two years. Two miserable years are an eternity,
at Clo's age. It is the old story, — a summer
boarder; a little flirting; a little dreaming;
a little pain; then autumn, and the nuts
dropping on the leaves, and he was gone, —
and knew not what he did, — and the child
waked up. There was the future; to bake and
sweep, to go to sewing-circles, and sing in the
choir, and bear the moonlight nights, — and
she loved him. She has lived through two
years of it, and she loves him now. Reason
will not reach such a passion in a girl like Clo.
I did not tell her that she would put it away
with other girlish things, and laugh at it herself
some happy day, as women have laughed
at their young fancies before her; partly
because that would be a certain way of repelling
her confidence, — she does not believe it,
and my believing could not make her; partly
because I am not quite sure about it myself.
Clo has a good deal of the woman about her;
her introspective life is intense. She may
cherish this sweet misery as she does her
musical tastes, till it has struck deep root.
There is nothing in the excellent Mrs. Bentley's
household, nor in Homer anywhere, to
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draw the girl out from herself in time to prevent
the dream from becoming a reality.”
“Poor little thing! What did you say to
her?”
“You ought to have heard what she said to
me! I wish I were at liberty to tell you the
whole story. What troubles her most is that
it is not going to help the matter any to die.
`O Mrs. Forceythe,' she says, in a tone that is
enough to give the heart-ache, even to such an
old woman as Mrs. Forceythe, `O Mrs. Forceythe,
what is going to become of me up
there? He never loved me, you see, and he
never, never will, and he will have some beautiful,
good wife of his own, and I won't have
anybody! For I can't love anybody else, —
I 've tried; I tried just as hard as I could to
love my cousin 'Bin; he 's real good, and —
I 'm — afraid 'Bin likes me, though I guess he
likes his carpet-sweepers better. O, sometimes
I think, and think, till it seems as if I could
not bear it! I don't see how God can make
me happy. I wish I could be buried up and
go to sleep, and never have any heaven!'”
“And you told her —?”
“That she should have him there. That is,
if not himself, something, — somebody who
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would so much more than fill his place, that
she would never have a lonely or unloved
minute. Her eyes brightened, and shaded,
and pondered, doubting. She `did n't see how
it could ever be.' I told her not to try and
see how, but to leave it to Christ. He knew
all about this little trouble of hers, and he
would make it right.
“`Will he?' she questioned, sighing; `but
there are so many of us! There 's 'Bin, and a
plenty more, and I don't see how it 's going to
be smoothed out. Everything is in a jumble,
Mrs. Forceythe, don't you see? for some people
can't like and keep liking so many times.'
Something came into my mind about the
rough places that shall be made plain, and the
crooked things straight. I tried to explain to
her, and at last I kissed away her tears, and
sent her home, if not exactly comforted, a little
less miserable, I think, than when she came.
Ah, well, — I wonder myself sometimes about
these `crooked things'; but, though I wonder,
I never doubt.”
She finished her sentence somewhat hurriedly,
and half started from her chair, raising both
hands with a quick, involuntary motion that
attracted my notice. The lights came in just
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then, and, unless I am much mistaken, her face
showed paler than usual; but when I asked
her if she felt faint, she said, “O no, I believe
I am a little tired, and will go to
bed.”
September 1.
I am glad that the summer is over. This
heat has certainly worn on Aunt Winifred,
with that kind of wear which slides people into
confirmed invalidism. I suppose she would
bear it in her saintly way, as she bears everything,
but it would be a bitter cup for her. I
know she was always pale, but this is a paleness
which —
Night.
A dreadful thing has happened!
I was in the middle of my sentence, when I
heard a commotion in the street, and a child's
voice shouting incoherently something about
the doctor, and “mother 's killed! O, mother 's
killed! mother 's burnt to death!” I was at
the window in time to see a blond-haired girl
running wildly past the house, and to see that
it was Molly Bland.
At the same moment I saw Aunt Winifred
snatching her hat from its nail in the entry.
She beckoned to me to follow, and we were
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half-way over to the parsonage before I had a
distinct thought of what I was about.
We came upon a horrible scene. Dr. Bland
was trying to do everything alone; there was
not a woman in the house to help him, for
they have never been able to keep a servant,
and none of the neighbors had had time to be
there before us. The poor husband was growing
faint, I think. Aunt Winifred saw by a
look that he could not bear much more, sent
him after Molly for the doctor, and took everything
meantime into her own charge.
I shall not write down a word of it. It was
a sight that, once seen, will never leave me as
long as I live. My nerves are thoroughly
shaken by it, and it must be put out of thought
as far as possible.
It seems that the little boy — the baby —
crept into the kitchen by himself, and began
to throw the contents of the match-box on the
stove, “to make a bonfire,” the poor little fellow
said. In five minutes his apron was ablaze.
