seems strange even to myself. If ever, in life, I looked on to these
twilight hours, with the end coming slowly nearer, I thought I should
lie in a kind of stupor of mind and body, indifferent to everything. I
am indifferent, with the indifference of one in whom desire seems to be
dead; but my mind is, or seems, almost preternaturally clear; and the
old habit, of trying to analyse, to describe, anything that I see or
realise distinctly is too strong for me. I have asked for pencil and
paper; they demur, but yield; and so I write a little, which relieves the
occasional physical restlessness I feel; it induces a power of tranquil
reverie, and the hours pass, I hardly know how. The light changes; the
morning freshness becomes the grave and solid afternoon, and so dies
into twilight; till out of the dark alleys steals the gentle evening,
dark-eyed and with the evening star tangled in her hair, full of shy
sweet virginal thoughts and mysteries ... and then the night, and the day
again.
Do I grieve, do I repine, do I fear? No, I can truthfully say, I do
not. I hardly seem to feel. Almost the only feeling left me is the old
childlike trustfulness in mother and nurse. I do not seem to need to tell
them anything. One or other sits near me. I feel my mother’s eyes dwell
upon me, till I look up and smile; but between our very minds there runs,
as it were, an airy bridge, on which the swift thoughts, the messengers
of love, speed to and fro. I seem, in the loss of all the superstructure
and fabric of life, to have nothing left to tie me to the world, but
this sense of unity with my mother—that inseparable, elemental tie that
nothing can break. And she, I know, feels this too; and it gives her,
though she could not describe it, a strange elation in the midst of her
sorrow, the joy that a man is born into the world, and that I am hers.
[Sidenote: A MOTHER’S HEART]
With the beloved nurse it is the same in a sense; but here it is not
the deep inextricable bond of blood, but the bond of perfect love. I
lose myself in wonder in thinking of it; that one who is hired—that
is the strange basis of the relationship—for a simple task, should
become absolutely identified with love, with those whom she serves. I
do not believe that Susan has a single thought or desire in the world
that is not centred on my mother or myself. The tie between us is
simply indissoluble. And I feel that if we wandered, we three spirits,
disconsolate and separate, through the trackless solitudes of heaven, she
would _somehow_ find her way to my side.
I have noticed that since my illness began she has slipped into the
use of little nursery phrases which I have not heard for years; I
have become “Master Henry” again, and am told to “look slippy” about
taking my medicine. This would have moved me in other days with a
sense of pathos; it is not so now, though the knowledge that these two
beloved, sweet-minded, loving women suffer, is the one shadow over my
tranquillity. If I could only explain to them that my sadness for their
sorrow is drowned in my wonder at the strangeness that any one should
ever sorrow at all for anything!
38
_Sep. 22, 1900._
To-day I am calmer, and the hours have been passing in a long reverie;
I have been thinking quietly over the past years. Sometimes, as I lay
with eyes closed, the old life came so near me that it almost seemed as
if men and women and children, some of them dead and gone, had sate by
me and spoken to me; little scenes and groups out of early years that I
thought I had forgotten suddenly shaped themselves. It is as if my will
had abdicated its sway, and the mind, like one who is to remove from a
house in which he had long dwelt, is turning over old stores, finding old
relics long laid aside in cupboards and lumber-rooms, and seeing them
without sorrow, only lingering with a kind of tender remoteness over the
sweet and fragrant associations of the days that are dead.
I have never doubted that I am to die, and to-day it seems as though I
cared little when the parting comes; death does not seem to me now like
a sharp close to life, the yawning of a dark pit; but, as in an allegory,
I seem to see a little dim figure, leaving a valley full of sunlight and
life, and going upwards into misty and shapeless hills. I used to wonder
whether death was an end, an extinction—_now_ that seems impossible—my
life and thought seem so strong, so independent of the frail physical
accompaniments of the body; but even if it is an end, the thought does
not afflict me. I am in the Father’s hands. It is He that hath made us.
39
_Sep. 24, 1900._
I have had an interview with her. I hardly know what we said—very
little—she understood, and it was very peaceful in her presence. I tried
to tell her not to be sorry; for indeed the one thing that seems to me
inconceivable is that any one should grieve. I lie like a boat upon a
quiet tide, drifting out to sea—the sea to which we must all drift. I am
thankful for my life and all its sweetness; the shadows have gone, and it
seems to me now as though all the happiness came from God, and all the
shadow was of my own making. And the strangest thought of all is that the
darkest shadow has always been this very passing which now seems to me
the most natural thing in the world—indeed the only true thing.
None the less am I thankful for this great and crowning gift of love—the
one thing that I had missed. I do not now even want to use it, to enjoy
it—it is there, and that is enough. In her presence it seemed to me that
Love stood side by side with Death, two shining sisters. But yesterday I
murmured over having been given, as it were, so sweet a cup to taste, and
then having the cup dashed from my lips. To-day I see that Love was the
crown of my poor life, and I thank God with all the strength of my spirit
for putting it into my hand as His last and best gift.
And I thanked her too for deigning to love me; and even while I did so,
the thought broke to pieces, as it were, and escaped from the feeble
words in which I veiled it, like a moth bursting from a cocoon. For were
we not each other’s before the world was made? And the thought of myself
and herself fled from me, and we were one spirit, thinking the same
thoughts, sustained by the same strength. One more word I said, and bade
her believe that I said it with undimmed and unblunted mind, that she
must live, and cast abroad by handfuls the love she would have garnered
for me; that the sorrow that lay heavy on her heart must be fruitful, not
a devastating sorrow; and that however much alone she might seem, that I
should be there, like one who kneels without a closed door ... and so we
said farewell.
[Sidenote: NEARLY HOME]
I lie now in my own room—it is evening; through the open window I can see
the dark-stemmed trees, the pigeon-cotes, the shadowy shoulder of the
barn, the soft ridges beyond, the little wood-end that I saw once in the
early dawn and thought so beautiful. When I saw it before it seemed to me
like the gate of the unknown country; will my hovering spirit pass that
way? I have lived my little life—and my heart goes out to all of every
tribe and nation under the sun who are still in the body. I would tell
them with my last breath that there is comfort to the end—that there is
nothing worth fretting over or being heavy-hearted about it; that the
Father’s arm is strong, and that his Heart is very wide.
THE END.
End of Project Gutenberg's The House of Quiet, by Arthur Christopher Benson