May 12th.
Aunt Winifred has said something about going, but I cannot yet bear to
hear of such a thing. She is to stay a while longer.
16th.
We have been over to-night to the grave.
She proposed to go by herself, thinking, I saw, with the delicacy with
which she always thinks, that I would rather not be there with another.
Nor should I, nor could I, with any other than this woman. It is
strange. I wished to go there with her. I had a vague, unreasoning
feeling that she would take away some of the bitterness of it, as she
has taken the bitterness of much else.
It is looking very pleasant there now. The turf has grown fine and
smooth. The low arbor-vitæ hedge and knots of Norway spruce, that father
planted long ago for mother, drop cool, green shadows that stir with the
wind. My English ivy has crept about and about the cross. Roy used to
say that he should fancy a cross to mark the spot where he might lie; I
think he would like this pure, unveined marble. May-flowers cover the
grave now, and steal out among the clover-leaves with a flush like
sunrise. By and by there will be roses, and, in August, August’s own
white lilies.
We went silently over, and sat silently down on the grass, the
field-path stretching away to the little church behind us, and beyond,
in front, the slope, the flats, the river, the hills cut in purple
distance melting far into the east. The air was thick with perfume.
Golden bees hung giddily over the blush in the grass. In the low
branches that swept the grave a little bird had built her nest.
Aunt Winifred did not speak to me for a time, nor watch my face.
Presently she laid her hand upon my lap, and I put mine into it.
“It is very pleasant here,” she said then, in her very pleasant voice.
“I meant that it should be,” I answered, trying not to let her see my
lips quiver. “At least it must not look neglected. I don’t suppose it
makes any difference to _him_.”
“I do not feel sure of that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I do not feel sure that anything he has left makes no ‘difference’ to
him.”
“But I don’t understand. He is in heaven. He would be too happy to care
for anything that is going on in this woful world.”
“Perhaps that is so,” she said, smiling a sweet contradiction to her
words, “but I don’t believe it.”
“What do you believe?”
“Many things that I have to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”
“I have sometimes wondered, for I cannot help it,” I said, “whether he
is shut off from all knowledge of me for all these years till I can go
to him. It will be a great while. It seems hard. Roy would want to know
something, if it were only a little, about me.”
“I believe that he wants to know, and that he knows, Mary; though, since
the belief must rest on analogy and conjecture, you need not accept it
as demonstrated mathematics,” she answered, with another smile.
“Roy never forgot me here!” I said, not meaning to sob.
“That is just it. He was not constituted so that he, remaining himself,
Roy, could forget you. If he goes out into this other life forgetting,
he becomes another than himself. That is a far more unnatural way of
creeping out of the difficulty than to assume that he loves and
remembers. Why not assume that? In fact, why assume anything else?
Neither reason, nor the Bible, nor common sense, forbids it. Instead of
starting with it as an hypothesis to be proved if we can, I lay it down
as one of those probabilities for which Butler would say, ‘the
presumption amounts nearly to certainty’; and if any one can disprove
it, I will hear what he has to say. There!” she broke off, laughing
softly, “that is a sufficient dose of metaphysics for such a simple
thing. It seems to me to lie just here: Roy loved you. Our Father, for
some tender, hidden reason, took him out of your sight for a while.
Though changed much, he can have forgotten nothing. Being _only out of
sight_, you remember, not lost, nor asleep, nor annihilated, he goes on
loving. To love must mean to think of, to care for, to hope for, to pray
for, not less out of a body than in it.”
“But that must mean--why, that must mean--”
“That he is near you. I do not doubt it.”
The sunshine quivered in among the ivy-leaves, and I turned to watch it,
thinking.
“I do not doubt,” she went on, speaking low,--“I cannot doubt that our
absent dead are very present with us. He said, ‘I am with you alway,’
knowing the need we have of him, even to the end of the world. He must
understand the need we have of them. I cannot doubt it.”
I watched her as she sat with her absent eyes turned eastward, and her
peculiar look--I have never seen it on another face--as of one who holds
a happy secret; and while I watched I wondered.
“There is a reason for it,” she said, rousing as if from a pleasant
dream,--“a good sensible reason, too, it strikes me, independent of
Scriptural or other proof.”
“What is that?”
“That God keeps us briskly at work in this world.”