His mother was on the spot at his first cry, and
smothered the little apron, and saved the child,
but her dress was muslin, and everybody was
too far off to hear her at first, — and by the
time her husband came in from the garden it
was too late.
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She is living yet. Her husband, pacing the
room back and forth, and crouching on his
knees by the hour, is praying God to let her
die before the morning.
Morning.
There is no chance of life, the doctor says.
But he has been able to find something that
has lessened her sufferings. She lies partially
unconscious.
Wednesday night.
Aunt Winifred and I were over at the parsonage
to-night, when she roused a little from
her stupor and recognized us. She spoke to
her husband, and kissed me good by, and asked
for the children. They were playing softly in
the next room; we sent for them, and they
came in, — the four unconscious, motherless
little things, — with the sunlight in their hair.
The bitterness of death came into her
marred face at sight of them, and she raised
her hands to Auntie — to the only other
mother there — with a sudden helpless cry:
“I could bear it, I could bear it, if it were n't
for them. Without any mother all their lives,—
such little things, — and to go away where
I can't do a single thing for them!”
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Aunt Winifred stooped down and spoke low,
but decidedly.
“You will do for them. God knows all
about it. He will not send you away from
them. You shall be just as much their mother,
every day of their lives, as you have been here.
Perhaps there is something to do for them
which you never could have done here. He
sees. He loves them. He loves you.”
If I could paint, I might paint the look that
struck through and through that woman's
dying face; but words cannot touch it. If I
were Aunt Winifred, I should bless God on my
knees to-night for having shown me how to
give such ease to a soul in death.
Thursday morning.
God is merciful. Mrs. Bland died at five
o'clock.
10th.
How such a voice from the heavens shocks
one out of the repose of calm sorrows and of
calm joys. This has come and gone so suddenly
that I cannot adjust it to any quiet and trustful
thinking yet.
The whole parish mourns excitedly; for,
though they worked their minister's wife hard,
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they loved her well. I cannot talk it over with
the rest. It jars. Horror should never be
dissected. Besides, my heart is too full of
those four little children with the sunlight in
their hair and the unconsciousness in their
eyes.
15th.
Mrs. Quirk came over to-day in great perplexity.
She had just come from the minister's.
“I don't know what we 're a goin' to do with
him!” she exclaimed in a gush of impatient,
uncomprehending sympathy; “you can't let a
man take on that way much longer. He 'll
worry himself sick, and then we shall either
lose him or have to pay his bills to Europe!
Why, he jest stops in the house, and walks his
study up and down, day and night; or else he
jest sets and sets and don't notice nobody but
the children. Now I 've jest ben over makin'
him some chicken-pie, — he used to set a sight
by my chicken-pie, — and he made believe to
eat it, 'cause I 'd ben at the trouble, I suppose,
but how much do you suppose he swallowed?
Jest three mouthfuls! Thinks says I, I won't
spend my time over chicken-pie for the afflicted
agin, and on ironing-day, too! When I
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knocked at the study door, he said, `Come in,'
and stopped his walkin' and turned as quick.
“`O,' says he, `good morning. I thought it
was Mrs. Forceythe.'
“I told him no, I was n't Mrs. Forceythe, but
I 'd come to comfort him in his sorrer all the
same. But that 's the only thing I have agin
our minister. He won't be comforted. Mary
Ann Jacobs, who 's ben there kind of looking
after the children and things for him, you
know, sence the funeral — she says he 's asked
three or four times for you, Mrs. Forceythe.
There 's ben plenty of his people in to see him,
but you have n't ben nigh him, Mary Ann
says.”
“I stayed away because I thought the presence
of friends at this time would be an intrusion,”
Auntie said; “but if he would like to
see me, that alters the case. I will go, certainly.”
“I don't know,” suggested Mrs. Quirk, looking
over the tops of her spectacles, — “I s'pose
it 's proper enough, but you bein' a widow, you
know, and his wife —”
Aunt Winifred's eyes shot fire. She stood
up and turned upon Mrs. Quirk with a look
the like of which I presume that worthy lady
had never seen before, and is not likely to see
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soon again (it gave the beautiful scorn of a
Zenobia to her fair, slight face), moved her lips
slightly, but said nothing, put on her bonnet,
and went straight to Dr. Bland's.
The minister, they told her, was in his study.
She knocked lightly at the door, and was bidden
in a lifeless voice to enter.
Shades and blinds were drawn, and the
glare of the sun quite shut out. Dr. Bland sat
by his study-table, with his face upon his hands.
A Bible lay open before him. It had been
lately used; the leaves were wet.
