Grandmother and Aunt Jael were failing every hour. On the afternoon of
the morrow of my misery old Doctor le Mesurier took me aside--I was the
mistress now--and told me that for both of them it was only a matter of
days.
"Which will be the first?" I asked him, between tears.
"I should not like to say."
"'Tis a close race, my dearie," was the way my Grandmother put it when,
a few minutes later, I went upstairs to cry my heart out by her side:
"a close race to glory, and the odds are even."
She smiled, with a tender frivolity that was new to me. New too was
this form and manner of speech.
Both she and Aunt Jael knew that the end was near. I got a nurse the
same evening, who took turns with me throughout the night, crossing
from one bedroom to the other. I could not forget my own grief, but
had little time to remember it. I was so dead-tired when I got to my
bed that, almost for the first time in my life, there was no long
waking-time: the breeding-time of misery and fear.
Aunt Jael developed jaundice, also a bronchial cough. She was soon too
weak and suffering to be her own unpleasant self. The Devil, however,
as late as four days before the end, made a last desperate struggle
for the soul that had so long been His. It was one evening; I had
brought the last beef-tea for the night, changed the hot-water jar,
straightened her pillows and put everything right. Suddenly, without
warning, she dashed the cup, full of the steaming liquid, into my face,
which it cut and scalded; screaming the while like a mad thing. She was
a vile, a repulsive sight. With her toothless hairy face distorted with
rage, foul also with the dark-yellowish taint of the jaundice; with
her beady black eyes gleaming savagely, her immense nose, her crested
nightcap, she looked like some obscene monster, half-bird, half-witch.
She clutched the ancient stick, slashed out at me savagely-feebly;
her failure to hurt me bringing her to the last livid agony of rage.
She screamed, grimaced, dribbled: "Ingrate, minx, harlot--oh, I'll
kill 'ee, you and yer wicked idle Grandmother. I'll--." She was cut
short by a fit of violent coughing. She lay back sweating with pain,
almost unconscious with hate, her face too loathsome to behold. She was
possessed of the Devil.
Drawn by the noise, the nurse came hurriedly from my Grandmother's
room. But already Satan was cast out; now she was sobbing, grunting,
wailing, in a maudlin pitiful way. For a moment our eyes met. I saw
shame there, and my heart quickened towards her. "Never mind, Aunt. You
had a nightmare. It is over now."
In the opposite bedroom, the end drew gentlier near. In her less
painful hours, my Grandmother was livelier than I had ever known her.
With the scent of Death's nostrils in the room, she grew skittish, gay,
worldly. She gave me droll winks and knowing smiles, as she recounted
pranks of eighty years ago: mighty jam-stealing forays, ginger
_battues_, historic bell-ringing expeditions; tremendous truantries,
twelve-year-old amours.
"Grandmother," I said gravely (I was the godly parent now and she
the child) "you've waited a long time to tell me this!" For a moment
genuine priggery, and sour remembrance of the blows meted out for my
own lean escapades, hindered my joining in her brazen glee. Then we
laughed together till we cried.
"Ah, they were happy days," she said, wiping her eyes. "My unsaved
days," she added, the holy familiar tone coming into her voice, "the
days before I found the Lord."
Then she fell to talking of the Faith, and for the first and last time
in her life spoke critically of the ways of the Lord's People.
"They do too much for them that are saved already, and too little
to bring in them that are lost. 'Tain't the Lord's precept at all.
'Remember the ninety-and-nine.'"
As in everything, my Grandmother was right. Apart from the Foreign
Field, our people make small stir to rescue the perishing. That, they
feel, is not the business of religion: which is not so much to reclaim
sinners as to edify saints, not to fight the Devil but to worship God.
Thus they are in sharpest contrast with the later nineteenth-century
evangelism, with its hordes of professional missioners--mountebanks,
gipsies, Jews--its Transatlantic sensationalism and sentimentalism,
its hysterical appeals to the spiritual egotism of the individual, its
sinner hunts, its spectacular war with Satan.
Though they are not always free from the danger of spiritual pride,
it may at least be said of our people that they worship the Lord in
a quieter holier way, that they practise the fast-vanishing art of
personal religion. Yet my Grandmother was right: "It is the sinners
that Christ came to save. 'Remember the ninety-and-nine!'"
One morning I found Aunt Jael greatly changed. Her eyes were gentler
than ever before, her face more peaceful.
I could see she had been waiting for me.
"Child," she said quickly, "is your Grandmother awake?" Her voice was
soft.
"I haven't been in yet. I always come to you first. The nurse is with
her."
"Go and see. I must speak to her."
"Speak to her, Aunt? You mean you want me to give her a message."
"No, Child. I must speak to her with my own voice. Go first and find
whether she is awake."
"Yes," I reported.
"Now then. Open the door wide. Yes--now put that chair against it,
so it can't swing to. Now go and do likewise with your Grandmother's
door. First move me right to the edge of the bed--thank 'ee! There!" I
propped her up amid her pillows.
Then with Grandmother and her door I did the same. (The nurse was
downstairs.)
Though the two old women could not see each other, despite the width of
the passage their faces cannot have been more than seven yards apart.
Grandmother's deafness had increased with her years, but today, helped
out now and then with a word from me, she heard everything. I stood
just inside Grandmother's room, watching her face, and listening to
Aunt Jael, whose voice was calm and clear.
"Can you hear me, Hannah?"
"Yes, Jael."
"Well, sister, I haven't many hours to go. The Lord is calling, but
I've this to say to 'ee first. These eighty years we've been together
I've been a hard sister to 'ee. These eighty years I've been a sinner.
'Ee 've been a loving forgiving woman, and I've been a bad and selfish
one: full o' pride and wickedness. Before I go, I want to hear 'ee with
your own lips say as 'ee forgive me, as maybe the Lord in His mercy
will too--"
A fit of coughing cut her short. Her pride she had torn into shreds.
Grandmother was sobbing with joy.
"Don't 'ee talk so, my dear! I've nothing to forgive 'ee."
"Hannah woman, 'tis not so. Come, oh say 'ee forgive me." The old woman
was eager, desperate: pleading against time, against Eternity.
"I forgive 'ee," said my Grandmother.
The same evening Aunt Jael died in her sleep. The face was not ugly in
death; the mouth was still hard and proud, but the eyes were serene.
She won the glory-race by just seven days. After this brief space of
time--the same span as between my birth and my mother's death--my
Grandmother followed.
It was the day after Aunt Jael's funeral. Towards the end she called
me Rachel. At the very last she sat up in bed, gazed at me with a
tenderness already radiant with the glory of the City of Heaven.
"I'm journeying away, Rachel,--up yonder. Mary is there. Can't 'ee see
her, Rachel? What is the veil between 'ee?--I can see 'ee both. Look!
There is New Jerusalem. The King in His Glory. Her words. Come--"
She fell back. I caught her in my arms. My soul could not follow.