“I sympathize with you in this sad dispensation,” he proceeded. “Of
course you was very fond of Royal; it’s natural you should be, quite
natural--” He stopped, perplexed, I suppose, by something in my face.
“Yes, it’s very natural; poor human nature sets a great deal by earthly
props and affections. But it’s your duty, as a Christian and a
church-member, to be resigned.”
I tapped the floor with my foot. I began to think that I could not bear
much more.
“To be resigned, my dear young friend. To say ‘Abba, Father.’ and pray
that the will of the Lord be done.”
“Deacon Quirk!” said I. “I am _not_ resigned. I pray the dear Lord with
all my heart to make me so, but I will not say that I am, until I
am,--if ever that time comes. As for those words about the Lord’s will,
I would no more take them on my lips than I would blasphemy, unless I
could speak them honestly,--and that I cannot do. We had better talk of
something else now, had we not?”
Deacon Quirk looked at me. It struck me that he would look very much so
at a Mormon or a Hottentot, and I wondered whether he were going to
excommunicate me on the spot.
As soon as he began to speak, however, I saw that he was only
bewildered,--honestly bewildered, and honestly shocked: I do not doubt
that I had said bewildering and shocking things.
“My friend,” he said solemnly, “I shall pray for you and leave you in
the hands of God. Your brother, whom He has removed from this earthly
life for His own wise--”
“We will not talk any more about Roy, if you please,” I interrupted;
“_he_ is happy and safe.”
“Hem!--I hope so,” he replied, moving uneasily in his chair; “I believe
he never made a profession of religion, but there is no limit to the
mercy of God. It is very unsafe for the young to think that they can
rely on a death-bed repentance, but our God is a covenant-keeping God,
and Royal’s mother was a pious woman. If you cannot say with certainty
that he is numbered among the redeemed, you are justified, perhaps, in
hoping so.”
I turned sharply on him, but words died on my lips. How could I tell the
man of that short, dear letter that came to me in December,--that Roy’s
was no death-bed repentance, but the quiet, natural growth of a life
that had always been the life of the pure in heart; of his manly beliefs
and unselfish motives; of that dawning sense of friendship with Christ
of which he used to speak so modestly, dreading lest he should not be
honest with himself? “Perhaps I ought not to call myself a Christian,”
he wrote,--I learned the words by heart.--“and I shall make no
profession to be such, till I am sure of it, but my life has not seemed
to me for a long time to be my own. ‘Bought with a price’ just expresses
it. I can point to no time at which I was conscious by any revolution of
feeling of ‘experiencing a change of heart,’ but it seems to me that a
man’s heart might be changed for all that. I do not know that it is
necessary for us to be able to watch every footprint of God. The _way_
is all that concerns us,--to see that we follow it and Him. This I am
sure of; and knocking about in this army life only convinces me of what
I felt in a certain way before,--that it is the only way, and He the
only guide _to_ follow.”
But how could I say anything of this to Deacon Quirk?--this my sealed
and sacred treasure, of all that Roy left me the dearest. At any rate I
did not. It seemed both obstinate and cruel in him to come there and say
what he had been saying. He might have known that I would not say that
Roy had gone to Heaven, if--why, if there had been the breath of a
doubt. It is a possibility of which I cannot rationally conceive, but I
suppose that his name would never have passed my lips.
So I turned away from Deacon Quirk, and shut my mouth, and waited for
him to finish. Whether the idea began to struggle into his mind that he
_might_ not have been making a very comforting remark, I cannot say; but
he started very soon to go.
“Supposing you are right, and Royal was saved at the eleventh hour,” he
said at parting, with one of his stolid efforts to be consolatory, that
are worse than his rebukes, “if he is singing the song of Moses and the
Lamb (he pointed with his big, dingy thumb at the ceiling), _he_ doesn’t
rebel against the doings of Providence. All _his_ affections are subdued
to God,--merged, as you might say,--merged in worshipping before the
great White Throne. He doesn’t think this miser’ble earthly spere of any
importance, compared with that eternal and exceeding weight of glory. In
the appropriate words of the poet,--
‘O, not to one created thing
Shall our embrace be given,
But all our joy shall be in God,
For only God is Heaven.’