He raised his head dejectedly, but smiled
when he saw who it was. He had been thinking
about her, he said, and was glad that she
had come.
I do not know all that passed between them,
but I gather, from such hints as Auntie in her
unconsciousness throws out, that she had things
to say which touched some comfortless places
in the man's heart. No Greek and Hebrew
“original,” no polished dogma, no link in his
stereotyped logic, not one of his eloquent sermons
on the future state, came to his relief.
These were meant for happy days. They
rang cold as sleet upon the warm needs of
an afflicted man. Brought face to face, and
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sharply, with the blank heaven of his belief,
he stood up from before his dead, and groped
about it, and cried out against it in the bitterness
of his soul.
“I had no chance to prepare myself to bow
to the will of God,” he said, his reserved ministerial
manner in curious contrast with the
caged way in which he was pacing the room,—
“I had no chance. I am taken by surprise,
as by a thief in the night. I had a great deal
to say to her, and there was no time. She
could tell me what to do with my poor little
children. I wanted to tell her other things.
I wanted to tell her — Perhaps we all of us
have our regrets when the Lord removes our
friends; we may have done or left undone
many things; we might have made them happier.
My mind does not rest with assurance
in its conceptions of the heavenly state. If I
never can tell her —”
He stopped abruptly, and paced into the
darkest shadows of the shadowed room, his
face turned away.
“You said once some pleasant things about
heaven?” he said at last, half appealingly,
stopping in front of her, hesitating; like a man
and like a minister, hardly ready to come with
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all the learning of his schools and commentators
and sit at the feet of a woman.
She talked with him for a time in her unobtrusive
way, deferring, when she honestly could,
to his clerical judgment, and careful not to
wound him by any word; but frankly and
clearly, as she always talks.
When she rose to go he thanked her quietly.
“This is a somewhat novel train of thought
to me,” he said; “I hope it may not prove an
unscriptural one. I have been reading the
book of Revelation to-day with these questions
especially in mind. We are never too old to
learn. Some passages may be capable of
other interpretations than I have formerly
given them. No matter what I wish, you see,
I must be guided by the Word of my God.”
Auntie says that she never respected the man
so much as she did when, hearing those words,
she looked up into his haggard face, convulsed
with its human pain and longing.
“I hope you do not think that I am not
guided by the Word of God,” she answered.
“I mean to be.”
“I know you mean to be,” he said cordially.
“I do not say that you are not. I may come
to see that you are, and that you are right.
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It will be a peaceful day for me if I can ever
quite agree with your methods of reasoning.
But I must think these things over. I thank
you once more for coming. Your sympathy
is grateful to me.”
Just as she closed the door he called her
back.
“See,” he said, with a saddened smile. “At
least I shall never preach this again. It seems
to me that life is always undoing for us something
that we have just laboriously done.”
He held up before her a mass of old blue
manuscript, and threw it, as he spoke, upon
the embers left in his grate. It smoked and
blazed up and burned out.
It was that sermon on heaven of which
there is an abstract in this journal.
20th.
Aunt Winifred hired Mr. Tripp's gray this
afternoon, and drove to East Homer on some
unexplained errand. She did not invite me to
go with her, and Faith, though she teased impressively,
was left at home. Her mother was
gone till late, — so late that I had begun to be
anxious about her, and heard through the
dark the first sound of the buggy wheels, with
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great relief. She looked very tired when I
met her at the gate. She had not been able,
she said, to accomplish her errand at East
Homer, and from there had gone to Worcester
by railroad, leaving Old Gray at the East
Homer Eagle till her return. She told me
nothing more, and I asked no questions.
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XV.
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Sunday.
Faith has behaved like a witch all day.
She knocked down three crickets and six
hymn-books in church this morning, and this
afternoon horrified the assembled and devout
congregation by turning round in the middle
of the long prayer, and, in a loud and distinct
voice, asking Mrs. Quirk for “'nother those
pepp'mints such as you gave me one Sunday
a good many years ago, you 'member.” After
church, her mother tried a few Bible questions
to keep her still.
“Faith, who was Christ's father?”
“Jerusalem!” said Faith, promptly.
“Where did his parents take Jesus when
they fled from Herod?”
“O, to Europe. Of course I knew that!
Everybody goes to Europe.”
To-night, when her mother had put her to
bed, she came down laughing.
“Faith does seem to have a hard time with
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the Lord's Prayer. To-night, being very sleepy
and in a hurry to finish, she proceeded with
great solemnity: — `Our Father who art in
heaven, hallowed be thy name; six days shalt
thou labor and do all thy work, and — Oh!'
“I was just thinking how amused her father
must be.”
Auntie says many such things. I cannot
explain how pleasantly they strike me, nor how
they help me.
29th.
