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Loraque le document eat trop grand pour §tre reproduit en un aeul clichA, il est f ilm6 A partir de Tangle aupAriaur gauche, de gauche d droit*, *t d* haut en baa, en prenant le nombre d'imagea nAceaaaire. Lea diagrammea suivants illuatrent la mAthode. 1 2 3 32X -'•■♦■. '^ 2 3 4 5 6 1 T] - *i ■•^■itaiMMMMMMMMiH THE GATES AJAR. HT ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS EDITED BY THE AUTHOR OF " ALWYN MORTON." " I shall know him when we meet : And we shall sit at endless feast, Enjoying each the other's good : What vaster dream can hit the mood Of Love on earth." —Tennyson. LONDON, ONT., E. A. Taylor & Co., Richmond Street. . 1869. I III illillll lITiliilBIMWi' { [Pbepaoe to the English Edition.— In pre- paring this little work for the English edition, the Editor has not inserted anything of his own, except a few unimportant connecting words, when he has thought it better to omit * some "passages in which the Authoress had -given perhaps too much play to her imagina- tion. For the few foot-notes he alon^ is responsible.] iftil To my father, whose life, like a perfume from beyond the Gates, penetrates every life which approaches it, the readers of this little hook will owe whatever pleasant thing they mayfmd within its pages, K S. P. ■ *- I ,i- . THE GATES AJAR. 1* CHAPTER I. One week; only one week to-day, this twen- ty-first of February. . I have been sitting here in trie dark and thinking about it, till it seems so horrijbly long and so horribly short; it has been such a week to hve through, and it is such a small part of the weeks that must be lived through, that I could think no longer, but hghted ray lamp and opened my desk to nnd something to do. I was tossing my paper about — only my own; the packages in the yellow envelopes I have ^ tiot been quite brave enough to open yet-^ when I came across this poor little book in wlich I used to keep memoranda of the wea- ther, and of my lovers, when I was a school- girL I turned the leaves, smiling to see how many blank pages w^re left, and took up my pen, and now I am not smiling any more. If it had not come exactly as it did, it seems to me as if I could bear it better. They tell me that it should not have been such a shock. *' Your brother had been in the army so long that you should have been prepared for any- thiilg. Everybody knows by what a hair asol- ^^n life is always banging/^ and a great deal ■yr'.i: M. IIQW70 4 The Gates Ajarl , more that I am afraid I have not listened to. I suppose it is all true; but that never makes it any easier. The house feels like a prison. I walk up and down and wonder that 1 ever called it home. — Something is the matter with the sunsets; they come and go, and I do not notice them. Some- thing ails the voices of the children, snowball- ing down the street; all the music is gone out of them*, and they hurt me like knives. Theharin- less^ happy children! — and Roy loved the little children. Why, it seems to me as if the world were spinning aiound in the Ught and wind and laugliter, and God just stretched down His hand one morning and put it out. -^ It was such a dear, pleasant world to be put out? It was never dearer or more pleasant than it was on that morning. I had not been so happy for weeks. I came im from the post- office singing to myself. His letter was so bright and full of mischief! I had not had one like it all the winter. I have laid it away by itself, filled with his jokes and pet names, " Mamie " or " Queen Mamie " every other line, and signed "Until next time, your happy Roy." I wondered if all brothers and sisters kept up the baby-names as we did. I wonder |if I shall ever become used to hving without them. I read the letterpver a great ^ aany times,and stopped to tell Mrs, Bland the news in it, and wondered what had kept it so long on the way, and wondered if it could be true that he wouM ,-j^'W^^^. •■ f , _ y fl \iiik i^'iiii 8 The Oates Ajar. find she had come early, because— she too hav- ing lost a brother in the war—she was expect- ea to be very sornr for me. Very likelv she was, and veiy hkeiy she did the best she knew how, but she was— not as uncomfortable as I, but as uncomfortable as she could be, and was evidently glad when itwas over. She observed, as she went out, that I shouldn't feel so sadbv and bv. She felt very sad at first when Jacfc died, out everybody got over that after a time. The girls were gjoing to sew for the fair next week at Mr. Quirk's, and she hoped I would exert myself and come. Ah, well— * * First learn to love one living man, Then mayst thou think upon the dead." It is not that the child is to be blamed for not blowing enough to stay away; but her comi^ here has made me wonder whether I am different from other women; why Roy was so much more to me than many brothers are to many sisters. I think it must be that there never was another like Roy. Then we have lived together so long, we two alone, since fa- ther died, that he had ffrown to me, heart of my heaJt, and life of my life. It did not seem as if he could be taken, and I be left. Besides, I suppose most young women of my age have their dreams, and a future probable ' qit possible, which makes the very incomplete- ness of life sweet, because of the 'symmetry which is waiting somewhere. But that was settled so long ago for me that it makes it very different. Roy was 931 there was. i J i f ,■ > t \ "*"' ~":'r' '''"1^""^^%: I \ I The Gates Ajar. 9 February 26tb. Death and Heaven could not seem very differ- ent f a Pagan from what they seem to me. I say this deliberately. It has been deUber- ately forced upon me. That of which I had a faint consciousness in the first shock takes shape now. I do not see how one with such thoughts in her heart as I have had can pos- sible l)e "regenerate," or .stand any chance of ever becoming "one of the redeemed." And here I am, what I have been for six years, a member of an Evangelical church, in good and regular standing ! The bare, blank sense of physical repulsion from death, which was all the idealnad of anythmg when they first brought him home, has not gone yet. It is horrible. It was cruel. Roy, all 1 had in the wide world, — Roy; with the flash of his eyes^with his smile that lighted the house all up; with his pretty, soft hair that I used to curl and kiss about my finger, his bounding step, his strong arms that folded me in and cared for me, — Koy snatched away in an instant, and laid out there in the wet and snow — ^in the hideous wet and snow— never to kiss him, never to see him any more ! . . . He was a good boy. Roy was a good boy. He must have gone to Heaven. But I know nothing about b'^aven. It is very far off. In m^ best and happiei^ days, I never liked to tiunk of it. If I were to go there, it could do me lao good, for I should not see Koy* Or if by chance I should see him standing up among tne fiprand, white angels, he vould not be the old dear Roy. I should grow so tired of Ising- i; 10 The Gates Ajar. ..'■'' ' V ing ! Should long and fret for one little talk— for I never said good-bye, and — I will stop this. A scrap from the German of Burger, which I came across to-day, shall be copied here. " Be calm, my child, forget thy woe, And think of God and heaven; Christ thy Redeemer hath to thee Himself for comfort given. "fcO mother, mother, what is Heaven ? , O mother, what is Hell? ! To be with Wilhelipa — that's my heaven; Wiihout him-— that's my hell," February 27th. Miss Meta Tripp, in the ignorance of her little silly heart, has done me a great mischief. Phoebe prepared me for it, by observing, when she came up yesterday to dust my room, that "folks was all sayin' that Mary Cabot" — (Homer is not an aristocratic town, and Phoebe doffisi and dons my title at her own sweet will) —"that Mary Cabot was dreadful low since Royal died, and hadn't ought to stay shut up by "herself, day in and day out. It was behav- ing contrary to the will of Providence, and very bad for her health, too." Moreover, Mrs. Bland, who called this morning with her three babies — she never is aMe to stir out of the house without thoae^ cmldren, poor thing I — lingered awkwardly on the doorsteps as she went j^way, and hoped that "Mary, mv dear," Wouldn't take it unkindly, but sne did wish that I would exert myseli more to see my friends, and receive comfort in tny af9iction. \ I r ii t >i ll^ mmmmmmtitmiimmmm* The Oates Ajar, 11 She didn't want to interfere or b6ther me, or — ^but— people would talk, and — - My good little minister's wife broke down all in a blush, at this point in her ''parochial du- ties" (I more than suspect that ner husband had a hand in the matter), so I took pity on her embarrassment, and said, smiling, that I would think about it. I see just how the leaven has spread. Miss Meta, a little overwhelmed and a good deal mystified by her call here, pronounces "poor Mary Cabot so sad; she wouldn't talk about Royal; and you couldn't persuade her to come to the Fair; and she was so sober/— why y it was dreadful I" Therefore, Homer has made up its mind that I shall become resigned in an arithmeti- cal manner, and comforted according to the Rule of Three. I wish I could go away ! I wish I could away and creep into the ground and die ! nobody need «ver speak any more words to me ! If anybody only knew what to say ! Little Mrs. Bland has been very kind, and I thank her with all my heart. But she does not know. She* does not understand. Her happy heart is bound up in her little live chil- dren. She ilfever laid anybody away under the snow without a chance to say good-Dy^« As for the minister, he «jcame, of course as it was proper that he should, before the funeral, and once after. He is a very good ntan, but I am afraid of him; and I am glad that he has not come a^ain. 12 The Gates Ajar. . ' l^ight. I can only repeat and re-echo what I wrote this noon, If anybody knew what to say ! Just after supper I heard the door-bell, and looking out of the window, cauffht a glimpse of Deacon Quirk's old drab felt hat on the up- ger step. My heart sank, but there was no elp for me. I waited for Phoebe to bring up his name, desperately listening to her heavy steps, and letting her knock three times before I answered. I confess to having let my hair down twice, washed my hands to a most unne- cessary extent, and been a long time brushing my dress; 'also to forgetting my handkerchief, and having to go back for it after I was down stairs. Deacon Quirk looked tired of waiting. I hope he was. Oh what an ill-natured thing to say ! What is coming over me ? What would Roy think ? What could he ] "Good evening, Mary," said the deacon, se- verely, when I went in. Probably he did not mean to speak severely, but tne truth is, I think he was a little vexed that I had kept him waiting. I said good evening, and apolo- gised for my delay, and sat down as far from him as I conveniently could. There was an aw- ful silence. " I came in this evening," said the deacon, breaking it with a cough, ^*I came — ^hem ! — to confer with you" I looked up. "I thought soniebody had ought to come, continued the deacon, "to con- fer with you as a Christian brother on your spiritual condition." ^ rMm, — ^if ever that time comes. As for those words about the Lord's wilL I wcmld no more take them on my lips than 1 would blasphemy^ ujiless I could speak them honestly, — and that I cannot do. We had better talk of something eLse now, had we not ?" Deacon Quirk looked at me. It struck me that he would look very much so at a Mormon or a Hottentot, and 1 wondered whether he were going to excoinmunicate me on the spot. As soon as he began to speak, however, I saw that he was only bewildered, honestly be- wildered, and honestly shocked; I do not doubt that I had saidbewilderingand shocking; things. "My friend,''hesaidsolenmly, "I shall pray for you arid leave you in the hands of God. Yoiur brother, whom He has removed from thi» earthly life for His own wise''^ ttmummt .iijkisfewSiiii the Gates Ajar^ 15 ^ 1 •H " We will not talk any more about Roy, if you please," [I interupted; " Ae is happy and safe. " Hem ! — I hope so " he replied, moving un- easily in his chair; " I believe he never made a profession of religion, but there is no limit to the mercy of God. It is very unsafe for the young to think that they can rely on a death- bed repentance, but our God is a covenant- keeping God, and Royal's mother was a pious woman. If you cannot say with certainty that he is numbered among the redeemed, you are justified, perhaps, in hoping so." I turned sharply on him, but words died on my lips. How could I tell the man of that short, dear letter that came to me in December, — ^that Roy's was no death-bed repentance, but the quite natural growth of a life that had alwavs been the life of the pure in heart, of his manly beliefs and unselfish motives; of that dawning sense of friendship with Christ of which he used to speak so modestly, dreading lest he should not be honest with himself 1 "Perhaps! ought not to call myself a Chris- tian," he wrote, — I learned the words by heart, — "and I shall make no profession to be such, till I am sure of it, but my life has not seemed to me for a long time to be my own. 'Bought with a price' just expresses it. I can point to no time at which I was conscious by any revolution of feeling, of ' e^xperiencing a change of heart,' but it seems to me that a man's heart might be changed for all that. I do not know that it is necesaaiy for us to be able to watch every foot-print of God. The way is all that con- UMMMfa 16 TU Gdtei Ajar, ffl«e of . S W *^"°^ « «>d Him ""•my life only conviW,^°^^S^ al'out in iZ certain war befwe fhf*™^ ?* ^^^ J felt bf^ con QST-fii!^:^,«f^hin/ of this to Dea- of all that Roy lefK f h*" *?^^credtreaS »te I did not Tt ^ *¥, <^^arest. At ant' been saying. Hrn& X^ ^f ^^'a* he had would notslv tw »„?"*, have known that T ft IS a possibility of wlS It*'' of a doubt, conceive, but Isuppo^ th«/.??'^°* rationally never have passerm7Iip^ ^ '^"'^ ""o^d W hether the i^Pa^ fJ!t^ ^ ^<"^ ham to finish •nind that hem& ^Th' '^^^le inCua ^eiy comforting remart >^eheen nialdnga started very scSn to |o ' '^"* «*y' hutlie ' -^S^IeS^^and Roya, wa. inth one of his stohd eZrf« +^ T^ ^* Parting, ttat^e wo^e tCttS-if'^^^^^^^ ™gr the song of MnJ^^\^^ *he cefflng) dence. AluraffSns± ^TF °^ «' ■rmerged, as youSKv ™"''*"^ *« God, shipping befo,^ the Satlfe'"^'?^'*^ wor- foesn't think tCm^liy^*l^^h^^^ He -y»port.nce,conSSSteS^^-4 »/*!«(W«iri»a» Th* OaU$ Ajw. 17 < exceeding weight of glory. In the appropriate words of the poet,— " Oh. not to one created thing Snail our embrace be g^ven, But all our joy shall be in GkxI, For only God Ib heaven.'* Those are very spiritooal and scripteral lines, and it's very proper to reflect how true they aie.'* I saw him go out, and came up here and locked myself in, and have been walking round and round the room. I must have walked a good while, for I feel as weak as a baby. Can the man in any state of existence be made to comprehend that he has been holding me on the rack this whole evening? Yet he came under a strict sense of duty,and in the kindness of all the heart he has ! I Know, or I ought to know, that he is a good man, —far better in the sight of God to-night, I do not doubt, than I am. But it hurts, — ^it cuts,— that thing which he said as he went out; because I suppose it must be true; because it seems to me greater than I can bear to have it true. Roy can have no thought of me, cannot re- member how I loved him, how he left me aJl alone. The sin^ng and the worshipping must take up all his time. I am nothing any more to Roy. March 2d. And once I fras much,— very much to him! His Mamie, lu9 poor Queen Mamie.— dear- er,he used to say, than all theirorld to Mm,— I don^t see how he can like it so well up there 'm( ,.ffW"-f — ' r. 18 Th§ Gates Ajar,^ as to forget her. Though Roy wa» a very good boy. But this poor, wicked Uttle Mamie, — why, I fall to pitying her as if she were some one else, and wish that some one would cry over her a^little. I can't cry. Roy used to say a thing, — I have not the words, but it was like this, — that one must be either very young or very ungenerous, if one could find time to pity one's self. I have lain for two nights, with my eyes open all night long. I thougnt that perhaps I might see him. I have been praying for a touch, a sign, only for something to break the silence into which he has gone. But there is no answer— none. The]light bums blue, and I see at last that it is morning, and go down stairs alone, and so the day begins. Something of Mrs. Browning's has been keeping a dull mechanical time in.my brain all day. " God keeps a niche In heaven to hold our idols: . . . albeit He brake them to our faces, and denied That our close kisses should impair their white" But why must He take them And why? should He keep them there? Shall we ever see them framed in their glorious gloom? Will He let us touch them th^n? Or must we stand like a poor worshipper at a cathedral, looking up at his pictured saint afar off upon the other side? Has everything stopped just here? Our talks together in the twilight, our planning and hop- f ing and dreaming together; our walks and rides W"*" mm ■MUM The Gates Ajar, 19 Iks azidlaughing; ourreadingandsingingandloving, — ^tBese then are all gone out for ever? God forgive the words I but heaven will never be heaven to me without them. March 4th. Perhaps I had better not write any more here after this. On looking over the leaves, I see that the little green book has become an outlet for the shallower pan^ of pain. Meta Tripp and Beacon Quirk, gossip and sympathy that have buzzed into my trouble and annoyed me hke wasps (we are apt to make more fuss over a wasp-sting than a sabre- cut), just that proportion of suffering which alone can ever be put into words, — the surface. I begin to underst^Cnd what I never imder- stood till now, — what people mean by the lux- ury of grief. No, I am sure that I never understood it, because my pride suffered as much as any part of me in that other time. I would no more have spent two consecutive hours drifting at the mercy of my thoughts, than I would have put my hand into the fur- nace fire. The right to mourn makes every- thing different. Then, as to mother, I was very young when she died, and father, though I loved him, was never to me what Roy has been. This luxury of grief, like all luxuries, is plea- surable. Though, as I was saving, it is only the shallow part of one's heart — 1 unaginetnat the deepest hearts have their shallows which can be filled by it — still it brings a shallow re- lief. 26 The Oates Ajar. Let it be confessed to this honest book, that driven to it bv desperation, I found in it a wr^ched sort of