After the experience related in the last chapter, I remained for some
time in solitude. Speech seemed incoherence, and effort impossible. I
needed a pause to adapt myself to my awe and my happiness; upon neither
of which will it be necessary for me to dwell. Yet I think I may be
understood if I say that from this hour I found that what we call Heaven
had truly begun for me. Now indeed for the first time I may say that I
believed without wonder in the life everlasting; since now, for the
first time, I had a reason sufficient for the continuance of existence.
A force like the cohesion of atoms held me to eternal hope. Brighter
than the dawn of friendship upon a heart bereft, more solemn than the
sunrise of love itself upon a life that had thought itself unloved,
stole on the power of the Presence to which I had been admitted in so
surprising, and yet, after all, how natural a way! Henceforth the
knowledge that this experience might be renewed for me at any turn of
thought or act, would illuminate joy itself, so that “it should have no
need of the sun to lighten it.” I recalled these words, as one recalls a
familiar quotation repeated for the first time on some foreign locality
of which it is descriptive. Now I knew what he meant, who wrote: “The
Lamb is the Light thereof.”
* * * * *
When I came to myself, I observed the young girl who had before
addressed me still strolling on the shore. She beckoned, and I went to
her, with a new meekness in my heart. What will He have me to do? If, by
the lips of this young thing, He choose to instruct me, let me glory in
the humility with which I will be a learner!
All things seemed to be so exquisitely ordered for us in this new life,
all flowed so naturally, like one sound-wave into another, with ease so
apparent, yet under law so superb, that already I was certain Heaven
contained no accidents, and no trivialities; as it did no shocks or
revolutions.
“If you like,” said the young girl, “we will cross the sea.”
“But how?” I asked, for I saw no boat.
“Can you not, then, walk upon the water yet?” she answered. “Many of us
do, as He did once below. But we no longer call such things miracles.
They are natural powers. Yet it is an art to use them. One has to learn
it, as we did swimming, or such things, in the old times.”
“I have only been here a short time,” I said, half amused at the little
celestial “airs” my young friend wore so sweetly. “I know but little
yet. Can you teach me how to walk on water?”
“It would take so much time,” said the young girl, “that I think we
should not wait for that. We go on to the next duty, now. You had better
learn, I think, from somebody wiser than I. I will take you over another
way.”
A great and beautiful shell, not unlike a nautilus, was floating near
us, on the incoming tide, and my companion motioned to me to step into
this. I obeyed her, laughing, but without any hesitation. “Neither shall
there be any more death,” I thought as I glanced over the rose-tinted
edges of the frail thing into the water, deeper than any I had ever
seen, but unclouded, so that I looked to the bottom of the sea. The girl
herself stepped out upon the waves with a practiced air, and lightly
drawing the great shell with one hand, bore me after her, as one bears a
sledge upon ice. As we came into mid-water we began to meet others, some
walking, as she did, some rowing or drifting like myself. Upon the
opposite shore uprose the outlines of a more thickly settled community
than any I had yet seen.
Watching this with interest that deepened as we approached the shore, I
selfishly or uncourteously forgot to converse with my companion, who did
not disturb my silence until we landed. As she gave me her hand, she
said in a quick, direct tone:
“Well, Miss Mary, I see that you do not know me, after all.”
I felt, as I had already done once or twice before, a certain social
embarrassment (which in itself instructed me, as perpetuating one of the
minor emotions of life below that I had hardly expected to renew) before
my lovely guide, as I shook my head, struggling with the phantasmal
memories evoked by her words. No, I did not know her.
“I am Marie Sauvée. I _hope_ you remember.”
She said these words in French. The change of language served instantly
to recall the long train of impressions stored away, who knew how or
where, about the name and memory of this girl.
“Marie Sauvée! _You_--HERE!” I exclaimed in her own tongue.