Dr. Bland gave us a good sermon yesterday.
There is an indescribable change in all his sermons.
There is a change, too, in the man,
and that something more than the haggardness
of grief. I not only respect him and am
sorry for him, but I feel more ready to be
taught by him than ever before. A certain
indefinable humanness softens his eyes and
tones, and seems to be creeping into everything
that he says. Yet, on the other hand,
his people say that they have never heard him
speak such pleasant, helpful things concerning
his and their relations to God. I met him
the other night, coming away from his wife's
grave, and was struck by the expression of his
face. I wondered if he were not slowly
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finding the “peaceful day,” of which he told Aunt
Winifred.
She, by the way, has taken another of her
mysterious trips to Worcester.
30th.
We were wondering to-day where it will be,—
I mean heaven.
“It is impossible to do more than wonder,”
Auntie said, “though we are explicitly told
that there will be new heavens and a new
earth, which seems, if anything can be taken
literally in the Bible, to point to this world as
the future home of at least some of us.”
“Not for all of us, of course?”
“I don't feel sure. I know that somebody
spent his valuable time in estimating that all
the people who have lived and died upon the
earth would cover it, alive or buried, twice
over; but I know that somebody else claims
with equal solemnity to have discovered that
they could all be buried in the State of Pennsylvania!
But it would be of little consequence
if we could not all find room here,
since there must be other provision for us.”
“Why?”
“Certainly there is `a place' in which we
are promised that we shall be `with Christ,'
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[figure description] Page 225.[end figure description]
this world being yet the great theatre of human
life and battle-ground of Satan; no place,
certainly, in which to confine a happy soul
without prospect of release. The Spiritualistic
notion of `circles' of dead friends revolving
over us is to me intolerable. I want my husband
with me when I need him, but I hope he
has a place to be happy in, which is out of this
woful world.
“The old astronomical idea, stars around
a sun, and systems around a centre, and that
centre the Throne of God, is not an unreasonable
one. Isaac Taylor, among his various
conjectures, inclines, I fancy, to suppose that
the sun of each system is the heaven of that
system. Though the glory of God may be
more directly and impressively exhibited in
one place than in another, we may live in
different planets, and some of us, after its destruction
and renovation, on this same dear
old, happy and miserable, loved and maltreated
earth. I hope I shall be one of them. I
should like to come back and build me a beautiful
home in Kansas, — I mean in what was
Kansas, — among the happy people and the
familiar, transfigured spots where John and I
worked for God so long together. That —
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with my dear Lord to see and speak with
every day — would be `Heaven our Home.'”
“There will be no days, then?”
“There will be succession of time. There
may not be alternations of twenty-four hours
dark or light, but `I use with thee an earthly
language,' as the wife said in that beautiful
little `Awakening,' of Therrmin's. Do you
remember it? Do read it over, if you have n't
read it lately.
“As to our coming back here, there is an
echo to Peter's assertion, in the idea of a world
under a curse, destroyed and regenerated, — the
atonement of Christ reaching, with something
more than poetic force, the very sands of the
earth which he trod with bleeding feet to make
himself its Saviour. That makes me feel —
don't you see? — what a taint there is in sin.
If dumb dust is to have such awful cleansing,
what must be needed for you and me?
“How many pleasant talks we have had
about these things, Mary! Well, it cannot
be long, at the longest, before we know, even
as we are known.”
I looked at her smiling white face, — it is
always very white now, — and something
struck slowly through me, like a chill.
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October 16, midnight.
There is no such thing as sleep at present.
Writing is better than thinking.
Aunt Winifred went again to Worcester
to-day. She said that she had to buy trimming
for Faith's sack.
She went alone, as usual, and Faith and I
kept each other company through the afternoon, —
she on the floor with Mary Ann, I in
the easy-chair with Macaulay. As the light
began to fall level on the floor, I threw the
book aside, — being at the end of a volume, —
and, Mary Ann having exhausted her attractions,
I surrendered unconditionally to the little
maiden.
She took me up garret, and down cellar, on
top of the wood-pile, and into the apple-trees;
I fathomed the mysteries of Old Man's Castle
and Still Palm; I was her grandmother, I was
her baby, I was a rabbit, I was a chestnut
horse, I was a watch-dog, I was a mild-tempered
giant, I was a bear “warranted not to
eat little girls,” I was a roaring hippopotamus
and a canary bird, I was Jeff Davis and I was
Moses in the bulrushes, and of what I was, the
time faileth me to tell.
It comes over me with a curious, mingled
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sense of the ludicrous and the horrible, that I
should have spent the afternoon like a baby,
and almost as happily, laughing out with the
child, past and future forgotten, the tremendous
risks of “I spy” absorbing all my present;
while what was happening was happening,
and what was to come was coming. Not
an echo in the air, not a prophecy in the
sunshine, not a note of warning in the song of
the robins that watched me from the apple-boughs!