content Being a little stronger now physically, I shall try to be a little braver; it will do no harm to try. So I seem to see that it was the content of poison,— salt-water poured between shipwrecked lips. At any rate, I mean to put the book away, and lock it up. Roy used to say that he did not believe in journals. I begin to see why. CHAPTER III. ■ March 7th. I have taken out my book, and am going to write again. But there is an excellent reason. I have something else than myself to write about. This morning Phoebe persuaded me to walk down to the oSice, " To keep up my spirits, and get some salt pork." She brought my things and put them on me while I was hesitating; tied my victorine and buttoned my gloves; warmed my boots, and fussed about me as if I had been a baby. It did me good to be taken care of, and I thanked her softly; a little more softly than I am apt to speak to Phoebe. ' , MMlNMha ■hMMiiii The Gate$ Ajar. 21 "Blessyoursoul, my dearPshe said, wink- ing briskly, ^' I don't want no thankgr. It's thanks enough jest to see one of your old looks comin' over you for a spell, sence" She knocked over a chair with her broom, and left her sentence unfinished, Phoebe has always had a queer, clinging, superior sort of love for us both. She dandled us on her knees, and made all our rag-dolls, and carried us through measles and mumps and the rest. Then mother's early death threw all the care upon her. I believe that in her secret heart she considers me more her child than her mistress. It cost a great many battles to be- come established as ** Miss Mary." "I should like to know," she would say,throw- ing back her great square shoulders, and tower- ing up in front of me — " I should Uke to know, if you s'pose I'ma-goin' to *MisS' anybody that I've trotted to Bamberry Cross as many times as I have you, Mary Caoot! Catch me!" I remember how she would insist on calling me " her baby " after I was in long dresses,and that it mortified me cruelly once when Meta Tripp was here to tea with some Boston cousins. Poor, good Phcebe! Her rough love seems worth more to me, now that it is all I have left me in the world. It occurs to me that I may not have taken notice enough of her lately. She has done her honest best to comfort me, and she loved Roy. too. But about the letter. I wrapped my face up closely in the cripe^ so that, if I met Deacon (2uirk, he should not recognize me, and think- ing that the air was pleasant as I walked,came 22 The Oates Ajar, f It home with the pork for Phoebe and a letter for myself. I did not open it; in fact, I forgot all about it, till I had De<^n at home for half an hour. I cannot bear to open a letter suice that morning when the lances of light fell on the snow. They have written to me from every- where — unclesand cousins and old school friends ; well-meaning people; saying each the same thing in the same way — no, not that exactly, and very likely I should feel hurt and lonely if they did not write; but sometimes I wish it did not all have to be read. So I did not notice much about my letter this morning, till presently it occurred to me that what must be done had better be done quickly; so I drew up my chair to the desk, prepared to read and answer on the spot. Something about the writing and the signature rather pleased me: it wa"* dated from Kansas, and was signed with the name of my mother^s youngest sister, Winifred Forceythe. I will lay the letter in between these two leaves, for it seems to suit the pleasant, spring-like day; besides. I took out the green book again on account of it. " Lawrence, Kansas, February 21st. " My dbae Child, — I have been thinking how happy you will be by aiid by because Roy is happy. "And yet I know — I understand — " You have been in all my thoughts, and they have been such pitiful, tender thoughts, that I cannot help lettuig you know that s(»nebody is sorry for you. For the rest, thef |heart knoweth its own bitterness, and I am, after all, MfM ifeMM The Gates Ajar. 23 t. Loy 71 too much of a stranger to my sister's child to intermeddle. " So my letter dies upon my pen. You can- rot bear words yet. How should I dare to fret you with them? I can only reach you by my silence, and leave you with the Heart that blea and broke for you and Roy. — Your Aunt, "Winifred Foroeythb. " Postscript, February 23d. I open my letter to add, that I am thinking of commg to New England with Faith— you know Faith and I have nobody but each o£her now. Indeed. I may be on my way by the time this reaches you. It is just possible that I may not come back to the W est. I shall be for a time at your Uncle Calvin's, and then my husband's friends think that they must have me. I should like to see you for a day or two, but if you do not care to see me, say so. If you let me come because you thiii you must, I shall find it out from your face in an hour. I should Hke to be something to you, or do some- thing for you; but if I cannot, I would rather not come." I like that letter. I have written to her to come, and in such a way that I think she will imderstand me to mean what I sav. I have not seen her since I was a child. I know that she was very much younger than my mother; that she spent her young ladyhood teaching at the South;— grand- father had enough with which to support her, but I have heard it said that she preferred to take care of herself ;— that she finally married 24 The Oatis Ajar. a poor minister, whose sermons people liked, but whose coat was shockingly shaoby; that she left the comforts and elegances and friends of New England to go to the West and bury herself in an unheara-of little place withihim (1 thuik she must have loved him); that he after- wards settled in Lawrence; that there, after they had been married some childless years, this little Faith was bom; and that there Unde Forceythe died about three years ago; that is about all I know of her. I suppose her share of Grandfather Burleigh's Uttle pro- perty supports her respectably. I understand that she has been living a sort of missionary me among her husband speople since his death, and that they think they shall never see her like again. Itis they whokeep her from coming home again. Uncle Calvin's wife told me once; they ana one other thing, — ^her husband's grave. 1 hope she will come to see me. I notice one strange thing about her letter. She does not use the ugly words " death" and " dying." I don't know exactly what she put in thei' places,but something thathada pleasant sound. " To be happy because Roy is happy." I won- der if she really thinks it is possible. I wonder what makes the words chase me about Th$ Gates Ajar. 26 CHAPTER IV. May 6th. I am afraid that ^my brave resolutions are all breaking down. The stillness of the Maj days is creeping in- to everything; the days m which the furlough was to come; in which the bitter Peace I^s come instead, and in which he would have been at home, never to go away from me any more. The lazy winds are choking me. Their faint sweetness makes me sick. The moist, rich loam is ploughed in the gardens; the grass, more golden than green, spring in the warm hollow by the froilt gate; the great maple, just reaching up to tap at the winidow, blazes and bows under its weight of scarlet, blossoms. I cannot bear the perfume; it comes up in great breaths, when the wmdow is opened. I wish that little cricket, just waked from his winter's nap, would not sit there on the still and chirp at me. " ^^e the blue- birds flashing in and out of t;>^ t . mine cloud that the maple makes, and "''^g, singing, everywhere. It is easy to understand how Bianca heard "the nightingales . sing through her head,'' how she could call them "owl-like birds," who sang "for Spite." who sang "for hate," who sang "for doom." 26 The Gatei Ajar. Most of all I hate the maple. I wish winter were back again to fold it away in white^ with its bare, black fingers only to come tappmg at the window. "Roy's maple," we used to call it. How much fun we had out of that old tree ! As far as I can remember, we never con- sidered spring to be officially introduced till we had had a fight with the red blossoms. Roy used to pelt me well; but with that pretty chivalry of his, which was rare in such a little fellow, which developed afterwards in- to that rarer treatment of women, of which everyone speaks who speaks of him, he would stop the play the instant it threatened rough- ness. I used to be glad, though, that I had strength and courage enough to make it some fun to him. The maple is full of pictures of Roy. Roy, not yet over the dignity of his first boots, aim- ing for the cross-barred branch, coming to the ground with a terrible wrench on his aakle, straight up again before anybody could stop him, and sittmg there on the ugly, swaying bough as white as a sheet, to wave his cap, — "There, I meant to doit, and I have!" Roy, chopping off the twigs for kindling-wopd in ms mud oven, and sending his hatchet right through the parlor window. Roy, cuttmg leaves for me, and then pulling all my wreaths down over my nose every time I put them on! Roy,'making me jump half-way across the room with a sudden thump on my window, and, look- ing out, I would see him with his hat off and hair blown from his forehead, framed in by the scented blossoms, or the quivering green, or the tm The Gates Ajar^ 27 his ight ting iths on! Dom ok- md the the flame of blood-red leaves. But there is no end to them if I begin. I had planned, if he came this week, to strip the richest branches, and fill his room. ' May 6th. The May-day stillness, the lazy winds, the sweetness m the air, are all gone. A miserable north-easterly storm has set in. The fi;arden loam is a mass of mud; the golden grass is drenched; the poor httle cricket is drowned in a mud-puddle; the bluebirds are huddled among the leaves, with their heads imder their drabbled wings, and the maple blossoms, dull and shrunken, drip against the glass. It begins to be evident that it will never do for me to Uve alone. Yet who is there in the wide world that I could bear to bring here — ^into Roy's place ? A little old-fashioned book, bound in green and gold, attracted my attention this morning while I was dusting the hbrary. It proved to be my mother's copy of "EUa,'^ — one that fa- ther had given her, I saw by the fly-leaf, in their early engagement days. It is some time since I have read Charles Lamb; indeed, since the middle of February I have read noth- ing of any Sort. Phoebe dries the Journal for me every night, and sometimes I glance at the Telegraphic Summary, and sometimes I don't. "You used to be fond enough of books," Mrs. Bland says, looking puzzled, — "regular blue-stocking, Mr* Bland called you (no person- al objectior to you, of course, my dear, but he jjai ' jtLJgi!. tmm 28 The Oates Ajar. V ♦ UoesnHlike literary women, which is a great comfort to me). Why don't you read and di- veiit yourself now 1" But my brain, like the rest of me, seems to be crushed. I could not follow three p^es of luatory with attention. Shakespeare, Words- worth, Whittier, Mrs- Browning, are filled with Roy's marks — ^and so down the shelf. Be- sides, poetry strikes as nothing else does, deep into the roots of things. One finds everywhere some strain at the fibres of one's heart. . A mind must be healthily reconciled to acti^al life, before a poet — ^at least most poets—can help it. W^ must learn to bear and to work, before we can spare strength to dream. To hymns and hymn-uke poems, exception should be made. Some of them are like soft hands stealing into ours in the daxk, and hold- ing us fast without a spoken word. I do not know how many times Whittier's "Psalm," and that old cryof Oowper's, "God moves in a mys- terious way," have quieted me— just the sound of the words; when iwastoowild to take in their meaning, and too wicked to believe them if Ihad. As to novels (by the way, Meta Tripp sent me over four yesterdayaftemoon, among which I notice "Aurora Floyd" and " Uncle Silas"), the author of "Rutledge" expresses my feeling about them precisely. I do not yemember her exact words, but they are aOt unUke these: — "She had far outlived the passion of ordinary novels; and the few which struck the depths of herexperiencegaT'ehermorepainthaa^pleasure." However, I took up poor "EUa" this morn- ing, mi stumbled upon "Dream Children," to The Gatti Ajar. 29 which, for pathos and symmetry, I have read lew th&igs superior in the^ language. Years ago, I ahnost knew it by heart, but it has slipped out of memory with many other things of late. Any book, if it be one of those which Lamb calls "books wliich are books," put before us at different periods of life, will unfold to us new meanings — wheels within wheels, delicate springs of purpose to which, at the last reading, we were stone-blind; gems T^diich perhaps the author ignor'»ntly cut and polished. "A sentence in this" Dream Childr^," which at eighteen I passed by with a compassionate sort of wonder, only tninking that it gave me " the blues '' to read it, and that I was glad Roy was alive, I have seized upon and learned all over again now. I write it down to the dull music of the rain. " And how, when he died, though he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he had died a great while a^o, such a distance there is be- twixt life and death; and how I bore his death, as I thought, pretty weU at first, but afterwards it haunted and haunted me; and though I did not cry or take it to heart as some do, and as I think he would have done if I had died, yet I missed him all day long, and knew not till then how much I had loved him. I missed his kind- ness and I missed his ciossness, and wished him to be alive again to be (quarrelling with him (for we quan-elled sometimes), rather than not have him again.'' How stillthe house is! I can hear the coach rumbling away at the half-mile comer, coming ■m mMSBVI 3Q The Gates Ajar, up from the evening train. A little arrow of light has just cut the gray gloom of the west. Ten o'clock. The coach to which I sat listening rumbled up to the gate and stopped. Puzzled for the moment, and feeling as inhospitable as I knew how, I went down to the door. The driver was already on the steps, with a bundle in his arms that proved to be a rather minute child; and a lady, veiled, was just stepping from the car- riage into the rain. Of course I came to my senses at tliat.and, calling to Phoebe that Mrs. Eorceythe had come, sent her out an umbrella. She surprised me by running lightly up the steps. I had imagined a somewhat advanced age and a sedate amount of infirmities to be necessary concomitants of aunthood. She came in all sparkhnff with rain-drops, and, gently pushing aside the hand with which I was try- mg to pay her driver, said, laughing: — " Here we are, bag and baggage, you see — * big trunk, little trunk,' &c., &c. You did not expect mef Ah, my letter missed then. It is too bad to take you by storm in this way. Come, Faith ! No,don't trouble about the trunks just now. Shall I go 'right in here?" Her voice hm a sparkle in it, like the drops on her veil, but it was low and very sweet. I took her in by the dining room fire, and was turning to take of the httle girl's things, when a soft Band stayed me, and I saw that she had drawn oflf the wet veil. A face somewhat pale looked down at me; she is taller than I^ with large, compassionate eyes. TAi Gates Ajar. 31 " I am too wet to kiss you, but I must have a louir," she said, smiling. "That will do. You are like your mother, very like." I don't know what possessed me, whether it was the sudden, sweet feeling of lanship with something alive, or whether it was her face or her voice, or all together, but 1 said. — "I don't thinkyou are too wet to be kissed," and threw my arms about her neck — I am not of the kissing kind either, and I had on rny new bombazine, and she was very wet. I thought she looked pleased. Phoebe was sent to open the register in the blue room, and as soon as it was warm I went up with them, leading Faithby the hand. I am unused to children, and she kept stepping on my dress, and spinning around and tipping over, in the most astonishing manner. It strik- ingly reminded me of a top at the last gasp. — Her mother observed that she was tired and sleeply. Phoebe was waiting awkwardly up- stairs, with fresh towels on her arm. Aunt Winifred turned- and held out her hand. " Well, Phoebe, I am glad to see you. This is Phoebe, I am sure] Y6u have altered with everything else since I was here before. You keep bright and well, I hope, and take 'good care of Miss Mary?" It was a simple enough thing, to be sure, her taking the trouble to notice the old servant with whom she had scarcely ever exchanged a half- dozen words; but I liked it. I liked the way, too, in which it was done. It reminded me of Roy's fine, well-bred manneiftowards his inferi- ors—always cordial yet, always appropriate ; I 82 Thi (rain Ajao'. have heard thatour mother had much the same. I tried to make things look as pleasant as I could down-staks,while they were makingready for tea. Thegrate wasraked up a Uttle, a bright supper-cloth laid on the table, and the curtams drawn. Phoebe mixed a hasty cake of some sort, and brought out the heavierpieces of silver,tea- pot, &c., which I do not use when I am alone,be- cause it is so much trouble to take care of them, and because I like the little Wedgwood set that Roy had for his chocolate. **' How pleasant!" said Aunt Winifred, as she sat down with Faith in a high chair beside her. Phoebe had a great hunt up in the garret for that chair; it has been stowed away there since it and I parted company. "How pleasant every- thingis here ! I believe in bright dining-rooms. There is an indescribable dinginess in most that I have seen, which tends to anything but thank- fulness. Home-sick, Faith? No; that's right. I don't think we shall be home-sick at Cousin Mary's." If she had not said that, the probabilities are that they would have been, for I have fallen quite out of the way of active housekeeping,and have almost f orgotton how to entertain a friend. But I do not want her good opirion wasted,and mean they shall have a good time if I can make it for them. It was a little hard at first to see her oposite me at the table; it was Roy's place. While she was sitting there in the light, with the dust and weariness of travel brushed away a little, I was able to make up my mind what this aunt of mine looks like. The Oates Ajar. 3S She is yoTing^ then, to begin with, and I find it necessary to reiteratt the fact, in order to got it into my stupid brain. The cape and spectacles, the little old woman's shawl and invalid's walk, for which I had prepared myself, persist in hover- ing before my bewildered eyes, ready to drop down on her ata moment's