June 11.
I was in her room this afternoon while she was dressing. I like to watch
her brush her beautiful gray hair; it quite alters her face to have it
down; it seems to shrine her in like a cloud, and the outlines of her
cheeks round out, and she grows young.
“I used to be proud of my hair when I was a girl,” she said with a
slight blush, as she saw me looking at her; “it was all I had to be vain
of, and I made the most of it. Ah well! I was dark-haired three years
ago.
“O you regular old woman!” she added, smiling at herself in the mirror,
as she twisted the silver coils flashing through her fingers. “Well,
when I am in heaven, I shall have my pretty brown hair again.”
It seemed odd enough to hear that; then the next minute it did not seem
odd at all, but the most natural thing in the world.
June 14.
She said nothing to me about the anniversary, and, though it has been in
my thoughts all the time, I said nothing to her. I thought that she
would shut herself up for the day, and was rather surprised that she was
about as usual, busily at work, chatting with me, and playing with
Faith. Just after tea, she went away alone for a time, and came back a
little quiet, but that was all. I was for some reason impressed with the
feeling that she kept the day in memory, not so much as the day of her
mourning, as of his release.
Longing to do something for her, yet not knowing what to do, I went into
the garden while she was away, and, finding some carnations, that shone
like stars in the dying light, I gathered them all, and took them to her
room, and, filling my tiny porphyry vase, left them on the bracket,
under the photograph of Uncle Forceythe that hangs by the window.
When she found them, she called me, and kissed me.
“Thank you, dear,” she said, “and thank God too, Mary, for me. That he
should have been happy,--happy and out of pain, for three long beautiful
years! O, think of that!”
When I was in her room with the flowers, I passed the table on which her
little Bible lay open. A mark of rich ribbon--a black ribbon--fell
across the pages; it bore in silver text these words:--
“_Thou shalt have no other gods before me._”
20th.
“I thank thee, my God, the river of Lethe may indeed flow through the
Elysian Fields,--it does not water the Christian’s Paradise.”
Aunt Winifred was saying that over to herself in a dreamy undertone this
morning, and I happened to hear her.
“Just a quotation, dear,” she said, smiling, in answer to my look of
inquiry, “I couldn’t originate so pretty a thing. _Isn’t_ it pretty?”
“Very; but I am not sure that I understand it.”
“You thought that forgetfulness would be necessary to happiness?”
“Why,--yes; as far as I had ever thought about it; that is, after our
last ties with this world are broken. It does not seem to me that I
could be happy to remember all that I have suffered and all that I have
sinned here.”
“But the last of all the sins will be as if it had never been. Christ
takes care of that. No shadow of a sense of guilt can dog you, or affect
your relations to Him or your other friends. The last pain borne, the
last tear, the last sigh, the last lonely hour, the last unsatisfied
dream, forever gone by; why should not the dead past bury its dead?”
“Then why remember it?”
“‘Save but to swell the sense of being blest.’ Besides, forgetfulness of
the disagreeable things of this life implies forgetfulness of the
pleasant ones. They are all tangled together.”
“To be sure. I don’t know that I should like that.”
“Of course you wouldn’t. Imagine yourself in a state of being where you
and Roy had lost your past; all that you had borne and enjoyed, and
hoped and feared, together; the pretty little memories of your babyhood,
and first ‘half-days’ at school, when he used to trudge along beside
you,--little fellow! how many times I have watched him!--holding you
tight by the apron-sleeve or hat-string, or bits of fat fingers, lest
you should run away or fall. Then the old Academy pranks, out of which
you used to help each other; his little chivalry and elder-brotherly
advice; the mischief in his eyes; some of the ‘Sunday-night talks’; the
first novel that you read and dreamed over together; the college
stories; the chats over the corn-popper by firelight; the earliest,
earnest looking-on into life together, its temptations conquered, its
lessons learned, its disappointments faced together,--always you
two,--would you like to, are you _likely_ to, forget all this?