As the long, golden afternoon slid away, we
came out by the front gate to watch for the
child's mother. I was tired, and, lying back
on the grass, gave Faith some pink and purple
larkspurs, that she might amuse herself in
making a chain of them. The picture that
she made sitting there on the short, dying
grass — the light which broke all about her
and over her at the first, creeping slowly down
and away to the west, her little fingers linking
the rich, bright flowers tube into tube, the
dimple on her cheek and the love in her eyes—
has photographed itself into my thinking.
How her voice rang out, when the wheels
sounded at last, and the carriage, somewhat
slowly driven, stopped!
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“Mamma, mamma! see what I 've got for
you, mamma!”
Auntie tried to step from the carriage, and
called me: “Mary, can you help me a little?
I am — tired.”
I went to her, and she leaned heavily on my
arm, and we came up the path.
“Such a pretty little chain, all for you,
mamma,” began Faith, and stopped, struck by
her mother's look.
“It has been a long ride, and I am in pain.
I believe I will lie right down on the parlor
sofa. Mary, would you be kind enough to
give Faith her supper and put her to bed?”
Faith's lip grieved.
“Cousin Mary is n't you, mamma. I want
to be kissed. You have n't kissed me.”
Her mother hesitated for a moment; then
kissed her once, twice; put both arms about
her neck; and turned her face to the wall
without a word.
“Mamma is tired, dear,” I said; “come
away.”
She was lying quite still when I had done
what was to be done for the child, and had
come back. The room was nearly dark. I
sat down on my cricket by her sofa.
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“Shall Phœbe light the lamp?”
“Not just yet.”
“Can't you drink a cup of tea if I bring it?”
“Not just yet.”
“Did you find the sack-trimming?” I ventured,
after a pause.
“I believe so, — yes.”
She drew a little package from her pocket,
held it a moment, then let it roll to the floor
forgotten. When I picked it up, the soft,
tissue-paper wrapper was wet and hot with
tears.
“Mary?”
“Yes.”
“I never thought of the little trimming till
the last minute. I had another errand.”
I waited.
“I thought at first I would not tell you just
yet. But I suppose the time has come; it will
be no more easy to put it off. I have been to
Worcester all these times to see a doctor.”
I bent my head in the dark, and listened for
the rest.
“He has his reputation; they said he could
help me if anybody could. He thought at
first he could. But to-day — Mary, see here.”
She walked feebly towards the window,
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where a faint, gray light struggled in, and
opened the bosom of her dress.....
There was silence between us for a long
while after that; she went back to the sofa,
and I took her hand and bowed my face over
it, and so we sat.
The leaves rustled out of doors. Faith, up
stairs, was singing herself to sleep with a
droning sound.
“He talked of risking an operation,” she
said, at length, “but decided to-day that it
was quite useless. I suppose I must give up
and be sick now; I am feeling the reaction from
having kept up so long. He thinks I shall
not suffer a very great deal. He thinks he
can relieve me, and that it may be soon over.”
“There is no chance?”
“No chance.”
I took both of her hands, and cried out, I
believe, as I did that first night when she
spoke to me of Roy, — “Auntie, Auntie, Auntie!”
and tried to think what I was doing, but
only cried out the more.
“Why, Mary!” she said, — “why, Mary!”
and again, as before, she passed her soft hand
to and fro across my hair, till by and by I began
to think, as I had thought before, that I
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could bear anything which God who loved us
all — who surely loved us all — should send.
So then, after I had grown still, she began
to tell me about it in her quiet voice, and the
leaves rustled, and Faith had sung herself to
sleep, and I listened wondering. For there
was no pain in the quiet voice, — no pain, nor
tone of fear. Indeed, it seemed to me that
I detected, through its subdued sadness, a
secret, suppressed buoyancy of satisfaction,
with which something struggled.
“And you?” I asked, turning quickly upon
her.
“I should thank God with all my heart,
Mary, if it were not for Faith and you. But it
is for Faith and you. That 's all.”
When I had locked the front door, and was
creeping up here to my room, my foot crushed
something, and a faint, wounded perfume came
up. It was the little pink and purple chain.
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XVI.
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October 17.
“The Lord God a'mighty help us! but His
ways are past finding out. What with one
thing and another thing, that child without a
mother, and you with the crape not yet rusty
for Mr. Roy'l, it doos seem to me as if His
manner of treating folks beats all! But I tell
you this, Miss Mary, my dear; you jest say
your prayers reg'lar and stick to Him, and
He 'll pull you through, sure!”
This was what Phœbe said when I told her.