notice. Just thirty- five she is by her own showing; older than I, to be sure; but as we passed in front of the mirror together once to-mght, I could not see half that diflferenco between us. The peace of her face and the pain of mine contrast sharply, and give me an old, worn look, beside her. After all, though, to one who had seen much of life, hers would be the true maturity perhaps, — ^the maturity of repose. A look in nereyes once or twice gave me the impression that she thinks me rather young, though she is far too wise and delicate to show it. I don't like to be treated like a girl. I mean to find out what phe does think. My eyes have been on her face the whole evemng, and I believe it is the sweetest face — woman's face— that I have ever seen. Yet she is far from being a beautiful woman. It is dif- ficult to say what makes the impression ;scarce- ly any feature is accurate, yet the tout ensemble seems to have no fault. Her hair, which must have been bright bronze once, has grown gray — quite gray — before its time. I really do not know of what color her eyes are; blue, perhaps, most frequently^ but they change witn every word that she speaks; when quiet, they have a curious, far-away look, and a steady, lambent light shines through them. Her mouth in pam 34 Tht\OaMlAjaT, well cut and delicjate, yet you do not so much notice that as its eypre8sion.f • Itlooks^as if it held a happy secret, with which, however near one may come to her, one can neverjintermed- dle. Yet there are lines about it and on her forehead, which are proof plain enough that she has not always floated on summer seas. She yet wears her widow's black, but relieves it pleasantly by white at'theithroaf^and wrists. Take her altogether,!! like to look'at her. Faith is a round, rolling, rollicking little piece of mischief, with three^years and a half of experience in this very happy world. She has black eyes and a pretty chm, funny little pink hands all covered with dimples, and a dim- ple in one cheek besides. She nas tipped over two tumblers of water, scratched herself all over playing \\ith the cat, and set her apron on fire already since she has been here. I stand in some awe'of her; but,after I have become in- itiated,! think that^we shall be very good friends. "Of all names m the catalogue, ! said to J ler mother, when she came down into the par- lour after putting her to bed, " Faith seems to be about the most inappropriate for this solid- bodied, twinkling little bairn of yours, with her pretty red cheeks, and such an appetite for supper!" ^ Yes,73he said,:laiiffhing,7* there'^is noth- ing mirituelle about Faith. But she means just that to me. ! could not call her anything else. Her father gave her the name." Her face changed, but did not sadden; a quietness crept into it and into hervoice,but that was all * I Will tell you about At some time,— per- The Gates AJat. 35 haps," she added, rising and standing by the fire. " Faith looks like him." Her eyes as- , sumed their distant look, "like the eyes of those who see the dead," and gazed away — so far away, into the fire, that I felt that she would not be listening to anything that I might say, and therefore said nothing. We spent the evening chatting cosily. After . the fire had died down in the grate (I had Phoebe lieht a pine-knot there, because I noticed that Aimt Winifred fancied the blaze in the dining-room), we drew up our chairs into the comer by the re- gister, and roasted away to our nearts' con- tent. A very bad habit to sit over the register, and Aunt Wmifred says she shall undertake to break me oiF it. We talked about everything under the sun, — ^uncles, aunts, cousins. Kansas and Connecticut, the surrenders and tne assas- sination, books, pictures, music, and Faith, — oh, and Phoebe and the cat. Aunt Winifred talks well, and does not gossip or exhaust her resources; one feels always that she has nia- - terial in reserve on any subject that is worth talking about. For one thing I thank her with all my heart; she never spoke of Roy. Upon reflection, I find that I have really passed a pleasant evening. She knocked at ^ my door just now, after I had written the last sentence, and had put away the book for the night. Thinking that it was Phoebe, I called, "Come in," and did not turn. She had come to the bureau where I stood unbraiding my hair, and touched my 36 The Gates Ajar. fe arm, before I saw who it was. She had on a crimson dressing-gown of warm flannel, and her hair hung down on her shoulders. Al- though so gray, her hair is massive yet, and coils finely when she is dressed. " I beg vour pardon," she said,"but I thought ou would be in bed, and I came in to say, — etme sit somewhere else at the breakfast-table, if you like. I saw that I had taken ^the vacaut place.' Good-night, my dear." It was such a little thing! I wonder how many people would have noticed it or taken the trouble to speak of it. The quick percep- tion, the unusual delicacy, — ^these too are Uke Roy. I almost wish that she had stayed a little longer. I almost think that I could bear to have her speak to me about hun. Faith, in the nej^t room, seems to have wakened from a frightened dream, and I can hear their voices through the wall. IJer mo- ther is soothing and singmg to her in the broken words of some old lullaby with which Phoebe used to sing Roy and me to sleep, years and years ago. The unfamiliar, hoh*e-like sound is plea- sant in the silent house, j. iioebe, on her way to bed, is stopping on the garret-stairs to listen to it. Even the cat comes mewing up to the door, and purring as I have not heard the creature purr since the old Sunday-night sing- ing, hushed so long ago. The Gates Ajar. 87 ". >.' , . -vv^ V I V. CHAPTER V. ' '^ ^ ' May 7th. I was awakened and nearly smothered this morning by a pillow thrown directly at my head. Somewhat unaccustomed, in the respectable, old maid's life that I lead, to such a pleasant little method of salutation, I jerked jftiyself up- right, and stared. There stood Faith in her night-dress, laughing as if she would sullbcate, and her mother m search of her was just knock- ing at the open door. " She insisted on going to wake Cousin Mary, and wouldn't be washed till I let her; but I stipulated that she should kiss you softly on both your eyes." "Idid,"saidFaith.stoutly, " I|kise,ed her eyes, both two of 'em, and her nose, and her mouth, and her neck; then I pulled her hair, and then I spinched her; but I thought she'd nave to be banged a little. WasnH it a bang, though!" It really did me good to begin the day with a hearty laugh. The days usually look so long and blank at the beginning, that I can hardly make up my mind to step out into them. Faith's pillow was the famous pebbla in the pond, to which authors of original imagination invari- blv resort; I felt its little circles widening out all through the day. I wonder if Aunt Wini- fred thought of.that. Shethinksofmany|t' :iaia»!t^^'.^.k 38 The Gates Ajar, V( For instance, afraid apparently that I should think I was afflicted with one of those profes- sional visitors who hold that a chance relation- ship justifies them in imposing on one from the beginning to the end of the chapter, she man- aged to make me imderstand, this , morning, that she was expecting to go back to Uncle ^1 Forceythe's brother on Saturday. I was sur- prised at myself to find that this proposition struck me with dismay. I insisted with all my heart on keeping her for a week at the least, and sent forth a fiat that her trunks should be unpacked. We have had a quiet, home-like day. Faith found her way to the orchard, and installed herself there for the day, overhauling the muddy grass with her bare hands to find dan- delions. She came in at dinner-time as brown as a little nut, with her hat hanging down her neck, her apron torn, and just about as dirty as I should suppose it possible for a clean child to succeed in making herself. Her mother, however, seemed to be quite used to it, and the expedition with whicli she made her pre- sentable I regard as a stroke of genius. While Faith was disposed of, and the house still, aimtie and I took our knitting and spent a regular old woman^s morning at the south window in the dining-room. In the afternoon Mrs Bland came over, babies and all, and sent up her card to Mrs. Forceythe. Supper-time came, and still there had not been a word of Roy. I began to wonder at, while I respected, this usual silencej While her motner was putting Faith to bed, The Gates Ajar, 1 1- 39 pre- y ouse pent louth moon sent bed, I went into my room alone, for a few moments' quiet. An early dark had fallen, for it had clouded up just before sunset. The dull, gray sky and narrow horison shut down and crowd- ed in everything. A soldier from the village, who has just come home, was walking down the street with his wife and sister. The crickets were chirping in the meadows. The faint breath of the maple came up. I sat down by the window and hid my face in both my hands. I must have sat there some time, for I had quite forgotten that I had com- pany to entertain, when the door softly opened and shut, and some one came and sat down on the couch beside me. I did not speak, for 1 could not, and the first thing I knew was that a gentle arm crept about me, and she had gathered me into her lap and laid my head on her shoulder, as she might have gathered Faith. " There," she said, in her low, lulUng voice, now tell auntie all about it." I don't know what it was,whether the voice, or touch, or words, but it came so suddenly, — and nobody had held me for so long, — ^that everything seemed to break up and unlock in a mmute, and I tlirew up my hands and cried. I don't know how long I cried. She passed her hand softly to and fro across my hair, brushing it away from my temples, while they throbbed and burned ; but she did not speak. By and by I sobbed out : — " Auntie, auntie, auntie !" as Faith sobs out in the dark. It seemed to me that I must have help or die. " f es, dear, I understand, I know how hard Bfc»" tM';.M-'w« HflMMmKHMMBM 42 The Oa(es Ajar. "Deacon Quirk," I answered faintly—" Dea- con Quirk and Dr. Bland." fr '^ ^' • " '-' " She put her other arm around me with a quick movement, as'if she would shield me from JDea- con Quirk and Dr. Bland. - v " Do I think you will see him again ? You might as well ask me if I thought God made you and made Roy, and gave you to each other. See him! Why, of course, you will see him as you saw him here." "As I saw him here I Why, here Hooked into his eyes, I saw him smile, I touched him. Why, Aunt Winifred, Roy is an angel!" She patted my hand with a little, soft, com- forting laugh. "But he is not any the less Roy for that — not any the less your own real Roy, who will love you and wait for you, and be very glad to see you,as he used to love and wait and be glad when you came home from a joimiey on a cold winter night." "And he met me at the door, and led me in Where it was light and warm !" I sobbed. "So he will meet you at the door in this other home, and lead you into the light and warmth. And cannot that make the cold and dark a lit- tle shorter? think a minute!" "But there is God— I thought we went to heaven to worship him, and" "Shall you worship more heartily or less, for having Roy again? Did Mary love the Master more or less, after Lazarus came back? Why, my child, where did you get vour ideas of God? Don't you suppose He kn --, w'itut dQn MEMu^HESSEfififll 46 1 Tht Gates AjOir, shadow of a long-past sympathy, with the des- perate words. " Mary," she said, laying down the book, "I believe Satan wrote that." ; " * She laughed a httle then, nervously, and; paled back into her quiet, peaceful self. *' I mean that he inspired it. They are wick- ed words. You must not read them over. You will outgrow them sometime with a beautiful gi'owth of trust and love. Let them alone till that time comes. See, I will blot them out of sight for you with colours as blue as heaven, — thertfaZheaven,whereGod mllhe 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 hues. There I shall let them stay, and, since she wishes it, I shall not Uft them to see the reckless words till I can do it safely. This afternoon Aunt Winifred has been tell- ing 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 iSiece, but for niy 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. 1 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 aiiswered. ; V The Gates Ajar. 47 I pondered the words in my heart, while I listened to her story. She gave me vivid pic- tures of the long, bright bridal journey, over- shadowed 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 trom a post-of- fice, and tliirty from a school house; of the parsonage, a log-hut among log-huts, distin- guished and adorned by a little lath and plas- tering, glass windows, and a door step; — 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 mis^on-work he found here with — I should say with a vengeance, if the expression were ex- actly suited to an elegantly constructed and re- flective 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 r She blushes a little, like a girl. " I believe I said I should be happy in Pata- gonia,— 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 beautrfully fulfijlea. In the roughest 4nm 48 The Gatfis Ajau times, — times of ragged clothes and empty flour barrels, of weaKness and sickness ana quack doctors, of cold and discouragement, of prairie fires and guerillas,~from trouble to Eouble, from year's end to year's end, we were ippy 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 and 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 mcked bushwhackers to heaven, the call to Lawrence came, and it seem- ed 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 Quan- trell'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 cave me no further description of his death than those words, and she spoke them with het 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 bittemes^; that grew distinct to me, as I sat, shut out by her The Gates Ajar. 49 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 Avas name enough at first for such a wee thing; then she was th^ 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 sim was setting, I remember, and the moon was rising. He, had had a hard day; the life was all scorched out of tha air. I moved the bed up by the win- dow, that he might have the breath of the ris- ing 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 chant- ing 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. 'I So there in the subset and the moonrise, W|5 two alone together, he baptized her, and we gave our little girl to God." mmmmmmm HI 60 The Oates Ajar, When she had said this, she rose and went over to the window, and stood with her face from me. By and ny, "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 10th. 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—es- pecially the Second Advent Church, at the fur- ther end of the village — are positively gliastly when it rains. Aunt Winifred was dressed briglit and early for church, I, in morning dress and slippers, sighed and demurred. "Auntie, 0^0 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 r " Not exactly." " What do you expect T ** There are the prayers and singijQg. Gener- The Gates Ajar, 51 ally 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 ana earnest and ignorant, and I, whom he cannot help one step on the way to hea- ven, consequently stays 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 bet- ter to go half a day always. I never compel Faith to go, but 1 never have a chance, for she teases not to be left at home." "Come, Faith ! go and pull otfCousin Mary's slippers, and bring down her boots, and then shell 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 cnild, 1 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 congrega- tion 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 aggra- vating, unseasonable heat, which is apt to come 52- The Gdtes Ajar. in spasms in the earty part of May, and whicli, in thi(ik spring alpacca and heavy sack; one findis intolerable. The thermometer stood at 75° on the churcih porch; every window was shut, arid eveiybody's f an was fluttering. Now, with this si^ht before him, what should our ob- servant minister do, but give out as his firist hymn, "Thme earthly, Sabbaths." "Thine earthly Sabbath ;«" would be a beautifubhymn, if it were not for those lines about the weather— "«i^n, :-u ** No midnight shade, n6 cto But sacrei^, high, eternal noon/ There was a great hot sunbeam stril on my black bonnet. My fan was brokien. gasped for air. The choir went over and' vier and (wer the words, spinning them into one of those indescribable times, in which everybody seeims to be tryir^g to get through first. Hooked 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 liave known whether he was Dreacbing in Greenland's icy mountains, or on India^g ooral strand. / #' The Gate^ -A/?**' 53 When he announced his text, "For our con- versation is in heaven/* Aunt Winifred and I exchanged glances of content. We had been talking about heayeii on our way tp church; at least, till Paith, not finding herself entertained, interrupted us by same severe speculations as to whether Maltese kitties were mulattoes. 1 listened to Dr. Bland as I have not listened for a long time. The subject was of all sub- jects nearest my heart. He is a scholarly man, in his way. He ought to know, I thought, more about it than Aunt Winifred. Perlmps he could help me. His sermon, as nearly as I can recall it, was substantially this:— " The futiure Hfe presented a vast theme to pur 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 fore-shadowed. Revelation had brought in, Uke 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 suitiable also that we should consider its promises. " He proposed in this discourse to consider the promise of heaven, the reward ofi*ered 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. 54 The Gates Ajar, " 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 ^vill be the em- ployments of heaven? " We shall studjr the character of God. "An infinite mmd must of necessity be eter- nally 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 bivther who, on being asked if he expected tc» see the dead wife of his youth in heaven, rephed, ' I expect to be so overwhelmed by the glory of the presence of God, that it may be thousands of years be- fore I shall think of my wife,' — he felt that per- haps this brother was near the tmth." Poor Mrs. Bland looked exceedingly uncom- fortable. " We shall also glorify God." i '■ He enlarged upon this division, but I have forgotten exactly how. " Tliat we shall recognise our friends in hea- ven, he was inclined to think, after mature de- Uberation, was probable. But there would be no special selfish affections there. In this v:orld we have enmities and favouritisms. In the world of bhss our hearts would glow with holy love ahke to al! other holy hearts." I wonder if he really thought that would make " a world of bhss." Aunt Winifred The Gates Ajar. 55 slipped her hand mto mine under her cloak. Ah, Br. Bland, if you had known how that lit- tle soft touch was preaching against you! " In the words of an eminent divine, who ha^ long since entered into the joys of which he spoke: — *Thus, whenever the miad 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 there, and even concealment, will be unknown. The soul will have no interests to conceal,no thoughts to dis- guise. 