May 9.
As I was looking over the green book last night, Aunt Winifred came up
behind me and softly laid a bunch of violets down between the leaves.
By an odd contrast, the contented, passionless things fell against those
two verses that were copied from the German, and completely covered them
from sight. I lifted the flowers, and held up the page for her to see.
As she read, her face altered strangely; her eyes dilated, her lip
quivered, a flush shot over her checks and dyed her forehead up to the
waves of her hair. I turned away quickly, feeling that I had committed a
rudeness in watching her, and detecting in her, however involuntarily,
some far, inner sympathy, or shadow of a long-past sympathy, with the
desperate words.
“Mary,” she said, laying down the book, “I believe Satan wrote that.”
She laughed a little then, nervously, and paled back into her quiet,
peaceful self.
“I mean that he inspired it. They are wicked words. You must not read
them over. You will outgrow them sometime with a beautiful growth of
trust and love. Let them alone till that time comes. See, I will blot
them out of sight for you with colors as blue as heaven,--the _real_
heaven, where God _will_ be loved the most.”
She shook apart the thick, sweet nosegay, and, taking a half-dozen of
the little blossoms, pinned them, dripping with fragrant dew, upon the
lines. There I shall let them stay, and, since she wishes it, I shall
not lift them to see the reckless words till I can do it safely.
This afternoon Aunt Winifred has been telling me about herself. Somewhat
more, or of a different kind, I should imagine, from what she has told
most people. She seems to love me a little, not in a proper kind of way,
because I happen to be her niece, but for my own sake. It surprises me
to find how pleased I am that she should.
That Kansas life must have been very hard to her, in contrast as it was
with the smooth elegance of her girlhood; she was very young, too, when
she undertook it. I said something of the sort to her.
“They have been the hardest and the easiest, the saddest and the
happiest, years of all my life,” she answered.
I pondered the words in my heart, while I listened to her story. She
gave me vivid pictures of the long, bright bridal journey, overshadowed
with a very mundane weariness of jolting coaches and railway accidents
before its close; of the little neglected hamlet which waited for them,
twenty miles from a post-office and thirty from a school-house; of the
parsonage, a log-hut among log-huts, distinguished and adorned by a
little lath and plastering, glass windows, and a doorstep;--they drew in
sight of it at the close of a tired day, with a red sunset lying low on
the flats.
Uncle Forceythe wanted mission-work, and mission-work he found here
with--I should say with a vengeance, if the expression were exactly
suited to an elegantly constructed and reflective journal.
“My heart sank for a moment, I confess,” she said, “but it never would
do, you know, to let him suspect that, so I smiled away as well as I
knew how, shook hands with one or two women in red calico who had been
‘slicking up inside,’ they said; went in by the fire,--it was really a
pleasant fire,--and, as soon as they had left us alone, I climbed into
John’s lap, and, with both arms around his neck, told him that I knew we
should be very happy. And I said--”
“Said what?”
She blushed a little, like a girl.
“I believe I said I should be happy in Patagonia,--with him. I made him
laugh at last, and say that my face and words were like a beautiful
prophecy. And, Mary, if they were, it was beautifully fulfilled. In the
roughest times,--times of ragged clothes and empty flour-barrels, of
weakness and sickness and quack doctors, of cold and discouragement, of
prairie fires and guerillas,--from trouble to trouble, from year’s end
to year’s end, we were happy together, we two. As long as we could have
each other, and as long as we could be about our Master’s business, we
felt as if we did not dare to ask for anything more, lest it should seem
that we were ungrateful for such wealth of mercy.”
It would take too long to write out here the half that she told me,
though I wish I could, for it interested me more than any story that I
have ever read.
After years of Christ-like toiling to help those rough old farmers and
wicked bushwhackers to Heaven, the call to Lawrence came, and it seemed
to Uncle Forceythe that he had better go. It was a pleasant, influential
parish, and there, though not less hard at work, they found fewer rubs
and more comforts; there Faith came, and there were their pleasant days,
till the war.--I held my breath to hear her tell about Quantrell’s raid.
There, too, Uncle wasted through that death-in-life, consumption; there
he “fell on sleep,” she said, and there she buried him.
She gave me no further description of his death than those words, and
she spoke them with her far-away, tearless eyes looking off through the
window, and after she had spoken she was still for a time.
The heart knoweth its own bitterness; that grew distinct to me, as I
sat, shut out by her silence. Yet there was nothing bitter about her
face.
“Faith was six months old when he went,” she said presently. “We had
never named her: Baby was name enough at first for such a wee thing;
then she was the only one, and had come so late, that it seemed to mean
more to us than to most to have a baby all to ourselves, and we liked
the sound of the word. When it became quite certain that John must go,
we used to talk it over, and he said that he would like to name her, but
what, he did not tell me.