November 8.
To-night, for the first time, Auntie fairly
gave up trying to put Faith to bed. She had
insisted on it until now, crawling up by the
banisters like a wounded thing. This time
she tottered and sank upon the second step.
She cried out, feebly: “I am afraid I must
give it up to Cousin Mary. Faith!” — the
child clung with both hands to her, — “Faith,
Faith! Mother's little girl!”
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It was the last dear care of motherhood
yielded; the last link snapped. It seemed to
be the very bitterness of parting.
I turned away, that they might bear it together,
they two alone.
19th.
Yet I think that took away the sting.
The days are slipping away now very
quietly, and — to her I am sure, and to me for
her sake — very happily.
She suffers less than I had feared, and she
lies upon the bed and smiles, and Faith comes
in and plays about, and the cheery morning
sunshine falls on everything, and when her
strong hours come, we have long talks together,
hand clasped in hand.
Such pleasant talks! We are quite brave
to speak of anything, since we know that what
is to be is best just so, and since we fear no
parting. I tell her that Faith and I will soon
learn to shut our eyes and think we see her,
and try to make it almost the same, for she
will never be very far away, will she? And
then she shakes her head smiling, for it pleases
her, and she kisses me softly. Then we dream
of how it will all be, and how we shall love and
try to please each other quite as much as now.
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“It will be like going around a corner, don't
you see?” she says. “You will know that I
am there all the while, though hidden, and
that if you call me I shall hear.” Then we
talk of Faith, and of how I shall comfort her;
that I shall teach her this, and guard her from
that, and how I shall talk with her about
heaven and her mother. Sometimes Faith
comes up and wants to know what we are saying,
and lays poor Mary Ann, sawdust and all,
upon the pillow, and wants “her toof-ache
kissed away.” So Auntie kisses away the
dolly's “toof-ache”; and kisses the dolly's little
mother, sometimes with a quiver on her lips,
but more often with a smile in her eyes, and
Faith runs back to play, and her laugh ripples
out, and her mother listens — listens.
Sometimes, too, we talk of some of the
people for whom she cares; of her husband's
friends; of her scholars, or Dr. Bland, or Clo,
or poor 'Bin Quirk, or of somebody down town
whom she was planning to help this winter.
Little Clo comes in as often as she is strong
enough to see her, and sends over untold jellies
and blanc-manges, which Faith and I have to
eat. “But don't let the child know that,”
Auntie says.
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But more often we talk of the life which she
is so soon to begin; of her husband and Roy;
of what she will try to say to Christ; how
much dearer He has grown to her since she
has lain here in pain at His bidding, and how
He helps her, at morning and at eventide and
in the night-watches.
We talk of the trees and the mountains and
the lilies in the garden, on which the glory of
the light that is not the light of the sun may
shine; of the “little brooks” by which she
longs to sit and sing to Faith; of the treasures
of art which she may fancy to have about her;
of the home in which her husband may be
making ready for her coming, and wonder
what he has there, and if he knows how near
the time is now.
But I notice lately that she more often and
more quickly wearies of these things; that she
comes back, and comes back again to some
loving thought — as loving as a child's — of
Jesus Christ. He seems to be — as she once
said she tried that He should be to Faith —
her “best friend.”
Sometimes, too, we wonder what it means
to pass out of the body, and what one will be
first conscious of.
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“I used to have a very human, and by no
means slight, dread of the physical pain of
death,” she said to-day; “but, for some reason
or other, that is slowly leaving me. I imagine
that the suffering of any fatal sickness is worse
than the immediate process of dissolution.
Then there is so much beyond it to occupy
one's thoughts. One thing I have thought
much about; it is that, whatever may be our
first experience after leaving the body, it is not
likely to be a revolutionary one. It is more
in analogy with God's dealings that a quiet
process, a gentle accustoming, should open
our eyes on the light that would blind if it
came in a flash. Perhaps we shall not see
Him, — perhaps we could not bear it to see
Him at once. It may be that the faces of
familiar human friends will be the first to
greet us; it may be that the touch of the human
hand dearer than any but His own shall
lead us, as we are able, behind the veil, till we
are a little used to the glory and the wonder,
and lead us so to Him.
“Be that as it may, and be heaven where
it may, I am not afraid. With all my guessing
and my studying and my dreaming over
these things, I am only a child in the dark.
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`Nevertheless, I am not afraid of the dark.'
God bless Mr. Robertson for saying that! I 'm
going to bless him when I see him. How
pleasant it will be to see him, and some other
friends whose faces I never saw in this world.
David, for instance, or Paul, or Cowper, or
President Lincoln, or Mrs. Browning. The
only trouble is that I am nobody to them!
However, I fancy that they will let me shake
hands with them.