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? He mentioned several ways, among which — "We should subdue our earthly affections to God. "We must not love the creature a« the Cre- ator. My son, give Me thy heart. When He removes our friends from the scenes of time' ' (with a glance in my direction;, " we should resim ourselves to His will, remembering that the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away in mercy; that He is all in all; that He wul never leave us nor forsake us; that He can never change or die." As if that made any difference with the fact, that His best treasures change^or die ! "In conclusion — " We infer from our text that our hearts should not be set upon earthly happiaess/* (Enlaiged,) 56 The Gates Ajar. " That the subject of heaven should be often in oiur thoughts and oil our lips/' (Enlarged.) Of course I have not done justice to the fill- ing up of the sermon ; to the illustrations, metaphors, proof -texts, learning and eloquence, —for, though Dr. Bland cannot seem to think outside of the old grooves, a little eloc[uence really flashes through the tameness of his style sometimes, and when he was talking about the harpers, &c., some of his words were well chosen. " To be drowned in light,'' I have somewhere read, " may be very beautiful ; it is still to be drowned." But I have given the skeleton of the discourse, and I have given the stun of the impressions that it left on me, an at- tentive hearer. It is fortunate that I did not hear it while I was alone ; it would have made me desperate. Going hungry, hopeless, blind- ^, I came back empty, uncomforted, groping. I wanted something actual, something pleasant about this place into which Roy has gone. He gave me glittering .generalities, cold common- t>lace, vagueness, imreality,a God and a future at which I sat and shivered * "" r - ' r ^ • Dr. Bland is a good man. He had, I know, written that sermon with prayer. I only wish that he could be made to seemvf it slides over and sails splendidly away from wants like mine. But thanks be to God who has provided a voice to answer me out of the deeps. Auntie and I walked home without any remarks (we overheard Deacon Quirk observe to a neighbor, " That's what I call a good gos- pel sermon, now I"), sent Faitnawa,y to Phoebe, sat down in the parlor, and looked at each other. Tlie Gates Ajar. 57 .1 "Welir saidl. ' " I know it," said she. *• : : "But did he say the dreadful truth ?" . " Not as I find it in my Bible." j . "That it is probable, only probable that we shall recoffnize " " My child, do not be troubled about that. It is not probable, it is.siu'e. If I could find ho proof for it, I should none the less believe it, as long as I believe in God. He gave you Roy, and the capacity to love him. He has taught you to sanctify that love through love to mm. Would it be like Him to create such beautiful and unsel5sh loves, — most like the love of Heaven of any type we know,— just for our threescore yearsand ten of earth? Would it be like him to suffer two souls to grdw to- gether here, so that the separation of a di.y is pain, and then wrench them apart for all Eter- nity ? It would be what Madame de Graspaiih calls, * fearful irony on the part of God.* " "But there are lost loves. There are lost souls." " That loss is not His work. How often would I have gathered you and ye would not ! He would have saved both soul and love. They had their own way. We were speaking of His redeemed. The object of having this world at all, you know, is to fit us for another. Of what use will it have beeii, if on passing out of it we must throw by for ever its gifts, its lessons, its niemories ? God links things together better than that. Be sure, as you are sure of Him. that we shall be ourselves in heaven. Would you be yourself not to recognize Roy?— con- 58 The Oaies Ajar. -•^ r sequently, not to love Roy 1 — for to love and be separated is misery, and heaven is joy." " I xmderstand. But you said you had other proof." ^ > "So I have ; plenty of it. If 'many shall come fiom the East and from the West, and shall sit down in the presence of God with Ab- raham, Isaac and Jacob,' will they not be likely to know that they are \7ith Abraham, Isaac and Jacob ?" "What is meant by such expressions as 'risen together,' ' sitting together at the right hand of God,' 'sitting together in heavenly places V If they mean anythmg they mean recognitions, friendships, enjoyments." " Did not St. Peter and the others know Moses when they saw him? — know Elias when they saw him ? Yet these men had been dead hundreds of years before the favored fishermen were bom. " How was it with those ' saints which slept and arose' when Christ hung dead there in the dark '2 Were they not seen of many ?" " But that Avas a miracle." " They were risen dead, such as you and I shall be some day. The miracle consisted in their rising then and there. Moreover, did not the beggar recognize Abraham ? and Well, one might go through the Bible finding it full of this promise in mnts or assertions, in parables or visions. We are ' heirs of God,' 'joint-heirs with Christ;' having suffered with Him, we shall be ' glorified together.' Christ himself has said many sure things, * I will come and receive you, that where I am, there ye may H9 *■;■ Hi ■ rt .. ^ %^^ The Gates Ajar, 59 be.' * I will that they be with me where I am.' Using, too, the very type of Godhead to signify the eternal nearness and eternal love of just such as you and Roy, as John and me, Tie Erays, * Holy Father, keep them whom thou ast given me, that they may he one as we are. " There is one place, though, where I find what I Hke better than all the rest; you remem- ber that old cry wrung from the lips of the stricken king, ' I shall go to him; but he will not return to me.''' " I never thought before how simple and direct it is; and that, too, in those old dark days." "Themorelstudy the Bible," she said — "and I study it not entirely in ignorance of the com- mentatorsand the mysteries — the more peiplex- ed I am to imagine where the current ideas of our future come from. They certainly are not in this book of gracious promises. That hea- ven which we heard about to-day was Dr. Bland's, not God's. ' It's aye a wonderfu' thing to me,' as poor Lauderdale said, * the way some preachers take it upon themselves to explain matters to the Almighty !'" > ^ " But the harps and choirs, the throne, the white robes, are all in Revelation. Deacon Quirk would put his great brown finger on the verses, and hold you there triumphantly." " Can't people tell picture from substance, a metaphor from its meaning ? That Book of Revelation is precisely what it professes to be— a vision; a symbol. A symbol of something, to be sure, and rich with pleasant hopes, but still a symbol. Now, I really believe that a large proportion of Christian church members, wno 60 Th% Gates Ajar, "-^i have studied their Bible, attended Sabbath schools, Ustened to sermons all their lives, if you could fairly come at their most definite idea of the place where they expect to spend eternity, would own it to be the golden city, with pearl gates, and jewels in the wall. It; never occurs to them, that, if one picture is literal, another must be. If we are to walk golden streets, how can we stand on a glassy sea ? How can we sit on thrones V " But why give us empty symbols] Why not a little fact?" " They are not empty symbols. And why God did not give us actual descriptions of ac- tual heavenly life, I don't trouble myself to wonder. He certainly had His reasons, and that is enough for me. I find from th^e sym- bols, and from His voice in my oWh^ heart, many beautiful things — I will tell you some more of them at another time— and, for the rest, I am content to wait. He loves me, and He loves mine. As long as we love Him, He will never separate Himself from us, or usfroiji each other. That, at least, is sure." " If that is sure, the rest; is of less impor- tancie — ^yes. But Br. Bland said an awful thing.' " The quotation from a dead divine?" " Yes. That there will be no separate inter ests,' no thbiights to concei.1." " Poor good man ! He has found oift by this time that ne should not have laid! (Jown non- sense like that, without qualification or demur, before a BibJ^-reading nearer. If was simply his opinion, not JJavid's, or St. Paul% or of. [ The Gates Ajar. 61 John's^ or Isaiah's. He had a perfect right to put it in the form of a conjecture." . " But where does the Bible say that we shall have power to conceal our thoughts?— and I would rather be annihilated than to spend eternity with heart laid bare — the inner temple thrown open to be trampled on byjevery passmg strangerP . , ^^v a: v ' " The Bible specifies very little about the minor arrangements of eternity in any way. But I doubt if, under any circumstances, it would have occurred to inspired men to inform us that our thoughts shall continue to be our own. The fact is patent on the face of things. The dead ministers supposition would destroy individuahty at one fell swoop. We should be like a man walking down a room lined with mirrors, who sees mmself reflected in all sizes, colours, shades, at all angles a,nd in ail propor- tions, according to the capacity of the mirror, till he seems no longer to belong to himself, but to be cut up into eUipses and octagons and prisms. How soon would he grow frantic in such companionship,and beg for a comer where he might hide and hush himseK in the dark! " That we shall in a higher life be able to do what we cannot in this— judge fairly of each other's moral worth — is undoubtedly true. But this promiscuous theory of refraction; — never! "Besides, wherever the Bible touches the subject, it premises our individuality as a mat- ter of course. What would be the use of talk- ingj if everybody knew the thoughts of every- body else?" 62 The Gates Ajar, " You don't suppose that people talk in hea- ven V* " I don't suppose anything else. Are we to spend ages oi joy,a company of mutes together ? Why not talk?" "I suppose we should sing — but" " Why not talk as well as sine? Does not song involve the faculty of speecn?' "Ye-es. Why, yes. " There are the visitors at the beautiful Mount of Transfiguration again. Did not they talk with each other and witn Christ? Did not St. John talk with the angel who * showed him those things? " , " And you mean to say " " I mean to say that if there is such a thing as common sense, you will talk with Roy as ycu talked with nim here, — only not as you talked with him here, because tnere will be no troubles nor Llns, no anxieties nor cares, to talk about; no ugly shades of cross words or httle quarrels to be made up; no fearful looking-for of separation." I laid my head upon her shoulder, and could hardly speak for the comfort that she gave me. Just then. Paith, who, mounted out on the kitchen table, was preaching at Phoebe in comical mimicry of Dr. Bland's choicest into- nations, laughed out like the splash of a little wave. The sound came in at the open door, and we stopped to listen till it had rippled away. ** There!" said her mother, " put that child, this very minute, with all her little sins for- given, into one of our dear Lord's many man- ? >''j The Gates Ajar. 63 sions, and do yuii suppose that she would be any the less holy or less reverent for a laugh like that r " Did not David dance before the Lord with all Ids might? The Bible is full of happy bat- tle-cries: — * Rejoice in the Lord I make a joy- ful noise unto him! Give thanks unto the Lord, for his mercy endureth!' — a Bible which exhausts its splendid wealth of rhetoric to make us understand that the coming life is a life of joy, no more threatens to make nuns than mutes of us." Faith appeared upon the scene just then, with the interesting information that she had bitten her tongue; so we talked no more. <^ '.* ; •" ' .1 :- J ^^^ CHAPTER VIL May 12th. Aimt Winifred has said something about going, but I cannot yet bear to hear of such a thing. She is to stay a while longer. 16tL 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 I '■ 64 The Gaiei Ajar. 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 arbour-vitee hedge and knots of Norway spruce that father planted long ago for mother, drop cool, green snadows that stir with the wind. — My Endish ivy has crept about and about the cross. Koy used to Sfay that he should fancy a cross to mark the spot where he mi^ht lie; I think he would like this pure, unveined mar- ble. May-flowers cover the grave now, and steal 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 stretohing away to the httle church behind us, and beyond^ in front, the slope, the flats, the river, tne 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 (iJd not speak to me for a time, nor watch my face. Presently she laid her hand upon my lap, and I put my hand into it. N f It is very pleasant here," 'she said then in her very pleasant voice. 'i*- The Gates Ajar. 66 ^' I meant that it should be," I answered, try- ing not to let her see my lips quiver. " At least it must not look neglected. I don't sup- pose 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 gouig on in this^ woeful world." " Perhaps that is so," she said, smiling a sweet contradiction to her words, "but I don't believe it." " What do you believe r " 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 fo to him. It will be a great while. It seems lard. Roy would want to know sometliing, if it were only a little, about me." " I believe that he wants to know, and that he knows, Mary; though, since the belief niust rest on analogy and conjecture, you need not accept it as demonstrated mathematics," she answered, with another smile. *f Roy never forgot me here !"Isaid,''not mean- ing to sob. " That is just it. He was not constituted so that he, remaining himself, Roy, could forget 66 Tht Oatet Ajar, \ you. If he goeJ out into this other life forget- - ting, he becomes another than himself. That is a far more unnatural way of creeping out of the difficulty than to assiime that he loves and remembers. Whj^^not assume that ? In ' fact, why assume anything else ? Neither rea- ^ 8on, nor the Bible, nor common sense, forbid 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. TJiere !" she broke off, laugh- ing softly, " that is a sufficient dose of meta- physics for such a simple thing. It seems to ' ine 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 qf sight y you remember, not lost, nor asleep,* ,ki-i * The notion of a dreamless sleep from the time of death till the general resurrection is now ■> held by very few thinking persons. The pas- ;: sage in 1 Cor. xv. 51, which has given comfort to so many at the grave of those '* not lost, but gone before," seems to have reference to this thought, and to have been misapprehended by most of the commentators. The translation is. We all (all of 1X6) shall not sleep, but we all (not some) shall be changed. The usual explanation given has b«.en, All shall not die or sleep, for some shall be alive at the time of the resurrection, and they shall be changed without undem)ing d«ath. May not the meaning xather be, There flmU be no intermediate sleep. All shall have a I. ■'■ The Gates Ajar. 67 ' v-,/r 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, thinkmg. „,,..., " I do not doubt," she went on, speaking low, — "I cannot doubt that our absent dead are Jv^, nMU spiritual body — (There is, not sMU be, a spiritual body); and this shall at the resurrection be changed, so as to be like our Saviour's glorious body, yet containing in some mysterious manner the essence, the germ of our earthly body; and * *so shall we be ever with the Lord. " ^W ■(; ■ Dean Alford explains it thus:— ^" The sleep of death cannot be predicated of^all of us, but.the re- surrection change can." .^■^,. But the decomposed body, the elements of which have been scattered through the air, the earth and the water, cannot with propriety be said to be chcf^nged by the resurrection. Those then living on the earth will have a change pafis on their mortal bodies, and saints in heaven will have their spiritual bodies still more glorified and perfected, and thus all will be changed. In 2 Cor. v. St. Paul states expressly that if the earthly tabernacle (our mortal body) is dis- solved, we have a building of God, a house which is from heaven, a heavenly or spiritual body, ready for us, so that we shall not be naked, un- clothed, bodiless, but clothed upon with the Dody which is not to be raised from the earth, but is from heaven, 68 The Gates Ajar. 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 under- stand the need we have of them, I cannot doubt it." I watched her as she sat with her absent ^yes t rned 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, ,., ^^^ v.,>. . . . " There is a reason for ii," she said, rousing as if from a pleasant dream, — "a good sensible reason, too, it strikes nie, independent of scripn tural or other proof." .,, .^ ■■■^■r.