“Roy might as well be not Roy, but a strange angel, if you should.
Heaven will be not less heaven, but more, for this pleasant remembering.
So many other and greater and happier memories will fill up the time
then, that after years these things may--probably will--seem smaller
than it seems to us now they can ever be; but they will, I think, be
always dear; just as we look back to our baby-selves with a pitying sort
of fondness, and, though the little creatures are of small enough use to
us now, yet we like to keep good friends with them for old times’ sake.
“I have no doubt that you and I shall sit down some summer afternoon in
heaven and talk over what we have been saying to-day, and laugh perhaps
at all the poor little dreams we have been dreaming of what has not
entered into the heart of man. You see it is certain to be so much
_better_ than anything that I can think of; which is the comfort of it.
And Roy--”
“Yes; some more about Roy, please.”
“Supposing he were to come right into the room now,--and I slipped
out,--and you had him all to yourself again--Now, dear, don’t cry, but
wait a minute!” Her caressing hand fell on my hair. “I did not mean to
hurt you, but to say that your first talk with him, after you stand face
to face, may be like that.
“Remembering this life is going to help us amazingly, I fancy, to
appreciate the next,” she added, by way of period. “Christ seems to have
thought so, when he called to the minds of those happy people what, in
that unconscious ministering of lowly faith which may never reap its
sheaf in the field where the seed was sown, they had not had the comfort
of finding out before,--‘I was sick and in prison, and ye visited me.’
And to come again to Abraham in the parable, did he not say, ‘Son,
_remember_ that thou in thy lifetime hadst good things and Lazarus
evil’?”
“I wonder what it is going to look like,” I said, as soon as I could put
poor Dives out of my mind.
“Heaven? Eye hath not seen, but I have my fancies. I think I want some
mountains, and very many trees.”
“Mountains and trees!”
“Yes; mountains as we see them at sunset and sunrise, or when the maples
are on fire and there are clouds enough to make great purple shadows
chase each other into lakes of light, over the tops and down the
sides,--the _ideal_ of mountains which we catch in rare glimpses, as we
catch the ideal of everything. Trees as they look when the wind cooes
through them on a June afternoon; elms or lindens or pines as cool as
frost, and yellow sunshine trickling through on moss. Trees in a forest
so thick that it shuts out the world, and you walk like one in a
sanctuary. Trees pierced by stars, and trees in a bath of summer moons
to which the thrill of ‘Love’s young dream’ shall cling forever--But
there is no end to one’s fancies. Some water, too, I would like.”
“There shall be no more sea.”
“Perhaps not; though, as the sea is the great type of separation and of
destruction, that may be only figurative. But I’m not particular about
the sea, if I can have rivers and little brooks, and fountains of just
the right sort; the fountains of this world don’t please me generally. I
want a little brook to sit and sing to Faith by. O, I forgot! she will
be a large girl probably, won’t she?”
“Never too large to like to hear your mother sing, will you, Faith?”
“O no,” said Faith, who bobbed in and out again like a canary, just
then,--“not unless I’m _dreadful_ big, with long dresses and a
waterfall, you know. I s’pose, maybe, I’d have to have little girls
myself to sing to, then. I hope they’ll behave better’n Mary Ann does.
She’s lost her other arm, and all her sawdust is just running out.
Besides, Kitty thought she was a mouse, and ran down cellar with her,
and she’s all shooken up, somehow. She don’t look very pretty.”
“Flowers, too,” her mother went on, after the interruption. “_Not_ all
amaranth and asphodel, but of variety and color and beauty unimagined;
glorified lilies of the valley, heavenly tea-rose buds, and spiritual
harebells among them. O, how your poor mother used to say,--you know
flowers were her poetry,--coming in weak and worn from her garden in the
early part of her sickness, hands and lap and basket full: ‘Winifred,
if I only supposed I _could_ have some flowers in heaven I shouldn’t be
half so afraid to go!’ I had not thought as much about these things then
as I have now, or I should have known better how to answer her. I should
like, if I had my choice, to have day-lilies and carnations fresh under
my windows all the time.”