“No, I am quite willing to trust all these
things to God.
`And what if much be still unknown?
Thy Lord shall teach thee that,
When thou shalt stand before His throne,
Or sit as Mary sat.'
I may find them very different from what I
have supposed. I know that I shall find them
infinitely more satisfying than I have supposed.
As Schiller said of his philosophy, `Perhaps I
may be ashamed of my raw design, at sight of
the true original. This may happen; I expect
it; but then, if reality bears no resemblance to
my dreams, it will be a more majestic, a more
delightful surprise.'
“I believe nothing that God denies. I cannot
overrate the beauty of his promise. So
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it surely can have done no harm for me to
take the comfort of my fancying till I am
there; and what a comfort it has been to me,
God only knows. I could scarcely have borne
some things without it.”
“You are never afraid that anything proving
a little different from what you expect
might —”
“Might disappoint me? No; I have settled
that in my heart with God. I do not
think I shall be disappointed. The truth is,
he has obviously not opened the gates which
bar heaven from our sight, but he has as obviously
not shut them; they stand ajar, with the
Bible and reason in the way, to keep them
from closing; surely we should look in as far
as we can, and surely, if we look with reverence,
our eyes will be holden, that we may
not cheat ourselves with mirages. And, as
the little Swedish girl said, the first time she
saw the stars: `O father, if the wrong side
of heaven is so beautiful, what must the right
side be?'”
January.
I write little now, for I am living too much.
The days are stealing away and lessening one
by one, and still Faith plays about the room,
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though very softly now, and still the cheery
sunshine shimmers in, and still we talk with
clasping hands, less often and more pleasantly.
Morning and noon and evening come and go;
the snow drifts down and the rain falls softly;
clouds form and break and hurry past the windows;
shadows melt and lights are shattered,
and little rainbows are prisoned by the icicles
that hang from the eaves.
I sit and watch them, and watch the sick-lamp
flicker in the night, and watch the blue
morning crawl over the hills; and the old words
are stealing down my thought: That is the
substance, this the shadow; that the reality, this
the dream.
I watch her face upon the pillow; the happy
secret on its lips; the smile within its eyes. It
is nearly a year now since God sent the face
to me. What it has done for me He knows;
what the next year and all the years are to be
without it, He knows, too.
It is slipping away, — slipping. And I —
must — lose it.
Perhaps I should not have said what I said
to-night; but being weak from watching, and
seeing how glad she was to go, seeing how all
the peace was for her, all the pain for us, I
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cried, “O Auntie, Auntie, why can't we go
too? Why can't Faith and I go with you?”
But she answered me only, “Mary, He
knows.”
We will be brave again to-morrow. A little
more sunshine in the room! A little more of
Faith and the dolly!
The Sabbath.
She asked for the child at bedtime to-night,
and I laid her down in her night-dress on her
mother's arm. She kissed her, and said her
prayers, and talked a bit about Mary Ann,
and to-morrow, and her snow man. I sat over
by the window in the dusk, and watched a
little creamy cloud that was folding in the
moon. Presently their voices grew low, and
at last Faith's stopped altogether. Then I
heard in fragments this: —
“Sleepy, dear? But you won't have many
more talks with mamma. Keep awake just a
minute, Faith, and hear — can you hear?
Mamma will never, never forget her little girl;
she won't go away very far; she will always
love you. Will you remember as long as you
live? She will always see you, though you
can't see her, perhaps. Hush, my darling,
don't cry! Is n't God naughty? No, God is
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good; God is always good. He won't take
mamma a great way off. One more kiss?
There! now you may go to sleep. One more!
Come, Cousin Mary.”
June 6.
It is a long time since I have written here.
I did not want to open the book till I was sure
that I could open it quietly, and could speak
as she would like to have me speak, of what
remains to be written.
But a very few words will tell it all.
It happened so naturally and so happily,
she was so glad when the time came, and she
made me so glad for her sake, that I cannot
grieve. I say it from my honest heart, I cannot
grieve. In the place out of which she has
gone, she has left me peace. I think of something
that Miss Procter said about the opening
of that golden gate,
“round which the kneeling spirits wait.
The halo seems to linger round those kneeling closest to
the door:
The joy that lightened from that place shines still upon the
watcher's face.”
I think more often of some things that she
herself said in the very last of those pleasant
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talks, when, turning a leaf in her little Bible,
she pointed out to me the words: —
“It is expedient for you that I go away;
for, if I go not away, the Comforter will not
come.”
It was one spring-like night, — the twenty-ninth
of March.
She had been in less pain, and had chatted
and laughed more with us than for many a
day. She begged that Faith might stay till
dark, and might bring her Noah's ark and
play down upon the foot of the bed where she
could see her. I sat in the rocking-chair with
my face to the window. We did not light the
lamps.