-r.t ^r^^ " What is that ?" r-^Yr: '^^ki: 'hLhnu ' i^t^-^'^r " That God keeps us briskly at \vork in this world." - I did not understand. . "Altogether too briskly, considering that it is a preparative world, tointend to put us from it into an idle one. What more natural than that we shall spend our best energies as we spent them here, — in comforting, teaching, helping, saving people whose very souls we love better than our own ? In fact, it would be very unnatural if we did not." -<• " But I thought that God took care of us,and angels, like Gabriel and the rest, if I ever thought anything about it, which I am inclined to doubt." "'God works by the use of means,' as the preachers say. W hy not use Roy as well as Gabriel ? What ^xchangel could ^inderstand i -' The Oates Ajar. €9 and reach the peculiarities of your nature as he could? or, even if understanding, could so love and bear with you ? What is to be done ? Will they send Roy to the planet Jupiter to take care of somebody else's sister ?" I laughed in spite of myself; nor l5i5 ihe laugh seem to jar upon the sacred stillness of the place. Her words were drawing away^the bitterness, as the sun was blotting the dull.dead green of the ivy into its glow of golden color. . " But the Bible, Aunt Winifred T :>: ,. " The Bible does not say a great deal on tliis point," she said; "but it does not contradict me. In fact, it helps me; and, moreover, it would uphold me in black and white if it weren't for one little obstacle." , j*>»if- ■,.;j-5,; 1. " And that?" " That frowning 'original Greek,' which Gail Hamilton denounces with her righteous indig- nation. No soonerdo I find a pretty verse that is exactly what I want, than up hops a com- mentator, aad says, this isn't according to text, and means something entirely different; and Barnes says this, and Stuart believes that, and Olshausen has demonstrated the other,and very ignorant it is in you, too, not to know it ! Here tne other day I ferreted out a sentence in Re- velation that seemed to prove beyond qaestion that angels and redejm6d men were the same; where the angel* says to St. John, yoti know, ^It has been supposed by some that the angel lent to St. John was Isaiah, on account of tne 70 The Gatei Ajar. *Am I not of thy brethren the prophets f I thought that I had discovered a dehghtful thing which all the Fathers of the Church had overlooked, and went ii> great glee to your Uncle Calvin, to be told that something was the matter — a noun left out, or some other un- answerable and imreasonable horror, I don't know what; and that it didn't mean tliat he was of thy brethem the prophets at all. " You see, if it could be proved that the Christian dead become angels,we could have all that we need, direct from God, about — to use the beautiful old phrase— the communion of saints. From Genesis to Revelation the Biblo is filled with angels who are at work on earth. They hold sweet converse witli Abraham in his tent. They are intrusted to save the soul of Lot. An angel hears the wail of Hagar. The similarity of expressions used in his prophecy, and in the Revelation; but the text does not af- firm that he was one of the prophets. The literal ' translation is, ** I an> a fellow-servant with thee and with thy brethren the prophets, and with those who keep the sayings of thy book." The word implies community of service, and is used with the same construction in CoLi.7, Epaphras, our dear fellow-servant; iv. 7, Ty chicus, a fellow- servant in the Lord; Matt. xxiv. 49, **to beat his fellow-servants," and Matt, xvlii. 28 to 33. It is evident from these passages that unf alien an- gels have the same offices and ministrations as those " who keep the sayings of thia book," and, therefore, that departed saints^ are ministering spirits, sent forth to minister to them who are the heirs of salvation. H , ':: • t': # The Gate$ Ajar. 71 beautiful feet of an angel bring the good tid- ings to maiden Mary. An angel's noiseless step guides St. Peter through the barred and bolted gate. Angels rolled the stone from the buried Christ, and angels sat there in the sol- emn morning— Mary, if we could haye seen them! ^ ^:t^^.= -i ^ .u^ -ma \^t . " Then there is that one question,direct,com- prehensive — we should not need anything else — 'Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister to the heirs of salvation i[' " But you see it never seems to have entered those commentators' heads that all these beau- tiful things refer to any but a superior race of beings,Uke those from whose ranki Lucifer fell.'' uh--- ' 'J<3ii ■» ♦,*.* *' How stupid in them !" - • " I take comfort in thinking so; but, to be serious, even admitting that these passages fefer to a superior race, must there not be some similarity in the laws which govern existence m the heavenly world? Since these gracious deeds are performed by what T/e are accustomed to caJl 'spiritual beings,' why may they not as well be done by people from this world as from anywhere else? Besides, there is another point, and a reasonable one, to be made. The word angel in the original* means, strictly , a messenger. It applies 1^ any servant of God, animate or inanimate. An east wind is as much an angel as Michael. — Again, the generic terms, ' spirits,' ' gods,' 'sona Hyy^Xos, 72 The Oatts Ajar. of G«>d/ are used interchangeably for saints and for angels. So, you see, I fancy that I find a way for you and Roy and me and all of us, straight into the shining ministry. Mary,Mary, wouldn't yuu like to go this very afternoon]" She lay back in the grass, with her face up- turned to the sky, and drew a long breath,wear- ifyi I do not think sli9 meant me to hear it. I did not answer her, for it came over me with such a hopeless thrill, how good it would be to be taken to Roy, there by his beautiful grave, with the ivy and the May-flowers and the sun- light and the clover-leaves round about; azid that it could not be, and how long it was to wait--it came over me so that I couldnot speak. "There!" she said, suddenly rousing, " what a thoughtless, wicked thing it was to say! And I meant to give you only the good cheer of a cheery friend. iJ o, I do not care to go this af- ternoon, nor any afternoon, till my Father is ready for me. Wherever He has most for me to do, there I wish — ^yes, I think I wish to stay. He knows best." - After a pause, I asked again, " Why did He not tell us more about this thing — about their presence with us? You see if I could know it I" " The mystery of the Bible lies not so much in what it says, as in what it does not say," she replied; "but I suppose that we have been told all that we can comprehend in this world. — Knowledge on one point might involve know- ledge on another, like the links of a chain, till itstretched far beyond our capacity. Atany rate, itisnotformetobreakthesilence. Thatiii(}od's The Gates Ajar. 78 affair. I can only accept the fact. Nevertlieles8, as Dr. Chalmers says, ' It were well for us all could we carefully draw the line beween the secret things which belong to God and the things which are revealed and belonff to \w and tc our children.' Some one else — Whately, I thmk — I remember to have noticed as speak- ing about these very subjects to this effect — that precisely because we know so little of them, it is the more important that we ^ should en- deavour so to dwell on them as to make the most of what httle knowledge we have.' " " Aunt Winifred, you are such a comfort!" " It needs our best faith," she said, " to bear this reticence ot God. I cannot help thinking sometimes of a thing Lauderdale said — I am always quoting him — from ' Son of the Soil,' ' you rememfeer: ' It's an awfu' marvel, beyond my reach, when a word of commimication would make a' the difference, why it's no permitted, if it were but to keep a heart from breaking liow and then.' Think of poor Eugenie de Gn^rin, trying to continue her little journal *To Maurice in Heaven,' till the awful, answerless stillness shut up the book and laid aside the *>'But then,'* she continued, " there is this to remember — I may have borrowed the idea, or it may be my own — ^that if we could speak to them or they to us, there would be no death, for there would be no reparation. The last, the surest, in some cases the only test of loyalty to Qod, would thus be taken away. Roman Ca- thoUc nature is human nature, when it comes 74 Th4 Gates Ajar, upon its knees before a saint. Many lives — all such lives as yours and mine — would become" — "Would become what?" " One long defiance to the First Command- ment." * I cannot become used to such words from such quiet lips. Yet they give me a curious sense of the trustwo-thmess of her peace. " Foimd- ed xmon . rr ^/' it seems to be. She has done what it va^c* !^ '; lifetime for some of us to do; what souiv I ul: ro into eternity, leaving un- done; what lam aiiiUd I shall never do — sound- ed her own nature. She knows the worst of herself, and faces it as fairly, I believe, as any- body can do in this world. As for the best of herself, she trusts that to Christ, and He knows it, and we. I hope she, in her sweet humble- ness, will know it some day. ^ " I suppose, nevertheless," she said, " that Roy knows what you are doing and feeling as wefi as, perhaps better than, he knew it three months ago. So he can help you without harm- ing you." I askedher, turning suddenly, how that could be, and yet heaven be heaven — how he could see me suffer what I had suffered, could see me some- times when I supposed none but God had seen me, and sing on and be happy. " You are not the first, Mary, and you will not be the last to ask that question. I cannot answer it, and I have never heard of any who could. I feel sure only of this — that he would suffer far less to see you than to know nothing about you; and that God's power of inventing *.'■■ •' .'- **j . -"^ The Gate* Ajar. 76 t: ",.,_ happiness is not to be blocked by an obstacle like this. Perhaps Roy sees the end from the beginning, and can bear the sight of pain for the peace that he watches coming to meet you. I do not know — that does not perplex me now; it only makes me anxious for one thing." "Whatis thatr ' ' ' " That you and I shall not do anything to make them sorry.'^ >^ ,, ^ , .ugt. • > " To make them sorry?" % :, [ rj'fjd^' " Roy would care. Roy would be ""^'sappoint- ed to see you make Hfe a hopeless h^i) for his sake, or to see you doubt his Savi'. ir. - # -^ ''Do yon think thatr ' '' " Some sort of mourning over '^in enters that happy life. God himself * was ^ i>v^ed' forty years long over His wandering people. Among the angels there has been ' silence,' whatever that mysterious pause may mean, just as there is joy over one siimer that repenteth; another of my proof-texts that, to show that they are allowed to keep us in sight." " Then you think, you really think, that Foy remembers and loves and takes care of me; that he has been listening, perhaps, and is — why, you don't think he may be herer " Yes, I do. Here, close beside you all this time, trying to speak to you througn the bless- ed sunshine and the flowers, trying to help you, and sure to love you — right here, dear. I do not believe God means to* send mm away from you,either." My heart was too full to answer her. Seeing t^mmpr^ 76 The Gates Ajar. how it was, she slipped away, and, strolling out of sight with her lace to the eastern hills, left me alone. And yet I did not seem alone. The low branches swept with a little soft sigh across the grave; the May-flowers wrapped me in with fragrance thick as incense: the tiny spar- row turned her soft eyes at me over the edge of the nest, and chirped contentedly; the "bles- sed sunshine " talked with me as it touched the edges of the ivy-leaves with fire. I cannot write it even here, how these things stole into my heart and hushed me. If I had seen him standing by the stainless cross, it would not have frightened or surprised me. There — not dead or gone, but there — it helps me, and makes me strong! "Mamie! little Mamie!" .,,;:-^ Roy, I will try to bear it all, if you will only stay! .4-. The Gates Ajar. 77 CHAPTER VIII. ■ * f:-l' May 20th. -^ The nearer the time has come for Aunt Win- ifred to go, the more it has seemed impossible to part with her. I have run away from the thought Hke a craven, till she made me face it this morning, by saying decidedly that she should go on the first day of the week. ^ ^ I dropped my sewing; the work-basket tip- ped over, and all my spools rolled away under the chairs. I had a little time to think while I was picking them up. .. ,...^f " There is the rest of my visit at .Norwich to be made, you know," she said, "and while I am there I shall form some definite plans for the summer; I have hardly decided what, yet. I had better leave here by the seven o'clock train, if such an early start will not incommode you." I wound up the last spool, and turned away to the window. There was a confused, dreary sky of scurrying clouds, and a cold wind was bruising the apple-buds. I hate a cold wind in May. It made me choke a little, thinking how I should, sit and Usten to it after she was gone — of the old, blank, comfortless days that must come and go — of what she had brought, and what she would take away. I was a bit 78 The Gaits Ajar. faint, I think, for a minute. I had not really thought the prospect through, before. " Mary," she said, " whaf s the matter? Come here." ,r t . .. \ , .. I went over, and she drew me towards her, and I put my arms about her peck. • v .. " I can not bear it," said I, " and that is the matter." She smiled, but her smile faded when she looked at me. And then I told her, sobbing, how it was; that I could not go into my future alone, — I could not do it ! tnat she aid not know how weak I was, — and reckless, — and wicked; that she did not know what she had been to me. I begged her not to leave me. I begged her to stay and help me bear my life. "My dear! you are as bad as Faith when I put her to bed alone." " But," said I, " when Faith cries, you go to her. you know." "Are you quite in earnest, Maiy?" she ask- ed, after a pause. " You don't * know very much about me, after all, and there is the cliild. It is always an experiment, bringing two families into lifelong relations under one roof. If I could think it best you might re- pent your bargain." " I am not ' a family,' " I said, feebly tmng to laugh. " Aimt Winifred, if you and Faith only will make this your home, I can never thank you, never. I shall be entertaining my good angels, and that is the whole of it.'' The GatM Ajar, 79 I "I have had some thought of not going back^" she said at last, in a low, constrained voice, as if she were touching something that gave her great pain, " for Faith's sake. I should like to edu- cate her in New England, if I had intend- ed if we stayed to rent or buy a little home of our own somewhere, but I had been putting off a decision. We are most weak and most selfish sometimes when we think ourselves strongest and noblest^ Mary. I love my hus- band's people. I think tney love me. I was almost happy with them. It seemed as if I were carrying on his work for him. That was so pleasant ! She rose and walked across the room. •' I will think the matter over," she said, by and by, in her natural tones, "and let you know to-night." ; She went away up-stairs then, and I did not see her again until to-ni^ht. I sent Faith up with her dinner and tea, judging that she would rather see the child than me. I observed, when the dishes came down, that she had touch- ed nothing but a cup of coffee. I began to understand, as 1 sat alone in the parlor through the afternoon, how much I had asked of her. In my selfish distress ^ losing her, I had not thought of that. Faces that her husband loved, meadows and hills and simsets that he had watched, the home where his last step sounded and his last word was spoken, the grave where she has laid him — this last more than all— call after her, and cling to Iter with yeftrwing plosewes^. To leave them, h to lecive 80 The Gates Ajar. 1 k the last faint shadow of her beautiful past. It hurts, but she is too brave to cry out. Tea was over, and Faith in bed, but still she did not come down. I was sitting by the window, watchinf^ a little crescent moon climb over the hills, and wondering whether I had better go up, when she came in and stood be- hind me, and said, attempting to laugh — "Very impolite in me to rim off* so, wasn't it? Cowardly, too, I think. Well, Mary ?" ; "Well, Auntie r r" Have you not repented your proposition yetr - ,:,:-:;,,..: ..,,. , •„ ...■-.... ;.;4,,' - " You would excel as an inquisitor, Mrs. For- ceythe !'' ^^--,,'..\.' i, :. x— ■ ^ r,, , . ■'?' "Then it shall be as you say ; as long as you want us you shall have us — Faith and me." ' I turned to thank her, but could not when I saw her face. It was very pale ; there was something inexpressibly sad about her mouth, and her eyeUds drooped heavily, Uke one weary from a great struggle. Feeling for the moment guilty and ashamed before her, as if I had done her wrong, " It is going to* be very hard for you," I said. _ "Never mind about that," she answered quickly. " We will not talk about that. I knew, though I did not toish to know, that it was best for Faith. Your hands aboutmyneck have settled it. Where the work is, there the laborer must be. It is quite plain now ; it seems to be what he wants." The Oaten Ajar. 81 " HeV^ I started at the word ; who had been in her lonely chamber ? Ah, it is simply real to her. Who, indeed, but her husband V She did not seem inclined' to talk, and stole away from me presently, and out of doors ; she was wrapped in her blanket shawl, and had thrown a shimmering white hood over her gray hair. I wondered where she could be going, and sat still at the window watching her. She opened and shut the gate softly ; and, turning * A modern w 'ter has satisfactorily proved that no erroneous doctrine can take deep root in the convictions of a large number of men, unless it contains in it, as a substratum, some great truth. Thus Mohammedanism prevailed, because it taught, though with much admixture of error, that there was but one God. So the Eoman doctrine of the Invocation of Saints was an expression of the deep feeling of the human heart, that the grave cannot sever all the ties of love and kindred, even for the present ; that our Christian friends who have "gone before" must have sympathy with us, though we have no scriptural warrant for addressing them with entreaties for their intercession or help. St. Paul called upon the Hebrews to run the race set before them, seeing that they were com- passed about with so great a cloud of witnesses — surely not uninterested spectators. Among these are mentioned the spirits of just men made perfect, as well as the innumerable company^ of angels. We have here an inspired assertion that our departed friends take a loving interest in our Christian course, and are ready to keep us in ** all our ways." i;¥M- i 82 The Gates Ajar, her face towards the churchyard, walked up the street and out of my sight. '^^,^:, t..rf^^mA.r She feels nearer to him in the resting-place of the dead. Her heart cries after the grave by which she will never sit and weep again ; on which she will never plant the roses any more. As I sat watching and thinking this, the faint light struck her slight figure and Uttle shimmermg hood again, and she walked down the street and in with steady step. , ^ ^ When she came up and stood beside me, smiling, with the light knitted thing thrown back on her shoulders, her face seemed to rlbe from it as from a snowy cloud ; and for her look, — I wish Raphael could have had it for one of his rapt Madonnas. "Now, Mary," she said, with the sparkle back again in her voice, " I am ready to be entertaining, and promise not to play the her- mit again very soon. 8hall I sit here on the sofa with you 1 Yes, my dear, 1 am happy, quite happy." V- - Sc then we took this new promise of home that has come to make my life, if not joyful, some- thing less desolate, and analysed it in its prac- tical 1 earings. What a pity that all pretty dreams have to be analysed! I had some no- ^ tion' about throwing our little incomes into a joint family fund, but she put a veto to that; I suppose because mine is the larger. She prefers to take board for herself and Faith; but, if I know myself, she shall never be suffered to have the feeling of a boarder, and I will make her sp The Gates Ajar^ 83 y ^ %■'.' much at home in my house that she shall not remember that it is not her own. Her visit to Norwich she has decided to put off until the autumn, so that I shall have herto myself undisturbed all summer. I have been looking at Roy's picture a long time,"and wondering how he would Uke the new plan. I said something of the sort to her. "Why put any* would' in that sentence?