“At last, one night, after he had lain for a while thinking with closed
eyes, he bade me bring the child to him. The sun was setting, I
remember, and the moon was rising. He had had a hard day; the life was
all scorched out of the air. I moved the bed up by the window, that he
might have the breath of the rising wind. Baby was wide awake, cooing
softly to herself in the cradle, her bits of damp curls clinging to her
head, and her pink feet in her hands. I took her up and brought her just
as she was, and knelt down by the bed. The street was still. We could
hear the frogs chanting a mile away. He lifted her little hands upon his
own, and said--no matter about the words--but he told me that as he left
the child, so he left the name, in my sacred charge,--that he had chosen
it for me,--that, when he was out of sight, it might help me to have it
often on my lips.
“So there in the sunset and the moonrise, we two alone together, he
baptized her, and we gave our little girl to God.”
When she had said this, she rose and went over to the window, and stood
with her face from me. By and by, “It was the fourteenth,” she said, as
if musing to herself,--“the fourteenth of June.”
I remember now that Uncle Forceythe died on the fourteenth of June. It
may have been that the words of that baptismal blessing were the last
that they heard, either child or mother.
May 10.
It has been a pleasant day; the air shines like transparent gold; the
wind sweeps like somebody’s strong arms over the flowers, and gathers up
a crowd of perfumes that wander up and down about one. The church bells
have rung out like silver all day. Those bells--especially the Second
Advent at the further end of the village--are positively ghastly when it
rains.
Aunt Winifred was dressed bright and early for church. I, in morning
dress and slippers, sighed and demurred.
“Auntie, _do_ you expect to hear anything new?”
“Judging from your diagnosis of Dr. Bland,--no.”
“To be edified, refreshed, strengthened, or instructed?”
“Perhaps not.”
“Bored, then?”
“Not exactly.”
“What do you expect?”
“There are the prayers and singing. Generally one can, if one tries,
wring a little devotion from the worst of them. As to a minister, if he
is good and commonplace, young and earnest and ignorant, and I, whom he
cannot help one step on the way to Heaven, consequently stay at home,
Deacon Quirk, whom he might carry a mile or two, by and by stays at home
also. If there is to be a ‘building fitly joined together,’ each stone
must do its part of the upholding. I feel better to go half a day
always. I never compel Faith to go, but I never have a chance, for she
teases not to be left at home.”
“I think it’s splendid to go to church most the time,” put in Faith, who
was squatted on the carpet, counting sugared caraway seeds,--“all but
the sermon. That isn’t splendid. I don’t like the gre-at big prayers ’n’
things, I like caramary seeds, though; mother always gives ’em to me in
meeting ’cause I’m a good girl. Don’t you wish _you_ were a good girl,
Cousin Mary, so’s you could have some? Besides, I’ve got on my best hat
and my button-boots. Besides, there used to be a real funny little boy
up in meeting at home, and he gave me a little tin dorg once over the
top the pew. Only mother made me give it back. O, you ought to seen the
man that preached down at Uncle Calvin’s! I tell you he was a bully old
minister,--_he banged the Bible like everything_!”
“There’s a devotional spirit for you!” I said to her mother.
“Well,” she answered, laughing, “it is better than that she should be
left to play dolls and eat preserves, and be punished for disobedience.
Sunday would invariably become a guilty sort of holiday at that rate.
Now, caraways or ‘bully old ministers’ notwithstanding, she carries to
bed with her a dim notion that this has been holy time and pleasant
time. Besides, the associations of a church-going childhood, if I can
manage them genially, will be a help to her when she is older. Come,
Faith! go and pull off Cousin Mary’s slippers, and bring down her
boots, and then she’ll have to go to church. No, I _didn’t_ say that you
might tickle her feet!”
Feeling the least bit sorry that I had set the example of a stay-at-home
Christian before the child, I went directly up stairs to make ready, and
we started after all in good season.
Dr. Bland was in the pulpit. I observed that he looked--as indeed did
the congregation bodily--with some curiosity into our slip, where it has
been a rare occurrence of late to find me, and where the light, falling
through the little stained glass oriel, touched Aunt Winifred’s
thoughtful smile. I wondered whether Dr. Bland thought it was wicked for
people to smile in church. No, of course he has too much sense. I wonder
what it is about Dr. Bland that always suggests such questions.
It has been very warm all day,--that aggravating, unseasonable heat,
which is apt to come in spasms in the early part of May, and which, in
thick spring alpaca and heavy sack, one finds intolerable. The
thermometer stood at 75° on the church porch; every window was shut, and
everybody’s fan was fluttering Now, with this sight before him, what
should our observant minister do, but give out as his first hymn: “Thine
earthly Sabbaths.” “Thine earthly Sabbaths” would be a beautiful hymn,
if it were not for those lines about the weather:--
“No midnight shade, _no clouded sun_,
_But sacred, high, eternal noon_”!