“Under your windows?”
“Yes. I hope to have a home of my own.”
“Not a house?”
“Something not unlike it. In the Father’s house are many mansions.
Sometimes I fancy that those words have a literal meaning which the
simple men who heard them may have understood better than we, and that
Christ is truly ‘preparing’ my home for me. He must be there, too, you
see,--I mean John.”
I believe that gave me some thoughts that I ought not to have, and so I
made no reply.
“If we have trees and mountains and flowers and books,” she went on,
smiling, “I don’t see why not have houses as well. Indeed, they seem to
me as supposable as anything can be which is guess-work at the best; for
what a homeless, desolate sort of sensation it gives one to think of
people wandering over the ‘sweet fields beyond the flood’ without a
local habitation and a name. What could be done with the millions who,
from the time of Adam, have been gathering there, unless they lived
under the conditions of organized society? Organized society involves
homes, not unlike the homes of this world.
“What other arrangement could be as pleasant, or could be pleasant at
all? Robertson’s definition of a church exactly fits. ‘More united in
each other, because more united in God.’ A happy home is the happiest
thing in the world. I do not see why it should not be in any world. I do
not believe that all the little tendernesses of family ties are thrown
by and lost with this life. In fact, Mary, I cannot think that anything
which has in it the elements of permanency is to be lost, but sin.
Eternity cannot be--it cannot be the great blank ocean which most of us
have somehow or other been brought up to feel that it is, which shall
swallow up, in a pitiless, glorified way, all the little brooks of our
delight. So I expect to have my beautiful home, and my husband, and
Faith, as I had them here; with many differences and great ones, but
_mine_ just the same. Unless Faith goes into a home of her own,--the
little creature! I suppose she can’t always be a baby.
“Do you remember what a pretty little wistful way Charles Lamb has of
wondering about all this?
“‘Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling indications which
point me to them here,--the “sweet assurance of a look”? Sun, and sky,
and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness
of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fish, and society, ...
and candle-light and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and
jests, and _irony itself_,--do these things go out with life?’”
“Now, Aunt Winifred!” I said, sitting up straight, “what am I to do with
these beautiful heresies? If Deacon Quirk _should_ hear!”
“I do not see where the heresy lies. As I hold fast by the Bible, I
cannot be in much danger.”
“But you don’t glean your conjectures from the Bible.”
“I conjecture nothing that the Bible contradicts. I do not believe as
truth indisputable anything that the Bible does not give me. But I
reason from analogy about this, as we all do about other matters. Why
should we not have pretty things in heaven? If this ‘bright and
beautiful economy’ of skies and rivers, of grass and sunshine, of hills
and valleys, is not too good for such a place as this world, will there
be any less variety of the bright and beautiful in the next? There is no
reason for supposing that the voice of God will speak to us in
thunder-claps, or that it will not take to itself the thousand gentle,
suggestive tongues of a nature built on the ruins of this, an unmarred
system of beneficence.
“There is a pretty argument in the fact that just such sunrises, such
opening of buds, such fragrant dropping of fruit, such bells in the
brooks, such dreams at twilight, and such hush of stars, were fit for
Adam and Eve, made holy man and woman. How do we know that the abstract
idea of a heaven needs imply anything very much unlike Eden? There is
some reason as well as poetry in the conception of a ‘Paradise
Regained.’ A ‘new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.’”
“But how far is it safe to trust to this kind of argument?”
“Bishop Butler will answer you better than I. Let me see,--Isaac Taylor
says something about that.”
She went to the bookcase for his “Physical Theory of Another Life,” and,
finding her place, showed me this passage:--
“If this often repeated argument from analogy is to be termed, as to the
conclusions it involves, a conjecture merely, we ought then to abandon
altogether every kind of abstract reasoning; nor will it be easy
afterwards to make good any principle of natural theology. In truth, the
very basis of reasoning is shaken by a scepticism so sweeping as this.”