*' she said, smiling. " It belongs to the present tense." ■•■:'• ^^^j;.^. ** Then I am sure he likes it," I answered, — " he likes it," and I said the woras over till I was ready to cry, for rest in their sweet sound. ^ 'i 22nd. > It is Roy's birthday. But I have not spoken of it. We used to make a great deal of these httle festivals — but it is of no use to write about ' that.;:^ ,^t<- ^'-^7^ -'^v "i^r^ ■ I am afraid I have been bearing it very badly all day. She noticed my face, but said nothing till to-night. Mrs. Bland was down-stairs,and I had come away alone up here in the dark. I heardher asking for me, but would not go down. By and by Aunt Winifred knocked, and I let her in. * "Mrs. Bland cannot understand whyyou don't see her, Mary,'' she said, gently. " You know you have not thanked her for those English violets that she sent the other day. I only thought I would remind you; she might feel a little pwned." ■ft 84 The Gates Ajar. ** I can^t to-night— not to niffht, Aunt Wini- fred. You must excuse me to her somehow. I don*t want to go down." i " Is it that you don't ' want to,' or is it that you can'tl" she said, in that gentle, motherly way of hers, at which I can never take offence. " Mary, I wonder if Roy would not a little ra- ther that you would go down?" It might have been Roy himself who spoke. 1 went down. - v '. 'M -. - »^- » V*' 'J • ■ 'J. - 1^1 ;.-'.n. T ' '(.■■ :^ -».' ».-(>■ ' ■>■ ' -'.•■^;^•^^.iBl^»v •. > 1 .*- % CHAPTER IX. .t- 1 /).lr.; u *■ ■ ( K- ,■ . * I i t i I :; 'f ■. • -ft. June 1st/ ' 4 t. ti^4 ^^ i^ ^. Aunt Winifred went +;> tiie office tliis morn- ing, and met Dr. Bland, who walked home with her. He always likes to talk with her. A woman who knows "^something about fate, free-will,aiid foreknowledge absolute,who is not ignorant of politics, and talks intelligently of Agassiz' latest fossil, who can understand a German quotation, and has heard of Strauss and Neander, who can dash her sprightJiness abiy against his old dry bones of metaphysics na theologv, yet never speak in atone above ;.i, i^tlStSk "^.f: Th^ Oates Ajar. 85 \ I tiiat essentially womanly voice of her&; iSj I imagine,a phenomenon in his social experience. I was sitting at the window when they came up and stopped at the gate. Dr. Bland lifted liis hat to me in his gi'ave way, talking the while; somewhat eagerly too, 1 could see. Aunt A/V inifred answered him with a peculiar smile and a few low words that I couldnot hear. " But, my dear madam," he said, "the gbry of God,you see, the glory of God is the primary consideration." " But the glory of God involves these lesser glories, as a sidereal system, though a splendid whole, exists by the multiplied diSering of one star from another star. Ah, Dr. Bland, you make a grand abstraction out of it,but it makes me cold," —she shivered, half playfully, half involuntarily — " it makes me cold. I am very much alive and human; and Christ was human God." She came in smiling a little sadly, and stood by me,watchingthe minister walk ov^r the hill " How much does that man love his wife fuid children?" she asked abruptly.!^. , "A good deal. Why?" /j " I am afraid that he will los one of thom^ then,bef ore many more yeai-s of .s life are past . " "What! he hasn't been tell^" q you that they are consumptive or anything . that sort?' "Oh dear me, no," with a meriT lau^h which died (juickly away: "I was only think- ing— there is trouble in store for him; some intense pain — if he is capable of intense pain — 86 The Oates Ajar, which shall shake his cold, smooth theorising to the foundation. He speaks in a foreign tonffue when he talks of bereavement, of death, of the future life. No argument could convince him of that, though, which is the worst of it." " He must think you shockingly heterodox." " I don't doubt it. We had a little talk tliis morning, and he regarded me with an expres- sion of mingled consternation and perplexity that was curious. He is a very good man. He is not a stupid man. I only wish that he would stop preaching and teaching things that he knows nothing about. : : ^ - f ^v 1 1 ^\\ " He is only drifting mth the tide, though," she added, " in his views of this matter. In our recoil from the material: in of the Romish Chuich,we have, it seems to me, nearly strand- ed ourselves on the opposite shore. Just as, in a vebc md from the spirit which would put our Saviour on a level with Buddha or Mahomet, we have been in danger of forgettmg * to begui as the Bible begins,' with His humanity. It it the grandeur of inspiration,that it knows how to balance tviith.^' v. - • ; It had been in my mind for several days to ask Aunt Winifred something, and, feeling in the mood, I made her take off her things and devote herself to me. My c[uestion concerned what we call the " intermediate state." "I liave, been expecting that," she sixid; " what about it ?'' ' ., ^^Whatw itr ** Life and activity." The Oatei Ajar. 87 ;',>■'■ ■» I* \! 1. ff We do not go to sleep, of course/' ; "I believe that notion is about exploded, though clear thinkers like Whatelj have ap- peared to advocate it. Where it originated I m not know, unless from the frequent com- p^isons in the Scriptures of death with sleep, which refer solely, I am convinced, to the con- dition of body, and which are voted down by an oveiivhelming majority of decided state- ments relative to the consciousness, happiness, and tangibility of the life into which we imme- diately pass." . , , M 1 < . " It is intermediate, in some sense,I suppose." " It waits between two other conditions, — yes; I think the drift of what we are taught about it leads to that conclusion. I expect to become at once sinless, bu j have a broader Christian character many years hence; to be happy at once, but to be happier by and by; to find in myself wonderful new tastes and ca- pacities, which are to be immeasurably enno- bled and enlarged after the Resurrection, whatever that may mean." * :i tii^nvuij ' " What does it mean ?" ' - ' - '^^v> '^ " I know no more than you, but you shall hear what I think, presently. I was going to say that this seems to be plain enough in the Bible, The angels took Lazarus at once to Abraham. Dives seems to have found no in- terval between death and consciousness of suf- fering." " They always tell you that that is only a paraMe, tf^^r 88 The Gates Ajar. " But it must mean something. No stoi in the Bible has been pulled to pieces and twis^ ed about as that has been. We are in danger of pulling and twisting all sense out oiiV[ rrj. " Then Judas, having hanged his wretched self, went to his own place. Besides,there vas Christ^s promise to the thief." '^ > i'>jv- 7 -vv i told her that I had heard Dr. Bland say that we could not place much dependence on that passage, because " Paradise '* did not necessarily mean heaven. ' ^ ' -":'' ' ■ "^ '; ■ " • " But it meant Uving, thinking, enjoying; for * To-day thou shalt be with me.'' St. PauFai b^utifnl j)erplexed reverie, however, would be ^ enough if it stood alone; for he did not know whether he would rather stay in this world, or depart and be with Christ, which is far better. With Christ, yon see; and His three myste- rious days, which typify our intermediate state were over then, and lie had ascended to His Father. Would it be* far better' either to ler ve this actual tangible Ufe, throbbing with hopes and passions, to leave its busy, Christ- like working, its quiet joys, its very sorrows which are near ancl human, foi a nap of sev- eral ages, cr even for a vague, lazy, half-alive, disembodied existence?" ^'ifh)4m *** Disembodied ? I supposed, of course, that it was disembodied." " I do not think so. And that brings us to the Resurrection. All the tendency of Reve- lation is to show that an embodied state is su- perior to a disembodied one. Yet certainly we who love God are promised that death will lead . 'V. The Oates Ajar* 89 us into a condition which sha?l have the advan- tage of this; for the good apostle to die ' was gam.' 1 don't believe, for instanae, that Adam and Eve have been wandering about in a misty condition all these thousands of years. I sus- pect that we shall have some sort of body im- mediately after passing out of this, but that there is to come at the general resurrection a mysterious change, equivalent, perhaps, to a reembodiment, when our capacities fgr action will be greatly improved, and that in some man- ner this new form will be connected with this * garment by the soul laid by.' " "Deacon Quirk expects to rise in his oWn entire, original body, after it has lain in the First Church cemetery a proper number of years, mider a black slate headstone, adorned with a willow, and such a * cherubim ' as that poor boy shot — by the way, if I've laughed at that story once, 1 have fifty times." vr. *• Perhaps Deacon Quirk would admire a work of art that I found stowed away on the top of your Uncle Calvin's bookcases. It was an old woodcut — nobody knows how old — of an inter- esting skeleton rising from his grave, and, in a sprightly and modest manner, drawing on his skin, while Gabriel, with apoplectic cheeks,feet uppermost in the air, was blowing a good-sized tin trumpet in his earl" ^' No; some of the popular notions of resur- rection are simple physiological impossibilities, from causes * too tedious to specify.' It is worth while to remember that St. Paul ex- pressly stated that we shall not rise in our eji- 'W^' % Th^ Oates Ajar. tire eartlily bodies. The simile which he used is the seed soa^ti, dying in. and mingling with . the ground. How many oi its original particles are found in the full-grown com?*' " Yet you believe that something belonging to this body is preserved for the completion of another 1" " Certainly. I accept God's statement about it, whicji is as plain as words can make a state- ment. I do not know, and I do not care to know, how it is to be effected. God will not be at a loss for a way any more than he is at a loss for a way to make His fields blossom every spring. For aught we know, some invi- sible compound of a decomposed body may hover, by a divine decree, aroun(| the site of death till it is wanted, — sufficient to preserve identity as strictly as a body can ever be said to preserve it; and stranger things have hap- Eened. You remember the old Mohammedan eUef in the one little bone which is imperish- able. Professor Bush's idea of our triune ex- istence is suggestive, as a notion. He believed, yx)u know, tnat it takes a material body, a spi- ritual body, and a soul, to make a man. The spiritual body is enclosed within the material, the soul within the spiritual. Death is simply the slipping off of the outer body, as a husk slips off from its kernel. The deathless frame stands ready then for the souFs untrammelled occupation. But it is a waste of time to spe- culate over such useless fancies, while so many remainthat will vitally affect our happiness." It is singular; but I had never given a serious , Jh es ■ ,-/■ t ■■# :, The Oates Ajar, 01 thought — and I have done some thinking about other matters — to my heavenly body, till that moment, while I sat listening to her. In fact, till Roy went, tho Future was a miserabj^, ..' mysterious blank, to be drawn on and on in . eternal and joyless monotony, and to which, at ^ times, annihilation seemed preferable. I re- member, when I was a child, asking father once if I were so good that I had to go to heaven, whether, after a hundred years, God would not let me "die out." More or less of the disposi- tion of that same desperate little sinner I sus- pect has alwavs clung to me. So I asked Aunt Winifred, in some perplexity, what she supposed our bodies would be like.-- % < ^ j " It must be nearly all * suppose,'" she said, " for we are nowhere definitely told. But this ~ is certain, they will be as real as these." " But these you can see, you can touch." * "What would be the use of having a body that you can't see and touch i A body is a body, not a spirit. Why should you not. hav- ing seen Rojrs old smile and heard his own voice, clasp his hand again, and feel his kiss on your happy lips?" " It is really amusing," she continued, " to sum up the notions that good people — excellent Eeople — even thinking people — have of the eavenly body. Vague visions of floating about in the clouds, of balancmg — with a white robe on, ijerhaps like the angels in the old pictiures. Murillo has one charming exception. I always take a secret delight in that little cherub of his, kicking the clouds, in the right-hand upper .^. IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) 1.0 [_ I.I IM 125 K 122 lit I Hi 12.0 \i& 1 1.25 ||U 1.6 ^ 6" — ► ^ V ^V^J "V^V^** Photographic Sciences Corporation >^^**^ ^^^ Longing to do something for her, yet not knowing what to do, I went into the garden while she was away, and finding some carna- tions, that shone like stars in the dying light, I gathered them all, and took them to Tier room, and filling my tiny porphyry vase, left them on the bracket, under the photojgraph 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 be^^utiiul years ! Oh, think of that !" Wh^ I was in her room with the flowers, I passed tne table on which her little Bible lay 104 The Gates Ajar. opan^ A mark of rich ribbou-^a black ribbon — feU across the pages; it bore In silver t«xt these words:-— - ^ . ^ , .. -iiv, uL»ai ** Tjbou shalt have no other Gods before me." ;-rf£a.£ei'.| 9ii'i io af^/ilulte^ioi n^q:' 20th. *4Ith£i.nk Thee, my God, that though the river of Lethe may indeed flow through the Elysian Fields, it does not water the Christianas Paradise.*' |,^jr^ _^ ' ^ Aunt Winifred was saying that over to her- self m 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 couldirt originate so pretty a thing. Isni't it pretty?" " Very; but I am not sure that I under- stand 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 wiis world are broken. It does not seem to me that I could be happy to remember all that I have sinned here." **But the sins will be as if they 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 yoiu- other friends. The last pain borne, the last tear, the last sigh, the last lonely l^pur, the last imsatisfled dream, : . ■ / ■7 » \ The Odte$ Ajar* 105 for ever ^one by; why should not the dead past bury its dead]" . , " Then why remember it?" "^'^^ ^^^^^• '' 'Save but to swell the sense of being blest/ Besides,! orgetf ulness of the disagreeable things of this life impUes f orgetfulness of the pleasant ones. They are tanked together." ** To be sure. I don't know that I should like that." ■ tm ■ ■^^- ^Jm^ muf%x:^ -lo ia^i s "Of course you wouldn't. Imagine yourself in a state of being where yOu and Koy had lost yoiu* past; all that you had borne and en- joyed, and hoped and feared, together; the pretty Uttle 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 chivahy and elder-brotherly advice; the mis- chief in his eyes; some of the ' Sunday night talks,' the first novel that you read and dream- ed over together; the college stories; the chats over the corn-popper by firelight; the earhest, earnest looking-on into life together, its temp- tations conquered, its lessons learned, its dis- appointments faced together, — always you two, — would you like to, are you likely to, forget all tliis ? "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 re- 106 The Gates Ajar.\ memb^ring. So many other and greater and happiermemories willfill uptheiimethen,thatin afteryearsthese 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-da,y, and laugh perhaps at all the poor little dreams we have been dreaming of what has not en- tered into the heart of man. You see it is cer- tain to be so much better than anything that I can think of ; which is the comfort of it. And Roy'' V ^* 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 yoursvelf again Now, dear, don't cry, but wait a minute !" Her caress- ing hand fell on my hair. " I did not mean to hi&t you, but to say that vour first talk with him,after you stand face to5cace,may be like that. " Remembering this Ufe is going to help us amazhidy, I fancy, to appreciate the next," she ad(fed, by way of period. " Christ seems to have thought so, when He called to the minds of those happy people what, in that un- conscious ministering of lowlv faith which may never reap its sheaf in the field where the seed .., J / The^ (^ates Ajur, 107 was sown, they had not had the comfort of Imding out before — 'I was sick and in prison, and ye visited me/ And to come again to Abra- ham in the parable, did he not say, * Son, re- member that thou in thy lifetime hadst good things, and Lazarus evil' ?" ^0T>i. ff) 5 ^a " I wonder what it is going to look like," t 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, f^i^i- ^:^<^-. ^^(^^-^f^o-mB^^ . "Mountains and trees!" ■ ^bti^/im-im^M-ms "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 Jmie 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 through it as in a sanctuary. Trees pierced by stars, and trees in a bath of summer moons to whicn the thrill of ' Love's young dream ' shall cling for ever 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 ■ «> » i l.ii-;».i>iX)i 108 The Gates Ajar. be dnlj figurative. But Fm not particular aibOiit the sea, if I can have risers and little brooks, and fountains of just the right sort; the fountains of this world aon't please me gener- ally. I want a little brook to sit and sing to Faith by. Oh, I forgot ! she will be a large girl probably, won't she? , ^ r i " Never too large to Uke to hear your mother sing, will you, Faithr ' ^ ^^'^ *^^ I'r^f -^^*0h no" said Faith, who bobbed in and o«t again hke a canary, just then — " not unless Fm dreadful big, with long dresses and a wa- terfall, you know. I s'pose, maybe, I'd have to have Uttle girls mvseli 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." ^m'p'-- " Flowers, too,'* her mother went on, after the interruption. "Not all amaranth and asphodel, but of variety and colour and beauty imimagined; glorifiedlilies of the vallev,heaven- ly tea-rose buds, and spiritual harebells among tnem. Oh, how your poor mother used to say — ^you know flowers were her poetry — coming in weak and worn from her garaen 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 afrsddto 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 «' The Gates Ajar. 109 should like, 11 I had my choice, to have day« lilies and carnations fresh under my windows all the time." a. c^^ . ^ " Under your windows?" ^>^ ^o ?4iiJS:tiuroi " Yes, I hope to have a liome of my own? "Not a house?" a. ^!, -ii; ._., 1 i / " 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 tiow- ers and books." she went on, smiling, I don't see why not nave 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 sensatidn 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 organised society? Organised society involves homes, u^t .unlike the homes of this world. rr "What other arrangement could be as pleasant, or could be pleasant at all? Robert- son's definition of a church exactly fits. *More imited in each other, because more imited in 110 The Gates Ajmr. Godr' 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 httle tendernesses of family ties are thrown by and lost with this world. 