“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--