 | XV. The gates ajar |  |
15. XV.
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
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 finding
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,'
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 —
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.
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
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!
“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.
“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,
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
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.
| XV. The gates ajar | |