March 2. Mother's calmness keeps me ashamed of the hot ache in my heart
and the restlessness which makes it so hard for me to keep an outward
composure. Hannah is rather shocked that she should be so entirely
unmoved in the face of death, and the dear, foolish old soul, steeped in
theological asperities from her cradle, must needs believe that Mother
is somehow endangering her future welfare by this very serenity.
"Don't you think, Miss Ruth," she said to me yesterday, "that you could
persuade your mother to see Mr. Saychase? She'd do it to oblige you."
"But it wouldn't oblige me, Hannah."
"Oh, Miss Ruth, think of her immortal soul!"
"Hannah," I said as gently as I could, she was so distressed, "you know
how Mother always felt about those things. It certainly couldn't do any
good now to try to alter her opinions, and it would only tire her."
I left Hannah as quickly as I could without hurting her feelings, but I
might have known that her conscience would force her to speak to Mother.
"Bless me, Hannah," Mother said to her, "I'm no more wicked because I'm
going to die than if I were going to live. I can't help dying, you know,
so I don't feel responsible."
When Hannah tried to go on, and broke down with tears, Mother put out
her thin hand, like a sweet shadow.
"Hannah," she said, "I know how you feel, and I thank you for speaking;
but don't be troubled. Where there are 'many mansions,' don't you think
there may be one even for those who did not see the truth, if they were
honest in their blindness?"
March 4. How far away everything else seems when the foot of death is
almost at the door! As I sit by the bedside in the long nights,
wondering whether he will come before morning, I think of the nights in
which I may sometime be waiting for death myself. I wonder whether I
shall be as serene and absolutely unterrified as Mother is. It is after
all only the terror of the unknown. Why should we be more ready to think
of the unknown as dreadful than as delightful? We certainly hail the
thought of new experiences in the body; why not out of it? Novelty in
itself must give a wonderful charm to that new life, at least for a long
time. Think of the pleasure of having youth all over again, for we shall
at least be young to any new existence into which we go, just as babies
are young to this.
Death is terrible, it seems to me, only when we think of ourselves who
are left behind, not when we think of those who go. Life is a thing so
beautiful that it may be sad to think of them as deprived of it; but the
more beautiful it is, the more I am assured that whatever power made the
earth must be able to make something better. If life is good, a higher
step in evolution must be nobler; and however we mourn, none of us would
dare to say that our grief is caused by the belief that our friends
have through death gone on to sorrow.