At the name, now, the whole story, like the bright side of a
dark-lantern, flashed. It was a tale of sorrow and shame, as sad,
perhaps, as any that it had been my lot to meet. So far as I had ever
known, the little French girl, thrown in my way while I was serving in
barracks at Washington, had baffled every effort I had made to win her
affection or her confidence, and had gone out of my life as the
thistle-down flies on the wind. She had cost me many of those precious
drops of the soul’s blood which all such endeavor drains; and in the
laboratory of memory I had labelled them, “Worse than Wasted,” and sadly
wondered if I should do the same again for such another need, at just
such hopeless expenditure, and had reminded myself that it was not good
spiritual economy, and said that I would never repeat the experience,
and known all the while that I should.
Now here, a spirit saved, shining as the air of Heaven, “without spot or
any such thing”--here, wiser in heavenly lore than I, longer with Him
than I, nearer to Him than I, dearer to Him, perhaps, than I--_here_ was
Marie Sauvée.
“I do not know how to apologize,” I said, struggling with my emotion,
“for the way in which I spoke to you just now. Why should you not be
here? Why, indeed? Why am I here? Why”--
“Dear Miss Mary,” cried the girl, interrupting me passionately, “but for
you it might never have been as it is. Or never for ages--I cannot say.
I might have been a ghost, bound yet to the hated ghost of the old life.
It was your doing, at the first--down there--all those years ago. Miss
Mary, you were the first person I ever loved. You didn’t know it. I had
no idea of telling you. But I did, I loved you. After you went away, I
loved you; ever since then, I loved you. I said, I will be fit to love
her before I die. And then I said, I will go where she is going, for I
shall never get at her anywhere else. And when I entered this place--for
I had no friend or relative here that I knew, to meet me--I was more
frightened than it is possible for any one like you to understand, and
wondered what place there could be for one like me in all this country,
and how I could ever get accustomed to their ways, and whether I should
shock and grieve them--you _can’t_ understand _that_; I dreaded it so, I
was afraid I should swear after I got to Heaven; I was afraid I might
say some evil word, and shame them all, and shame myself more than I
could ever get over. I knew I wasn’t educated for any such society. I
knew there wasn’t anything in me that would be at home here, but just”--
“But just what, Marie?” I asked, with a humility deeper than I could
have expressed.
“But just my love for you, Miss Mary. That was all. I had nothing to
come to Heaven on, but loving you and meaning to be a better girl
because I loved you. That was truly all.”
“That is impossible!” I said quickly. “Your love for me never brought
you here of itself alone. You are mistaken about this. It is neither
Christianity nor philosophy.”
“There is no mistake,” persisted the girl, with gentle obstinacy,
smiling delightedly at my dogmatism, “I came here because I loved you.
Do you not see? In loving you, I loved--for the first time in my life I
loved--goodness. I really did. And when I got to this place, I found out
that goodness was the same as God. And I had been getting the love of
God into my heart, all that time, in that strange way, and never knew
how it was with me, until--Oh, Miss Mary, who do you think it was, WHO,
that met me within an hour after I died?”
“It was our Master,” she added in an awe-struck, yet rapturous whisper,
that thrilled me through. “It was He Himself. He was the first, for I
had nobody, as I told you, belonging to me in this holy place, to care
for a wretch like me.--_He_ was the first to meet _me_! And it was He
who taught me everything I had to learn. It was He who made me feel
acquainted and at home. It was He who took me on from love of you, to
love of Him, as you put one foot after another in learning to walk after
you have had a terrible sickness. And it was _He_ who never reminded
me--never once reminded me--of the sinful creature I had been. Never, by
one word or look, from that hour to this day, has He let me feel ashamed
in Heaven. That is what _He_ is!” cried the girl, turning upon me, in a
little sudden, sharp way she used to have; her face and form were so
transfigured before me, as she spoke, that it seemed as if she quivered
with excess of light, and were about to break away and diffuse herself
upon the radiant air, like song, or happy speech, or melting color.
“Die for Him!” she said after a passionate silence. “If I could die
everlastingly and everlastingly and everlastingly, to give Him any
pleasure, or to save Him any pain-- But then, that’s nothing,” she added,
“I love Him. That is all that means.--And I’ve only got to live
everlastingly instead. That is the way He has treated me--_me_!”