University of Virginia Library

7. VII.

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

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?”

“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

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.

“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.”

“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 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

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

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[1] 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!

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

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

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

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,'

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.

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!