Sunday.
Faith has behaved like a witch all day. She knocked down three crickets
and six hymn-books in church this morning, and this afternoon horrified
the assembled and devout congregation by turning round in the middle of
the long prayer, and, in a loud and distinct voice, asking Mrs. Quirk
for “‘nother those pepp’mints such as you gave me one Sunday a good many
years ago, you ’member.” After church, her mother tried a few Bible
questions to keep her still.
“Faith, who was Christ’s father?”
“Jerusalem!” said Faith, promptly.
“Where did his parents take Jesus when they fled from Herod?”
“O, to Europe. Of course I knew that! Everybody goes to Europe.”
To-night, when her mother had put her to bed, she came down laughing.
“Faith does seem to have a hard time with the Lord’s Prayer. To-night,
being very sleepy and in a hurry to finish, she proceeded with great
solemnity:--‘Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; six
days shalt thou labor and do all thy work, and--Oh!’
“I was just thinking how amused her father must be.”
Auntie says many such things. I cannot explain how pleasantly they
strike me, nor how they help me.
29th.
Dr. Bland gave us a good sermon yesterday. There is an indescribable
change in all his sermons. There is a change, too, in the man, and that
something more than the haggardness of grief. I not only respect him and
am sorry for him, but I feel more ready to be taught by him than ever
before. A certain indefinable _humanness_ softens his eyes and tones,
and seems to be creeping into everything that he says. Yet, on the other
hand, his people say that they have never heard him speak such pleasant,
helpful things concerning his and their relations to God. I met him the
other night, coming away from his wife’s grave, and was struck by the
expression of his face. I wondered if he were not slowly finding the
“peaceful day,” of which he told Aunt Winifred.
She, by the way, has taken another of her mysterious trips to Worcester.
30th.
We were wondering to-day where it will be,--I mean heaven.
“It is impossible to do more than wonder,” Auntie said, “though we are
explicitly told that there will be new heavens _and_ a new earth, which
seems, if anything can be taken literally in the Bible, to point to this
world as the future home of at least some of us.”
“Not for all of us, of course?”
“I don’t feel sure. I know that somebody spent his valuable time in
estimating that all the people who have lived and died upon the earth
would cover it, alive or buried, twice over; but I know that somebody
else claims with equal solemnity to have discovered that they could all
be buried in the State of Pennsylvania! But it would be of little
consequence if we could not all find room here, since there must be
other provision for us.”
“Why?”
“Certainly there is ‘a place’ in which we are promised that we shall be
‘with Christ,’ this world being yet the great theatre of human life and
battle-ground of Satan; no place, certainly, in which to confine a happy
soul without prospect of release. The Spiritualistic notion of ‘circles’
of dead friends revolving over us is to me intolerable. I want my
husband with me when I need him, but I hope he has a place to be happy
in, which is out of this woful world.
“The old astronomical idea, stars around a sun, and systems around a
centre, and that centre the Throne of God, is not an unreasonable one.
Isaac Taylor, among his various conjectures, inclines, I fancy, to
suppose that the sun of each system is the heaven of that system. Though
the glory of God may be more directly and impressively exhibited in one
place than in another, we may live in different planets, and some of us,
after its destruction and renovation, on this same dear old, happy and
miserable, loved and maltreated earth. I hope I shall be one of them. I
should like to come back and build me a beautiful home in Kansas,--I
mean in what was Kansas,--among the happy people and the familiar,
transfigured spots where John and I worked for God so long together.
That--with my dear Lord to see and speak with every day--would be
‘Heaven our Home.’”
“There will be no _days_, then?”
“There will be succession of time. There may not be alternations of
twenty-four hours dark or light, but ‘I use with thee an earthly
language,’ as the wife said in that beautiful little ‘Awakening,’ of
Therrmin’s. Do you remember it? Do read it over, if you haven’t read it
lately.
