 | X. The gates ajar |  |
10. X.
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
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 ribbon
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
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
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
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.
“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
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
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
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
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
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.”
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
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'
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 church-members,
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?'
“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.
“`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[1] 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.”
| X. The gates ajar | |