Those are very spiritooal and scripteral lines, and it’s very proper to
reflect how true they are.”
I saw him go out, and came up here and locked myself in, and have been
walking round and round the room. I must have walked a good while, for I
feel as weak as a baby.
Can the man in any state of existence be made to comprehend that he has
been holding me on the rack this whole evening?
Yet he came under a strict sense of duty, and in the kindness of all the
heart he has! I know, or I ought to know, that he is a good man,--far
better in the sight of God to-night, I do not doubt, than I am.
But it hurts,--it cuts,--that thing which he said as he went out;
because I suppose it must be true; because it seems to me greater than I
can bear to have it true.
Roy, away in that dreadful Heaven, can have no thought of me, cannot
remember how I loved him, how he left me all alone. The singing and the
worshipping must take up all his time. God wants it all. He is a
“Jealous God.” I am nothing any more to Roy.
March 2.
And once I was much,--very much to him!
His Mamie, his poor Queen Mamie,--dearer, he used to say, than all the
world to him,--I don’t see how he can like it so well up there as to
forget her. Though Roy was a very good boy. But this poor, wicked little
Mamie,--why, I fall to pitying her as if she were some one else, and
wish that some one would cry over her a little. I can’t cry.
Roy used to say a thing,--I have not the words, but it was like
this,--that one must be either very young or very ungenerous, if one
could find time to pity one’s self.
I have lain for two nights, with my eyes open all night long. I thought
that perhaps I might see him. I have been praying for a touch, a sign,
only for something to break the silence into which he has gone. But
there is no answer, none. The light burns blue, and I see at last that
it is morning, and go down stairs alone, and so the day begins.
Something of Mrs. Browning’s has been keeping a dull mechanical time in
my brain all day.
“God keeps a niche
In Heaven to hold our idols: ... albeit
He brake them to our faces, and denied
That our close kisses should impair their white.”
But why must He take them? And why should He keep them there? Shall we
ever see them framed in their glorious gloom? Will He let us touch them
_then_? Or must we stand like a poor worshipper at a Cathedral, looking
up at his pictured saint afar off upon the other side?
Has everything stopped just here? Our talks together in the twilight,
our planning and hoping and dreaming together; our walks and rides and
laughing; our reading and singing and loving,--these then are all gone
out forever?
God forgive the words! but Heaven will never be Heaven to me without
them.
March 4.
Perhaps I had better not write any more here after this.
On looking over the leaves, I see that the little green book has become
an outlet for the shallower part of pain.
Meta Tripp and Deacon Quirk, gossip and sympathy that have buzzed into
my trouble and annoyed me like wasps (we are apt to make more fuss over
a wasp-sting than a sabre-cut), just that proportion of suffering which
alone can ever be put into words,--the surface.
I begin to understand what I never understood till now,--what people
mean by the luxury of grief. No, I am sure that I never understood it,
because my pride suffered as much as any part of me in that other time.
I would no more have spent two consecutive hours drifting at the mercy
of my thoughts, than I would have put my hand into the furnace fire.
The right to mourn makes everything different. Then, as to mother, I was
very young when she died, and father, though I loved him, was never to
me what Roy has been.
This luxury of grief, like all luxuries, is pleasurable. Though, as I
was saying, it is only the shallow part of one’s heart--I imagine that
the deepest hearts have their shallows--which can be filled by it, still
it brings a shallow relief.
Let it be confessed to this honest book, that, driven to it by
desperation, I found in it a wretched sort of content.
Being a little stronger now physically, I shall try to be a little
braver; it will do no harm to try. So I seem to see that it was the
content of poison,--salt-water poured between shipwrecked lips.
At any rate, I mean to put the book away and lock it up. Roy used to say
that he did not believe in journals. I begin to see why.