There was a great hot sunbeam striking directly on my black bonnet. My
fan was broken. I gasped for air. The choir went over and over and
_over_ the words, spinning them into one of those indescribable tunes,
in which everybody seems to be trying to get through first. I don’t know
what they called them,--they always remind me of a game of “Tag.”
I looked at Aunt Winifred. She took it more coolly than I, but an amused
little smile played over her face. She told me after church that she had
repeatedly heard that hymn given out at noon of an intense July day. Her
husband, she said, used to save it for the winter, or for cloudy
afternoons. “Using means of grace,” he called that.
However, Dr. Bland did better the second time, Aunt Winifred joined in
the singing, and I enjoyed it, so I will not blame the poor man. I
suppose he was so far lifted above this earth, that he would not have
known whether he was preaching in Greenland’s icy mountains, or on
India’s coral strand.
When he announced his text, “For our conversation is in Heaven,” Aunt
Winifred and I exchanged glances of content. We had been talking about
heaven on the way to church; at least, till Faith, not finding herself
entertained, interrupted us by some severe speculations as to whether
Maltese kitties were mulattoes, and “why the bell-ringer didn’t jump off
the steeple some night, and see if he couldn’t fly right up, the way
Elijah did.”
I listened to Dr. Bland as I have not listened for a long time. The
subject was of all subjects nearest my heart. He is a scholarly man, in
his way. He ought to know, I thought, more about it than Aunt Winifred.
Perhaps he could help me.
His sermon, as nearly as I can recall it, was substantially this.
“The future life presented a vast theme to our speculation. Theories
‘too numerous to mention,’ had been held concerning it. Pagans had
believed in a coming state of rewards and punishments. What natural
theology had dimly foreshadowed, Revelation had brought in, like a
full-orbed day, with healing on its wings.” I am not positive about the
metaphors.
“As it was fitting that we should at times turn our thoughts upon the
threatenings of Scripture, it was eminently suitable also that we should
consider its promises.
“He proposed in this discourse to consider the promise of heaven, the
reward offered by Christ to his good and faithful servants.
“In the first place: What is heaven?”
I am not quite clear in my mind what it was, though I tried my best to
find out. As nearly as I can recollect, however,--
“Heaven is an eternal state.
“Heaven is a state of holiness.
“Heaven is a state of happiness.”
Having heard these observations before, I will not enlarge as he did
upon them, but leave that for the “vivid imagination” of the green book.
“In the second place: What will be the employments of heaven?
“We shall study the character of God.
“An infinite mind must of necessity be eternally an object of study to
a finite mind. The finite mind must of necessity find in such study
supreme delight. All lesser joys and interests will pale. He felt at
moments, in reflecting on this theme, that that good brother who, on
being asked if he expected to see the dead wife of his youth in heaven,
replied, ‘I expect to be so overwhelmed by the glory of the presence of
God, that it may be thousands of years before I shall think of my
wife,’--he felt that perhaps this brother was near the truth.”
Poor Mrs. Bland looked exceedingly uncomfortable.
“We shall also glorify God.”
He enlarged upon this division, but I have forgotten exactly how. There
was something about adoration, and the harpers harping with their harps,
and the sea of glass, and crying, Worthy the Lamb! and a great deal more
that bewildered and disheartened me so that I could scarcely listen to
it. I do not doubt that we shall glorify God primarily and happily, but
can we not do it in some other way than by harping and praying?
“We shall moreover love each other with a universal and unselfish
love.”
“That we shall recognize our friends in heaven, he was inclined to
think, after mature deliberation, was probable. But there would be no
special selfish affections there. In this world we have enmities and
favoritisms. In the world of bliss our hearts would glow with holy love
alike to all other holy hearts.”
I wonder if he really thought _that_ would make “a world of bliss.” Aunt
Winifred slipped her hand into mine under her cloak. Ah, Dr. Bland, if
you had known how that little soft touch was preaching against you!
“In the words of an eminent divine, who has long since entered into the
joys of which he spoke: ‘Thus, whenever the mind roves through the
immense region of heaven, it will find, among all its innumerable
millions, not an enemy, not a stranger, not an indifferent heart, not a
reserved bosom. Disguise here, and even concealment, will be unknown.
The soul will have no interests to conceal, _no thoughts to disguise_. A
window will be opened in every breast, and show to every eye the rich
and beautiful furniture within!’
“Thirdly: How shall we fit for heaven?”