The night came on slowly. Showery clouds
flitted by, but there was a blaze of golden
color behind them. It broke through and
scattered them; it burned them and melted
them; it shot great pink and purple jets up to
the zenith; it fell and lay in amber mist upon
the hills. A soft wind swept by, and darted
now and then into the glow, and shifted it
about, color away from color, and back again.
“See, Faith!” she said softly; “put down
the little camel a minute, and look!” and
added after, but neither to the child nor to me,
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it seemed: “At eventide there shall be light.”
Phœbe knocked presently, and I went out to
see what was wanted, and planned a little for
Auntie's breakfast, and came back.
Faith, with her little ark, was still playing
quietly upon the bed. I sat down again in
my rocking-chair with my face to the window.
Now and then the child's voice broke the
silence, asking Where should she put the elephant,
and was there room there for the yellow
bird? and now and then her mother answered
her, and so presently the skies had
faded, and so the night came on.
I was thinking that it was Faith's bedtime,
and that I had better light the lamp, when
a few distinct, hurried words from the bed attracted
my attention.
“Faith, I think you had better kiss mamma
now, and get down.”
There was a change in the voice. I was
there in a moment, and lifted the child from
the pillow, where she had crept. But she said,
“Wait a minute, Mary; wait a minute,” —
for Faith clung to her, with one hand upon
her cheek, softly patting it.
I went over and stood by the window.
It was her mother herself who gently put
the little fingers away at last.
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“Mother's own little girl! Good night, my
darling, my darling.”
So I took the child away to Phœbe, and
came back, and shut the door.
“I thought you might have some message
for Roy,” she said.
“Now?”
“Now, I think.”
We had often talked of this, and she had
promised to remember it, whatever it might
be. So I told her — But I will not write
what I told her.
I saw that she was playing weakly with her
wedding-ring, which hung very loosely below
its little worn guard.
“Take the little guard,” she said, “and keep
it for Faith; but bury the other with me: he
put it on; nobody else must take it —”
The sentence dropped, unfinished.
I crept up on the bed beside her, for she
seemed to wish it. I asked if I should light the
lamp, but she shook her head. The room
seemed light, she said, quite light. She
wondered then if Faith were asleep, and if
she would waken early in the morning.
After that I kissed her, and then we said
nothing more, only presently she asked me to
hold her hand.
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It was quite dark when she turned her face
at last towards the window.
“John!” she said, — “why, John!”
They came in, with heads uncovered and
voices hushed, to see her, in the days while she
was lying down stairs among the flowers.
Once when I thought that she was alone, I
went in, — it was at twilight, — and turned,
startled by a figure that was crouched sobbing
on the floor.
“O, I want to go too, I want to go too!” it
cried.
“She 's ben there all day long,” said Phœbe,
wiping her eyes, “and she won't go home for
a mouthful of victuals, poor creetur! but she
jest sets there and cries and cries, an' there 's
no stoppin' of her!”
It was little Clo.
At another time, I was there with fresh
flowers, when the door opened, creaking a
little, and 'Bin Quirk came in on tiptoe, trying
in vain to still the noise of his new boots.
His eyes were red and wet, and he held out to
me timidly a single white carnation.
“Could you put it somewhere, where it
would n't do any harm? I walked way over
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to Worcester and back to get it. If you could
jest hide it under the others out of sight, seems
to me it would do me a sight of good to feel it
was there, you know.”
I motioned to him to lay it himself between
her fingers.
“O, I dars n't. I 'm not fit, I'm not. She 'd
rether have you.”
But I told him that I knew she would be as
pleased that he should give it to her himself
as she was when he gave her the China pinks
on that distant summer day. So the great
awkward fellow bent down, as simply as a child,
as tenderly as a woman, and left the flower in
its place.
“She liked 'em,” he faltered; “maybe, if what
she used to say is all so, she 'll like 'em now.
She liked 'em better than she did machines.
I 've just got my carpet-sweeper through; I
was thinking how pleased she 'd be; I wanted
to tell her. If I should go to the good place,—
if ever I do go, it will be just her doin's, —
I 'll tell her then, maybe, I —”
He forgot that anybody was there, and, sobbing,
hid his face in his great hands.
So we are waiting for the morning when
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the gates shall open, — Faith and I. I, from
my stiller watches, am not saddened by the
music of her life. I feel sure that her mother
wishes it to be a cheery life. I feel sure that
she is showing me, who will have no motherhood
by which to show myself, how to help
her little girl.
And Roy, — ah, well, and Roy, — he knows.
Our hour is not yet come. If the Master will
that we should be about His Father's business,
what is that to us?
THE END.
