Thus the grave yawns for another victim, and having swallowed him, and
a million more that same day, returns to its former state of insatiable
famished greed. It is a law--natural, wise, and comprehensible by
the feeblest understanding--that all created beings, in which there
is progressive life, must come forth, ripen, decay, and fall. But
why, oh! why, in too many cases does the decay and fall forerun the
ripening? Why is so many a worm permitted to gnaw out so many a closed
bud's green heart? Why is the canker death allowed to pasture on so
many an unblown life? Why are so many little toddling children, not
yet come into the heritage of reason to which we are all by our human
birth entitled, borne from their mother's emptied arms to their small
short graves? Is it, as Hartley Coleridge very nobly, whether truly or
untruly, said--
"God only made them for his Christ to save?"
Very wasteful is the mighty mother, knowing that her materials are
inexhaustible. And so they lay Jack down in the wormy grave.
"Bear, bear him along,
With his few faults shut up like dead flow'rets."
No one will ever abuse him or say anything ill-natured of him again;
for to speak evil of the helpless, speechless, answerless dead,
requires a heart as bad, a nature as cowardly vile, as his must be
that foully murders a young child. And the mourners go home, and take
off their hatbands and scarves, and give them to their wives to make
aprons of. And old Luath lies in the hall, watching still, with ears
attentively pricked at any incoming footstep, and hope drooping, as day
droops too, begins to howl dismally towards sun-down.
And Esther--"You ought not to grieve for him; it is a happy change for
him; he is in Heaven!" So they had said to her weepingly, as people do
say to us, when the desire of our eyes has left us; but even as they
spake them, she felt that they were but words, hollow and empty as the
greetings in the market-place with which we salute our indifferent
acquaintance. Was she so sure that the change had been a happy one?
It was a change from the known to the unknown, from moderate certain
evils, and moderate probable good, to infinite possibilities of horror
or blessedness. Where lay this heaven, this promised land, where we so
confidently lodge our dead? Was it up above that highest bluest arch
that looks in truth pure enough, and solid enough, to be the floor
of some sweet elysium? Ah! no! Human knowledge, that like a naughty,
prying child, has found out at once so infinitely too much and too
little, tells us that that skyey vault is but thin air. She thinks,
shuddering--"What if heaven itself be but thin air? _Is it anywhere?_
What if its existence at all be but the fine-spun fancy of poor human
hearts, that must needs frame for themselves some blessed definite
hope, since _real_ hope have they none? Is it a beautiful tender fraud
practised by themselves upon themselves, to save them from the despair
of the black vagueness into which they must send out their departed
ones, and go out themselves when life's little day is over? Oh, light!
light! When the great God said, 'Let there be light!' in the material
world, why did not He say so too in the world of spirits? I know that
my soul shall live for ever! I know that there is that within me over
which the most insatiable of monsters, insatiabler than any slain in
classic tale--a monster that turns beauty to unsightliness, whose
handmaid is corruption, and whose drink is tears--has no power. But
alas! alas! can I rejoice in my immortality, when I know not where,
or under what conditions, those endless, endless æons will roll
themselves away into the past?"
* * * * *
"We must bow beneath the rod," says old Mrs. Brandon, nodding her head
and her poke bonnet. It is the identical poke bonnet, and not another,
in which she once paid her congratulatory visit. The summer sun had
browned it a little, but otherwise it is in a state of high efficiency.
"We must bow beneath the rod, knowing that it is a _tender Father's_
hand that wields it."
"I suppose so," answers Esther, listlessly. To her it seems a matter of
indifference whose hand it was that inflicted such an immedicable hurt,
seeing that it has been inflicted by some one, and now yawns, a gaping
rift in her soul, never to be assuaged by any balsam.
"Suppose!" cries Miss Bessy, her long, uncertain nose reddening a
little in her righteous zeal, at the slackness of Esther's faith.
"Surely, surely, if we are _Believers_, there can be no '_suppose_' in
such a case."
"I did not mean to express any doubt," Esther says, gently, but wearily.