“As to our coming back here, there is an echo to Peter’s assertion, in
the idea of a world under a curse, destroyed and regenerated,--the
atonement of Christ reaching, with something more than poetic force, the
very sands of the earth which he trod with bleeding feet to make himself
its Saviour. That makes me feel--don’t you see?--what a taint there is
in sin. If dumb dust is to have such awful cleansing, what must be
needed for you and me?
“How many pleasant talks we have had about these things, Mary! Well, it
cannot be long, at the longest, before we know, even as we are known.”
I looked at her smiling white face,--it is always very white now,--and
something struck slowly through me, like a chill.
October 16, midnight.
There is no such thing as sleep at present. Writing is better than
thinking.
Aunt Winifred went again to Worcester to-day. She said that she had to
buy trimming for Faith’s sack.
She went alone, as usual, and Faith and I kept each other company
through the afternoon,--she on the floor with Mary Ann, I in the
easy-chair with Macaulay. As the light began to fall level on the floor,
I threw the book aside,--being at the end of a volume,--and, Mary Ann
having exhausted her attractions, I surrendered unconditionally to the
little maiden.
She took me up garret, and down cellar, on lop of the wood-pile, and
into the apple-trees; I fathomed the mysteries of Old Man’s Castle and
Still Palm; I was her grandmother, I was her baby, I was a rabbit, I was
a chestnut horse, I was a watch-dog, I was a mild-tempered giant, I was
a bear “warranted not to eat little girls,” I was a roaring hippopotamus
and a canary bird, I was Jeff Davis and I was Moses in the bulrushes,
and of what I was, the time faileth me to tell.
It comes over me with a curious, mingled sense of the ludicrous and the
horrible, that I should have spent the afternoon like a baby and almost
as happily, laughing out with the child, past and future forgotten, the
tremendous risks of “I spy” absorbing all my present; while what was
happening was happening, and what was to come was coming. Not an echo in
the air, not a prophecy in the sunshine, not a note of warning in the
song of the robins that watched me from the apple-boughs!
As the long, golden afternoon slid away, we came out by the front gate
to watch for the child’s mother. I was tired, and, lying back on the
grass, gave Faith some pink and purple larkspurs, that she might amuse
herself in making a chain of them. The picture that she made sitting
there on the short, dying grass--the light which broke all about her and
over her at the first, creeping slowly down and away to the west, her
little fingers linking the rich, bright flowers tube into tube, the
dimple on her cheek and the love in her eyes--has photographed itself
into my thinking.
How her voice rang out, when the wheels sounded at last, and the
carriage, somewhat slowly driven, stopped!
“Mamma, mamma! see what I’ve got for you, mamma!”
Auntie tried to step from the carriage, and called me: “Mary, can you
help me a little? I am--tired.”
I went to her, and she leaned heavily on my arm, and we came up the
path.
“Such a pretty little chain, all for you, mamma,” began Faith, and
stopped, struck by her mother’s look.
“It has been a long ride, and I am in pain. I believe I will lie right
down on the parlor sofa. Mary, would you be kind enough to give Faith
her supper and put her to bed?”
Faith’s lip grieved.
“Cousin Mary isn’t _you_, mamma. I want to be kissed. You haven’t kissed
me.”
Her mother hesitated for a moment; then kissed her once, twice; put both
arms about her neck; and turned her face to the wall without a word.
“Mamma is tired, dear,” I said; “come away.”
She was lying quite still when I had done what was to be done for the
child, and had come back. The room was nearly dark. I sat down on my
cricket by her sofa.
“Shall Phœbe light the lamp?”
“Not just yet.”
“Can’t you drink a cup of tea if I bring it?”
“Not just yet.”
“Did you find the sack-trimming?” I ventured, after a pause.
“I believe so,--yes.”
She drew a little package from her pocket, held it a moment, then let it
roll to the floor forgotten. When I picked it up, the soft, tissue-paper
wrapper was wet and hot with tears.
“Mary?”
“Yes.”
“I never thought of the little trimming till the last minute. I had
another errand.”