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 some 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, aiid my husband, and Faith, as I had them here; with many differences and great ones, \mimine just the same. Unless Faith goes into a home of her own — the little creature! I suppose she can't always be a l)aby. " Do you remember what a pretty little wist- ful way Charles Lamb has of wondering about all this? ** '*Shall I enjoy friendships there, wantmg the smiling indications which point me to them here, — t^e " sweet assurance of a look"? Sun, and sky, and breeze, and soUtary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the deUcious juices of meats and fish, and society, * * * and candle-light, and fire- side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself^ — do these things go out withUfe?'" " Now, Aunt "Winifred!" I said, sitting up straight,^* what am I to do with these beautiful heresies^ If Deacon Quirk should hear!'' '\, The Gates Ajar. Ill " I do not see where the heresy lies. As I hold fast by the Bible, I cannot be in much danger." ;- rv. " But you don't glean your conjectures from the Bible?" "I conjecture nothing that the Bible contra- dicts. I do not believe as truth indisputable any- thing that the Bible does not ^ve me. But I reason from analogy about this, as we aJl do about other matters. Why should we not have Erettjr things in heaven 1 If this * bright and eautiful economy' of skies and rivers, of grass and smishine, 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 not 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 immarred system of benificence. " 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 <£reams at twilight, and such hush of stars, were fit for Adam and Eve, a 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 tinast to this kind of argument !" 112 The Gates Ajau '* 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 — J* If this often-repeated argument from ana- logy is to be termed, as to tne 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 fey a scepticism so sweeping as this." v'And in another place — "None need fear the consequences of such endeavors who have well learned the prime principle of sound philosophy, namely, not to allow the most plausible and {)leasing conjec- tures to unsettle our convictions of truth. i :cb^^ . resting upon positive evidence. If there be any who frown upon all such attempts, « «c^;; . . they would do well to consider, that although individually, and from the constitu- tion of their minds, they may find it very easy to abstain from every path of excursive medi- tation, it is not so with others who almost irre- sistibly are borne forward to the vast field of universal contemplation,— a field from which the human mind is not to be barred, and which better taken posi^ssion of bv those who IS i^verently bow to the authority of Christianity t|ian left open to impiety." "Very good," I said, laying dowQ the book. 'A-- . r "^ The Oates Ajar. 113 " Buc about tiiose trees an5 houses, atid the rest of your * pretty things'? Are they to be like these?'' if/ ik. :.\T T.r'^ "I don't suppose that the houses will be made of oak and pine and nailed together, for instance. But I hope for heavenly types of nature and of art. ^Something that mil he to U8 then what these are now. That is the amount of ^t. They may be as * spiritual' as you please ; they will answer all the purpose to us. As we are not spiritual beings yet, how- ever, I am under the necessity of calling them by their earthly names. You remember Plato's old theory, that the ideal of everything exists etemallym the mind^of God. If that is so — and I do not see how it can be otherwise —then whatever of God is expressed to us in this world bv flower,or blade of gras8,or human face, whv should not that be expressed for ever in heaven by something corresponding to flower, or grass, or human face? t do not mean that the heavenly creation will be less real than these, but more so. Their ' spiritu* ality* is of such a sort that our gardens and forests and homes are but shadows of them. " f ou don't know how I amuse myself at night thinking this all over before I go to sleep; wondering what one thing will be like, and an-* other thing; planning what I should like; thinking that John has seen it all, and wonder- ing if he is laughing at me because I know so little about it. f tell you, Mary, there's a * deal o' comfort in't/ as rhoebe says about her cup of tea." . . H V >. 114 The 6ate$ Ajar, July 5t)i. Aunt Winifred has been hunting up a S\m- dajr school class for herself and one for me; wmch is a venture that I never was persuaded into undertaking before. She herself Is fast becoming acquainted with the poorer people of the town. I find that she is a thoroughly busy Chris- tian, with a certain " week-day hoJiness" that is fitroog and refreshing, Uke a west,>md. Church-goinff, and conversations on heaven, by no means exhaust her vitality. She told me a pretty thing about her class; it happened the first Sabbath that she took it. Her ischolars are young girls of from fourteen to eighteen years of age, children of church members, most of them. She seemed to have taken their hearts by storm. She says, " They treated me very prettily, and made me love them at once.'* CIq Beutley is in the class; Olo is i^ pretty, soft-eyed little creature, \7ith a shrinking mouthy and an absorbing passion for music, wMch she has always been too poor to gratify. I suspect that her teacher will make a i^t of hen She says that in the course of her lesson, 6x, to give it in her own ^ords— " While we were all taking together, some- body, pi^ed my sleeve, and tl^re was <}lo in the corner^ With her gr^ brown eye$ fixed on me. ^ See here 1^ i^he said in a_ whisper, *■ I can't be goodl 1 would" a piano' t> luld be good if I could omyjmi ibave * Well, Clo/ 1 said, ' if youwdil be a .. V '* The Oatea Ajar, 115 ^ ood girl, and go to heaven, I think you will ave music there, and will play just as much as you care to.' " You ought to have seen the look the child save me. I)elight and fear and incredulous bewilderment tumbled over each other, as if I had proposed taking her into a forbidden fairy- land. a i y^hy, Mrs Forceythe! Why, they won't let anybodyhave music up there! not in heavenV '^ I Ifdd down the question-book, and asked what kind of place she supposed that heaven ii^asgoingto be. " * Oh,' she said, with a dreary sigh, *I liiever think about it when I can help it. I sujp{)ose we* shaU all just stand there P "And your I asked of the next, a bright girl with snappmg eyes. ^^i?at^f: "'Do you want me to talk good, or tell the truth]' she answered me. Having been given to understand that she was not expected to ' talk good' in my class, she said, with an approving, decided nod: " Well, then ! I don't think it\ foing to be anything nice anyway. No, I don't ! told my last teacher so, and she looked just as shocked, and said I never should go there as long as I felt so. That made me mad, and I told lier I didn't see but I should be aa well pfif in one place as another, except for the fire.^ "A i^ent girl in the corner began at this point to lo(^ interested, 'I always supposed,' said sl:^. Hhat you just floated round in heaven -^y(»i Know— iftll together^Hspmething like jmubepa^elV" 116 The Oates Ajar. ** Whereupon I shut the question book en* tirely,and took the talking to myself for a while. " * But I Thever thought it was anything Uke that.' interrupted little Clo, presently, her cheeksflushed with excitement. * Why, I should like to go, if it is like that ! I never supposed people talked, unless it was about converting people, and saying your prayers, and all that/'^ " Now, weren't thoseideas alluring and com- forting for young girls in the blossom of warm human life? They were trying with all their little hearts to ^ be good,' too, some of them, BiiA had all of them been to church and Sunday school all their lives. Never, never, if Jesus Christ had been Teacher and Preacher to them, wbutd He have {>ictured their blessed endless y^ani with ^im in such bleak colors. They flrre not the hues of His Bible." dm ati'Lna A- • . ■ . , ?- --.'•".sY'Tffv-. % The Oates Ajar. 117 , rvdUv '.UiU i'l"* CHAPTER XL July 1^1. We took a trip to-dav to East Hom^r for butter. Nothing could convince Phoebe that any butter but "Stephen David's" rai^t, could, would or should be used in this family^ So to Mr. Stenhen David's, a journey of Iqui^ miles, I meekly betake myself at stated peiipas in the domestic year, buraened with di^ectio^ik about firkins and half-firkins, ^unds and halC pounds, salt and no salt, churning and ^' work- mg over;" some of which I remember and some of which I forget, and to all of which Phoebe considers me sublimely incapable of attending. The afternoon was perfect, and we took things leisurely, letting the reins s^vingf rom the hooK — ^an arrangement to which Mr. Tripp's old grav was entirely agreeable — and, leaning back against the buggy-cushions, woundalong among the strong, sweet pine-smells, lazily talking or laaly silent, as our spirits moved, and as only two people who thoroughly understand and like each other can talk or be silent. We rode home by Deacon Quirk's, and, as ^® jogged by, there broke upon our view a bloommg vision of the Deaconhimself, at work in his potatoe-field, with his son and heir, who, :/ . \ 118 The Gates Ajar, by the way,has the reputation of beingthe most awkward fellow in the township. The amiablechurch-officerhavingcaughtsight of lis, left his work, and coming up to the fence "in rustic modesty unscared," guiltless of coat or vest, his calico shirt sleeves roUe'i up to his huge brown elbows, and his dusty straw hat flapping in the wind, rapped on the rails with his hoe- handle as a sign for us to stop. ^. "Are we in a hurry ]" I asked, under n^y breath. : "Oh no," said Aunt Winifred. " He has somewhat to say unto me, I see by his eyes. I have been expecting it. Let us hear him out. Qi^Qd afternoon, Deacon Quirk." ^* Good afternoon, ma'am. Pleasant day !" She assented to the statement, novel as it was, ^*!A very pleasant day," repeated the Deacon, lookingfor the first time in his life, to my know- ledge, a little undecided as to what he sihould say next, " Remarkable tine day for riding. In a hurry ?" "Wfcl-\ not especially. Did you want any- thing of me V\ "You're a church member, aren^t you, ma'am?" asked the Deacon, abruptly. "lam." "Orthodox?" " Oh yes," with a smile. "You had a reasewi for addng ?" . \ t r ',*' " The Gates Ajar. 119 " Yes, ma'am ; I had, as you might say, a i^ason for asking." The Deacon laid his hoe on the top of the felice, and his arms across it, aQd pushed his h^lt on the back of his head in a becoming and ai^entative manner.,, t?, ■ > t . ;.^f^, .^.. , .v , . ^ ., it hope you don't consider that I'm taking ties if 1 have a little religious conversation you, Mrs. Forceythe.'' '• ^ ■ ' ' ' I It is no offence to me if you are," replied Mb. Forceythe, with a twinkle in her eye ; bu^ both twinkle and words glanced off from thelDeacon. y wife was telling me last night," he be- ganl with an ominous cough, " that her niece>y^ Cloffldy Bentley-— Moses Bentle^'s daughteif^' youtnow, and one of your sentimental gitW that reads poetry, and is easy enough led away by van delusions and false doctrine-r-was un- der y^ur charge at Sunday school. Now Clo- tildyis intimate with my wife, — ^who is her aunt in her mother's side, and always tries to do heijduty by her, — and she t^^^ Mrs. Quirk what Jou'd been a-saying to th' ?se , nng minds on the8abbath." He shopped, and observed hei jpressively, as if hi expected to see the guilty blushes of^ arraign^ heresy covering her amused, atten- tive &c< " I h(k)e you will pardon me, ma'am, for repeating it ; but Clotild.y said that you told her she fhould play music in heaven. Play .;.« nmsic. am t" ■ I I 120 The Gates Ajar. " I certainly did," she said quie%. . "You did ! Well, notr, I didn*t beliM'lty nor I wouldn't believe, till I asked you ! thought it wam't more than fair that I shoul( ask you, before repeating it, you know. It') none of my business, Mrs. Forceythe, any mori than that I take a general interest in the spir^ too^l welfare of the youth of our ' Sabbati school ; but I am very much surprised ! I ai very much surprised !" , ,, ,. ,^.. ^ ,,. ,, ,x ■i;" I ^wn surprised that you should be, I)ea( Quirk. Do you beheve that God would tak^a poor little disappointed girl like Clo, who his been all her life here forbidden the enjoymenj a perfectly innocent taste, and keep ner in hiiippy heaven eternal years, without fine means to gratify it ? I don't." ^**1I tell Clotildy I don't see what she wdats of a pianna-forte," observed Clotildy^s uiile, sditentiously. " She can go to singin' scl|ool| and she's bieen In the choir ever since I hkva wMdi is six year? >xme Christmas. Besi(Bs, 1 ddii^ think it's our place to specylate ob tiie mysteries of the heavenly spere. My wifiltold her that she mustn't believe any suchmings a0 that, which were very irreverent, ana con- trary to the Scriptures, and Clo went /home cryilig. She said, * It was so pretty tojthink aboiut.' It is very easy to impress thes^ delu- sions of fancy on the young." " Pray, Deacon Quirk," said Aunt Winifred, leaning earnestly forward in the carria^, " will yott^/teU ma wtiat^h^rei, if/irrey^at^ run- .\i 1 i 1' li 1 M I i I i tri ij^. The Gates Ajar, 121 scriptural' in the idea that there will be instru- mental music in heaven?" ^ "Well," replied the Deacon, after some con- sideration, "come to think of it, there wiU be harps, I suppose. Harpers harping with theur harps on the sea of glass. But I don't believe there will be any piannas. It's a dreadfully material way to talk about that glorious worli, ^to^ my thinking," ^- ^^^'^^ ^^"^^'^ -""-^ '""'^^ " If you could show me wherein a harp is 1^8 ' material' than a piano, perhaps I should a^ee, with you." > Deacon Quirk looked rather nonplussed loiir a minute. . . o^Wn^ "What cwyou suppose people will do,, ^ heaven?" she asked agam. Ba^o^ " Glorify God," said the Deacon, promptly recovering himself, — "glorify God, mi sipg Worthy the Lamb! We shall be clothed 4» white robes, with palms in our hands, and bow before the Great White Throne. We shall be engaged in such employments a$ befit sinless creatures m a spiritooal state of existence." " Now, Deacon Quirk," replied Aunt Wini- fred, looking him over from nead to foot,— old straw hat, calico shirt, blue overalls, and cow;r, hide boots, coarse, work-worn hands, and "»«'• row forehead braided tight," — "just imagine yourself, will you, taken out of this life this minute, as you stand here in your potato-field!' (the Deacon changed his positi6n with evident uneashiess), "ana putinto another Bfe,-^nbt anyb^ else, but^ youneli, just as yoti: left this 122 The Gates Ajar. spot, — ^and do you honestly think that you snomd be happy to go and put on a white dress and stand stm in a choir with a ^'een branch in one hand and a singing-book m the other, and smg and pray, and never do anything but sing and pray^ this year, next year, and every year for ever?" "We-ell," he replied, surprised into a vq0' nientary flash of carnal candour, " I can't say that I shouldn't wonder for a minute, maybe, how Ahinadah wovM ever get those potatoes hoed without m^. Abmadab! go back to your work I" The graceful Abinadab had sauntered up during the conversation, and was listening, hoe in hand and mouth open. He slunk away when his father spoke, but came up again pres- ently on tip-toe when Aunt Winifred was talk- ing. There was an interested, intelligent look about his square and pitifully embarassed face which attracted my notice. " But then," proceeded the Deacon, re-en- forced by the sudden recollection of his duties as a father and a church member, " that couldn't be a permanent state of feeling, you know. I expect to be transformed by the renewing of my mind to appreciate the glories of the New Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God. : That's what I expect, marm. Now I heerd that you told Mrs. Bland, or that Maiy told her, or that she heerd it some way, that you said you supposed there were trees and flowers and houses and such in heaven. I told my wife I tho\ight your deceased husband was a 1 ■\ n I The Gates Ajar n 123 Congregational minister, and I didn't believe you ever said it; but that's the rumor." Without deeming it necessary to refer to her "deceased husband," Aunt WinifrQcl replied that " rumour" was quite right. ''^" ' " Well!" said the Deacon, with severe signifi- cance, " / believe in a spiritooal heaven." I looked him over agam — ^hat, hoe, shirt and all; scanned his obstmate old face, with its stupid, good eyes and animal mouth. Then I glanced at Aunt Winifred as she leaned forward m the afternoon light; the white, finely-cut woman^ with her serene smile, and rapt saintly eyes,— every inch of her, body and soul, refined not only by birth and training, but by the long nearness of her heart to Christ. * "- ' " Of the earth, earthy. Of the heavens, heiaf - enly." 