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                            THE GATES AJAR.

                                  BY

                       ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS.

      “Splendor! Immensity! Eternity! Grand words! Great things!
     A little definite happiness would be more to the purpose.”
                                    MADAME DE GASPARIN

                                BOSTON:
                     JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY,
           LATE TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.
                                 1873.

      Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by

                        FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.,

In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

               UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & CO.,
                              CAMBRIDGE.

  To my father, whose life, like a perfume from beyond the Gates,
  penetrates every life which approaches it, the readers of this little
  book will owe whatever pleasant thing they may find within its pages.

E. S. P.

ANDOVER, October 22, 1868.

                            THE GATES AJAR.

I.

One week; only one week to-day, this twenty-first of February.

I have been sitting here in the dark and thinking about it, till it
seems so horribly long and so horribly short; it has been such a week to
live through, and it is such a small part of the weeks that must be
lived through, that I could think no longer, but lighted my lamp and
opened my desk to find something to do.

I was tossing my paper about,--only my own: the packages in the yellow
envelopes I have not been quite brave enough to open yet,--when I came
across this poor little book in which I used to keep memoranda of the
weather, and my lovers, when I was a school-girl. I turned the leaves,
smiling to see how many blank pages were left, and took up my pen, and
now I am not smiling any more.

If it had not come exactly as it did, it seems to me as if I could bear
it better. They tell me that it should not have been such a shock.
“Your brother had been in the army so long that you should have been
prepared for anything. Everybody knows by what a hair a soldier’s life
is always hanging,” and a great deal more that I am afraid I have not
listened to. I suppose it is all true; but that never makes it any
easier.

The house feels like a prison. I walk up and down and wonder that I ever
called it home. Something is the matter with the sunsets; they come and
go, and I do not notice them. Something ails the voices of the children,
snowballing down the street; all the music has gone out of them, and
they hurt me like knives. The harmless, happy children!--and Roy loved
the little children.

Why, it seems to me as if the world were spinning around in the light
and wind and laughter, and God just stretched down His hand one morning
and put it out.

It was such a dear, pleasant world to be put out!

It was never dearer or more pleasant than it was on that morning. I had
not been as happy for weeks. I came up from the Post-Office singing to
myself. His letter was so bright and full of mischief! I had not had
one like it all the winter. I have laid it away by itself, filled with
his jokes and pet names, “Mamie” or “Queen Mamie” every other line, and
signed

                     “Until next time, your happy

                                             ROY.”

I wonder if all brothers and sisters keep up the baby-names as we did. I
wonder if I shall ever become used to living without them.

I read the letter over a great many times, and stopped to tell Mrs.
Bland the news in it, and wondered what had kept it so long on the way,
and wondered if it could be true that he would have a furlough in May.
It seemed too good to be true. If I had been fourteen instead of
twenty-four, I should have jumped up and down and clapped my hands there
in the street. The sky was so bright that I could scarcely turn up my
eyes to look at it. The sunshine was shivered into little lances all
over the glaring white crust. There was a snow-bird chirping and pecking
on the maple-tree as I came in.

I went up and opened my window; sat down by it and drew a long breath,
and began to count the days till May. I must have sat there as much as
half an hour. I was so happy counting the days that I did not hear the
front gate, and when I looked down a man stood there,--a great, rough
man,--who shouted up that he was in a hurry, and wanted seventy-five
cents for a telegram that he had brought over from East Homer. I believe
I went down and paid him, sent him away, came up here and locked the
door before I read it.

Phœbe found me here at dinner-time.

If I could have gone to him, could have busied myself with packing and
journeying, could have been forced to think and plan, could have had the
shadow of a hope of one more look, one word, I suppose I should have
taken it differently. Those two words--“Shot dead”--shut me up and
walled me in, as I think people must feel shut up and walled in, in
Hell. I write the words most solemnly, for I know that there has been
Hell in my heart.

It is all over now. He came back, and they brought him up the steps, and
I listened to their feet,--so many feet; he used to come bounding in.
They let me see him for a minute, and there was a funeral, and Mrs.
Bland came over, and she and Phœbe attended to everything, I suppose.
I did not notice nor think till we had left him out there in the cold
and had come back. The windows of his room were opened, and the bitter
wind swept in. The house was still and damp. Nobody was there to welcome
me. Nobody would ever be * * * *

Poor old Phœbe! I had forgotten her. She was waiting at the kitchen
window in her black bonnet; she took off my things and made me a cup of
tea, and kept at work near me for a little while, wiping her eyes. She
came in just now, when I had left my unfinished sentence to dry, sitting
here with my face in my hands.

“Laws now, Miss Mary, my dear! This won’t never do,--a rebellin’ agin
Providence, and singein’ your hair on the lamp chimney this way! The
dining-room fire’s goin’ beautiful, and the salmon is toasted to a
brown. Put away them papers and come right along!”

II.

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 knees 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 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. She observed, as she went out, that I
shouldn’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 waiting somewhere. But that was
settled so long ago for me that it makes it very different. Roy was all
there was.

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! * * * *

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, 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
hadn’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 wouldn’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 didn’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 mystified by her call here, pronounces “poor Mary Cabot
_so_ sad; she wouldn’t talk about Royal; and you couldn’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!

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--”

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 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_ 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 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 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 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_ doesn’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 doesn’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?

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 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
_then_? 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 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 sabre-cut), 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 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.

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 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 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; 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 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 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.

IV.

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 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, 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 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 _doesn’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 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. “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 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.

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:--

“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
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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

V.

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 wouldn’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. _Wasn’t_
it a bang, though!”

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 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.

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 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 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.”

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 isn’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 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?”

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 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 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!

VI.

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 checks 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.”

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, 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 women in red calico who had been
‘slicking 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, 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 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.

“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?”

“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 isn’t splendid. I don’t like the gre-at big prayers ’n’
things, 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 Mary’s slippers, and bring down her
boots, and then she’ll have to go to church. No, I _didn’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 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, 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 didn’t jump off
the steeple some night, and see if he couldn’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 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 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.”

“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.

“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 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.

“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. 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 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 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, 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_.”

“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 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?”

“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--”

“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. 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!”

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 _un_natural 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 else’s 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 weren’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 isn’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 didn’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[A]
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, wouldn’t you like to go this very
afternoon?”

 [A] ἄγγελος.

She lay back in the grass, with her face up-turned 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!

VIII.

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 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.”

“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.

“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:--

“Very impolite in me to run off so, wasn’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 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.

“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?” 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.”

“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.

IX.

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 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 hasn’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,--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 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; 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 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 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 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 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 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 semi-circles
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 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 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.”