"_Suppose_ will not do us much good at the _Last Day_," continues Miss
Bessy, rather venomously. "Unless we can lay fast hold upon Jesus"
(_laying hold of a roll of paper to exemplify the tenacity of her own
grasp_[1]), "unless we have assurance that we are _Elect_, where are
we?"
"If it is any comfort to you, love, you know that you have our
prayers," says Mrs. Brandon, squeezing Esther's hand.
"We have set apart a special day with several Christian friends,"
says Bessy, with animation, "to wrestle in prayer for you, that this
searching dispensation may be blessed to your conversion--that you may
find the Lord."
"Thanks," answers Esther, meekly, too broken-down to resent even the
indignity of being set up on a metaphorical stool of repentance, amid a
select circle of Miss Bessy's Christian friends.
"If we could send you anything from Plas Berwyn--" begins Mrs. Brandon.
"Any books or leaflets," interrupts Bessy.
"Any eatables, or anything of that kind," amends her mother. "I daresay
you have not been thinking much about housekeeping lately, my poor
child; and you know whenever you feel inclined to come to us _for
good_, you will always find open hearts and open arms," concludes the
good old woman, suiting her action to her words, and folding Esther in
a black bombazine embrace.
"Thank you very much," replies the girl, gratefully, her low, sad voice
almost smothered by her mamma-in-law's bonnet strings, amongst which
her little disconsolate head is lying _perdue_.
"We are only broken cisterns, you should remember, mamma," says Bessy,
a little reprovingly of her parent's carnal materialism; "leaky
vessels, all of us! You should direct Esther to the one _Ebenezer_."
The race of Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the
Naamathite, is by no means extinct: if not in the male line, at all
events in the female, it still survives in the person of many a Miss
Bessy Brandon.
* * * * *
Brandon has been busy all day with Jack's lawyer: returning in the
afternoon, he finds Esther sitting on the study window-ledge, on
which she and Jack used to sit on summer nights, and watch the little
feathery, plumy clouds sail along the sky's sapphire sea; used to watch
"The large white stars rise one by one,"
and speculate who lived in them, and what they were made of. Jack has
entered into the ranks of the initiated, but she still sits and wonders.
"Come out for a stroll, Essie," says the young man, stooping over her
till his yellow beard, curly as a bull's forehead, almost touches her
dark, drooped head.
"If you like," she answers, indifferently; and so drags herself slowly
up, and walks away heavily to get ready.
"Where shall we go?" inquires he, as they stand at the farmyard gate.
The callow Cochin chickens have grown up, and are stalking about, in
all the dignity of long, yellow legs and adolescence, under the frames
of the corn-ricks, "Where shall we go?--to see my mother?"
"That would be returning her visit almost too promptly," answers the
young girl, with a weary smile; "it is not more than half an hour since
they left this house."
"_They!_ Were my sisters here too, then?" inquires Bob, quickly; his
confidence in his sisters' infallibility as to words and actions not
being so perfect as in his mamma's. "I hope their coming did not worry
you much."
"Nothing worries me now," she answers, calmly; "I defy anything to
worry, or anger, or frighten me. Do you remember a line of Mrs. Barrett
Browning's? Oh no, by-the-bye, you never read poetry--
"'Fallen too low for special fear.'
"That is exactly my case."
"I never know the right sort of thing to say, don't you know," remarks
Brandon, rather awkwardly, looking down, and poking about little
pebbles with the end of his stick. "But I had hoped that mother might
have hit upon something that would have comforted you a little."
"She meant to, I am sure," replies Esther, gravely. "She was very kind,
and so were the girls, I suppose; only some of Bessy's speeches rather
reminded me of Eliphaz the Temanite's, 'Remember, I pray thee, who ever
perished, being innocent? or where were the righteous cut off?'"
"I wish to heaven that Bessy could be possessed with a dumb devil!"
says that young lady's brother, looking up, red with sudden anger. "No
one should ever have my leave to try and cast it out."
"Let us go to the common," Esther says, abruptly, not heeding him.
[1] A fact.