'The two faces sharpened themselves into two types. Which, indeed, was the better, able to comprehend a " spiritooal heaven"? " It is distinctly stated in the Bible, in whidf' I suppose we shall both agree," said Aunt Wm- if red, gently, " that there shall be a new earth, as wellab new heavens. It is noticeable, also, that the descriptions of heaven, although a series of metaphors, are yet singularly earthlike and tangible ones. Are flowers^ and skies, and trees less 'spiritual' than white dresses and little palm-branches? In fact, where are you going to get your little branches without trees? What could well be more suggestive of material modes of living, and material industry, than a city miarked intostreets and alleys, paved solid- ly with gold, walM in and barred with gates / 124 jTAe Gaitz Ajar. whose jewels are named and counted, and whose very length and breadth are measured with a celestial surveyor's chain?" " But I think we'd ought to stick to what the Bible says," answered the Deacon, stolidly. " li it says golden cities and doesn't say flowers, it means cities and doesn't mean flowers. 1 dare sav you're a good woman, Mrs. Forceythe, if you QO hold such oncommon doctrine, and 1 don't doubt you mean well enough, but I don't think that we ought to trouble ourselves about these mysteries of a future state. Fm willing to trust them to God!" The evasion of a fair argument by this self- sufficient spasm of piety was more than I could calmly stand, and I indulged in a subdued ex- plosion.r— Auntie says it soimded like Fourth of July crackers touched ofi*mider a wet barrel. ''^Deacon Quirk? do you mean to imply thai ^ Mrs. Forceythe does not trust it to Goal The ~^ truth Is, that the existence of such a world as heaven is a fact from which you shrink. You know you do ! She has twenty thoughts about it where you have one; yet jpu, set up a claim to superior spirituality!" '^"^ ^,^^^1 "Maiy, Mary, you are a little excited, I' fear. God is a spirit^ and they that worship Him must worship Him in spint and in truth If ,. The Relevancy of this last I confess myself in- capable, of perceiving, but the good inan seemed to be convinced that he had made a noint, and.-^ we rod*6^^ off .leaving Mm under that t^Mul de- lusion. ' \ ■ VjT. u The Gates Ajar, 125 " If he werenH a good man I'' I sighed. " But he is, and I must respect him for it/' ^ ^* Of course you must; nor is he to blame that he is narrow and rough. I should scarcely have argjued as seriously as I did with him, but that, as i fancy him to be a representative of a class, I wanted to try an experiment. Isn't he amus- ing, thouffh? He is precisely one of Mr. Stop- ford Brooke's men, * who can understand noth- ing which is original' " "Are there, or are there not, more of such men in our church than in others?" ^' ''^ '^'^^ "Not more proportionately to numbers. But I would not have them thinned out. The bet- ter we do Christ's work, the more of uneducat- ed^ neglected, or debased minds will be drawn to try and serve Him with us. He sought out the lame, the halt, the blind, the stupid, the crotchety, the rough, as weH as the equabie,the intelligent, the renned. Untrained Christians in any sect will always have their eccentricities and their littlenesses, at which the silken judg- ment of high places, where the Carpenter^ Son would be a strange guest, will sneer. That would never trouble me. It only raises the question in my mind whether cultivated Chris- tians generally are sufficiently (?t^^iva^or5, scat- tering their golden gifts on wayside ground." "Now take Deacon Quirk," I suggested, when we had ridden along a little way under the low, freen arches of the elms, " and put him into eaven as you oro^osed^ just as he is, and what u be goin^ to do with hmiself ? He csm .4.v " Very true, and a good, common-sense ar- c^ument against such a heaven. I don't pro- fess to surmise what wiD be found for him to do, beyond this — that it will be some very pa- latable work that he can understand. How do we know that he would not be appointed guar- dian of his poor son here, to whom I suspect he hasnotbeen all that a father might be in this life, and that he would not have his body as well as his soul to look after, his farm as well as his prayers? to him might be committed the charge of the dews and the rains and the hundred un- seen influences that are at work on this very potato-field." ; *' But when his son is gone in his turn, and i^e have all gone, and there are no more pota- to-fields? An eternity remains." ** There may be some kind of agricultural em- ployments even then.* To whomsoiever a tal- ent is given, it will be given him wherewith to use it. Besides, by that time the good Deacon Will be immensely changed. I suppose thrttthe simple transition of death, which rids him of sin and of grossness, will not only woMerfully re- I'^Adam in his state of innocence was put into the'garden to dress ill and to k0ep it. The Oaies Ajar. 127 fine him, but will have its effect upon his intel- lect." " If a talent is given, use will be found for it? Tell me some more about that." " I fancy many things about it; but of course can feel sure of only the foundation principle. This life is a great school-house. The wise Teacher trai!is in us such gifts as, if we gradu- ate honourably, will be of most service m the perfect manhood and womanhood that come after. He sees, as we do not, that a power is sometimes best trained by repression. * We do not always lose an advantage when we dispense with it,' Goethe says. But the suffocated lives, like little Clo's1;here,make mv heartache some- times. I take comfort in thinking how they will bud and blossom up in the air^ by and by. There are a great many of them. We tread them underfoot in our careless stepping now and then,'and do not see that they have not the elasticity to rise from our touch. ' Heaven may be a place for those who failed on e^h,' the Country Parson says." " Then there wiU be air enough for all?" **For all; for those who have had a little bloom in tins world, as well. I suppose the artist will paint his pictures, the poet sing his happy songs^ the orator and author will not nnd their talents hidden in the eternal darkness of a ^ve; the sculptor will use his beautiful £;ift m the moulding of someheavenly Carrara; ^as well the singer as the player on iilftruments shall be tbete.' Christ daM a thing thitt has growh on nni wilji new nic^DilDgrlate- 128 The Gatei Ajcur. \j: — * He that loHth Ma life far my sake shall find itJ Ity you see — not another man's lifq, not a stran£[e compound of powers and Plea- sures, but his own familiar aspirations. 00 we shall best 'glorify God,' not less there than here, bv doing it in the peculiar way that He himself marked out for us. But^h, Mary, you see it is only the life ' lost' lor His sake that diaQ be so beautifully found. A great man never goes to heaven because he is great. He must ^0, as the meanest of his fellow-sinners go, with face towards Calvai7,and every golden treasure used for love of Him who showed him how." ^^i* What would the old Pagrfhs— and modem ones, tooyfor that matter-HUiy to that? Wasn't it Tadtus who announced it as his belief, that immortality was granted as a special gift to a few superior minds? For the people who per* aiited m making up the rest of the world, poor thii^! as it could be of little cozisequence what became of them, they might die as the brute dieth." '*It seems an unbearable thing to me some- times,'' she went on, " the wreck of a gifted souL A man who can be, if he chooses, as much better and happier than the rest of us, as the ocean reflects more sky than a millpond. must also be, if he chooses, more wicked and more micerable. It takes longer to reach sea- shells than river-pebbles. I am compelled to think, also, that intellectual rank must in hea- ven bear some proportion to goodness. There are last and there are first that shall have '\ The Gates Ajar. 12» chpn/ijed places. As the tree falleth^ there shall it lie, and with that amount of holiness of which a man leaves this life the possessor, he must start in another. I have seen great think- ers, * forfemost men ' in science, in theology, in the arts, who, I solemnlv believe, will turn aside in heaven — and will turn humbly and heartily — to let certain day-labourers and paur pers whom I have known, go up before them as kings and priests unto God." *' I believe that. But I was going to auk — for poor creatures like your respected niece, who hasn't a talent,nor even a single absorUng taste, for one thing above another thing — what shall she do?" " Whatever she liketh best; something very useful, my dear, don't be afraid, ana very pleasant. Something, too, for which this life has fitted you; though you may not under- stand how that can be, better tnan did poor Heine on his ' matmzzen-gruft,' reading di tiie books that treated of his disease; * But what good th's reading is to do me I dont know,' he said, 'except that it will qualify me to give lectures in heaven on the ignorance «E doctors on earth about diseases of the spinal marrow.' " " I don't know how many times I have thought of—I believe it was the poet Gray, who said that his idea of heaven was to lie on the mfa, and read novels. That touches the lazy part of us, though." "Yes. they wMlbe the active, outgoing, gen- erous elements of our nature that wul be IbTQugbtiutQ use the% rathet tbaii tl(0 mUr 1^ Tht Oaiee Ajar, fBentred and dreamy ones. Though I suppose that we shall read in heaven, — being influenced to be better and nobler by good and noble t^hers of the pen, not less there thaji here.*' . "Oh think of it ! To have books, and music, and pictures ]" "All that Art, *the handmaid of the Lord,' can do for us, I have no doubt will be done. Eternity will never become monotonous. Va- riety without end, charms unnumbered wi^in charms, will be devised by Infinite ingenuity to minister to our delight. Perhaps,— this is just my faiicying,-~perhaps there will be whole planets tiuned inta galleries of art, over which we may wander at will; or into orchestral halls where the highest possibilities of music will be reaMsed to singer and to hearer. Do jrou know, I have sometimes had a flitting notion that music would be the language of heaven ? It certainlv difl'ers in some indescribable man- ner fiom tne other arts. W»? have most of us felt it in Our diflierent ways, it always seems to me like the cry of a great sad life dragged to use in this world against its will. Pictures and statues and poems fit themselves to their work more contentedly. Sympliony and song struggle in fetters. That sense of conflict is not good for me. It is quite as likely to harm as to help. Then perhaps the mysteries of side- real systems will be spread out like a child's map before us. Perhaps we shall take jour- neys to Jupiter and to Saturn and to the glit- tering haze of nebulae, and to the site of rmned wcJrldfl whose * extinct light is yet travelling The Gales Ajar. 131 M through space.' Occupation for explorers there, you see !" " You make me say with little Clo, * Oh, why, I want to go!* every time I hear you talk. But there isone thing,— you spoke of families living together.'' "Yes." - ^ " ^ "And you spoke of— your husband. But theBible'^ ..^ , ,,. . " Says there shall be no marrying nor giving in marriage. I know that. Is or will there be such marrjring or giving in marriage as there is in a world like this. Christ expressly goes on to state, that we shall be as the angels in heav- en. How do we know what heavenly unions of heart with heart exist among the angels? It leaves me margin enough to live ana be happv with John for ever, and it holds many possibilities for the settlement of all perplexing questions brought about by the relations of this world. It is of no use to talk much about them. But it is on that very verse that I found my unshaken belief that they will be smoothed out in some natural and happy way, with which each one shall be content.'^ " But oh, there is a great gulf fixed; and on one side one, and on the other another, and they loved each other." Her face paled — it always pales, I notice, at the mention of this mystery, — but her eyes never lost by a sl^de their steadfast trust. ** Mary, don't question me about that That belongs to the unutterable things. God will 132 TM Gate€ AjKx/r. take care of that. I think I could leave it to Him even if He brought it for me myself to face. I feel sure that He will make it all come out right. Perhaps He will be so dear to us that we couldnot love any one who hated Him. In some way the void must be filled, for He shall wipe away tears. But it seems to me 'that the only thought in which there ca-n be any rest, and in that there can, is this: that Clirist, who loves us even as His Father loves Him, can be happy in spite of the existence of a hell. If it is possible to Hira_, surely He can make it possible to us." v- " Two things that He has taught us," she said after a silence, " give me beautiful assur- ance that none of these dreams with which I help myself can be beyond His intention to fulhl. One is, that eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart conceived it, — ^this lavish- nessof reward which He is keeping for us. Another is, that 'I shall be satisfied yfhm I awake.?" ^t1 i», ' ?i. " With His Ukeness." -^ ^ " With His likeness. And abouHhat I have other things to say." But Old Gray stopped at the gate, and Phoebe was watching for her butter,^ and it was no time to say them then. ■^>o v - . 'rlnii> ■ The Gates Ajar. 133 ^5 IBj^yih :ii>jpfj iJ>i''.ti jfi^i))nd^H/ IFmv^ ^,ulIT• iEofvi^Mm CHAPTER XII.:i»^ W^ -^m 03 ama^^K (■ -vcf. - h|r> ' Where oongregationR ne'er break up,] And SaDbaths have no end.' The dullest preachers are sure to give it out, and that when there are the greatest number of restless children wondering when it will be time to go home. It is only within ten years that mcxiem hymn-books have altered it, re- turning m part to the original. 134 The Gates Ajar. " I do not think we have chosen the best parts of that hymn for our 'service of song/ I ou never read the whole of it ? You don't know how pretty it is! It is a reUef from the customary psalms and choirs. One's whole heart is glad of the outlet of its sweet refrain — * Would God that I were there !' ' ^ » before one has half read it. You are quite ready to believe that * There is no hunger, heat, nor cold, IBut pleasure every way,* Listen to this — * Thy houses are of ivory, Tny windows crystal clear, Thy tiles are made of beaten gold! O God, that I were there! * We that are here in banishment Continually do moan. * Ou-* sweet is mixed with bitter gall Our pleasure is but pain. Our joys scarce last the looking on, Our sorrows still remain. But there they live in buch delight, Such pleasure and such j|^^y, As that to them a thousand years Doth seem as yesterday.* i -.-^^ And this- Thy gardens and thy gallant walks Uontinually are green ; [flowers There grow such sweet ^uad pioaflant As nowhere else are seen. le :■""-:•-:■■■ v. :.;:\v->; ly !»*■ .■«tl ■S»v ^jCU •C «/%•■ The Gates Ajar. 13& * There ciimamon, there sugar grows, r There nard and balm abound; What tongue can tell, or heart conceive, ,^ The joys that there are found! ' Quite through tiie sfe'et^^^thsilve'r souttd The flood of life doth flow, 1 ,. Upon whose banks, on every side, The wood of life doth grow,' you We may learn something from that grand old Catholic singer. He is far nearer to the Bible than the innovators on his MSS. Do you not notice how like his images are to the inspired ones, and yet how pleasant and natural is the effect of the entire poem 1 "There is nobody like Bonar, though, to sing about heaven. There is one of his, * We «haU meet and rest,' — do you know it ?" I shook my head, and knelt down beside her and watched her face, — it was q^uite imconscioiis of me, the musing face, — while she repeated dreamily— * * Where the faded flower shall freshen, - Freshen never more to fade. Where the shaded sky shall brighten, — Brighten never more to shade ; Where the sun-blaze never scorches ; Where the star-beams cease to chill ; Where no tempest stirs the echoes Of the wood, or wave, orhiU; . . . •Where no shadow shall bewilder ; Where life's vain parade is o'er ; Where the sleep of sin is broken, ^ And the dreamer dreams no more; Where the bond is never sever'd, — 136 The Odtes Ajar. PartingB, claspings, sob and moan, i^itf i Midnight waking, twilight weeping, ]ir iv.^^^ ^ii>{' J^^^^Y Jaoontide,— all are done ; , o ^5^4 Wiiere tne child has found its n\other ; ^ ^^.; ' ['. tVhere the mother finds the child ; ^;^: ' ^'^' Where dear families are gathet'd, >-^ ^'^l That were scattered on the wild; ,'^'p^^'-' jWhere the hidden wound is heal'd ; i; £ Where the blighted life reblooms ; '^Where the smitten heart the freshness , , Of Its buoyant youth resumes ; ^ J Where wh iind the joy of loving, ' ' ' ? As We never loved before, — * ^ ' liWing on, unchiird, unhindered, Loving once, for evermore." . A.'i I '1 (. v;j!t.fe;^ ^m'^'m^ftt. ?>!> if- 'iv; <;y*ffi).is::ci«.f • :ii AiMt Winifred was weeding her day-lilies this morning, when the gate creaked timidly, and then swung noisily, and in walked Abina- dab Quirk, with a bouquet of China pinks in the button-hple of his green-gray linen coat. He had taken evident pains to smarten him- self up a little, for his hair was combed into two horizontal dabs over his ears, and the green-^ay coat and blue-checked shirt-sleeves were quite clean : but he certaiiily is the most uncouth specimen of six feet five that it has ever been my privilege to behold. I feel sorry tor him, though. J heard Meta Tripp laugh- ing at him in Sunday School the other day, — " Quadrangular Quirk," she called him, a httle too loud; and the poor fellow heard her. He half turned, blushing fiercely ; then slunk down ^iU it. bo A • bil^-* .!/ The Gates Ajc. " Grace and peace in Christ, my dear Uttle son. I see Tvith pleasure that thou leamest well, and prayest diligently. Do so, my son, and continue. When I come home I will "bring thee a pretty fairing. ^^ i iti# .i^>ki>v i>it " I laiow a pretty, merry garden wherein are many children. Tney have little ffolden coats, and they gather beautiful apples under the trees, and pears, cherries, plums, and wheat-plums; — they sing, and jump, and are merry. They have beautiful Httle norses, too. with gold bits and silver saddles. And I asKcd the man to whom the garden belongs, whose children they were. And he said: *They are the chil- dren that love to pray and to learn, and are good.' Then said I: 'Dear man, I have a son, too; his name is Johnny Lu- ther. May he not also come into this garden and eat these beautiful apples and 144 TJ^ Gates Ajar. pears, and ride these fine horses?' Then the man said : ^ If he loves to pray and to learn, and is good, he shall come into this garden, ana Lippus and Jost too; and when they all come together, they shall have fifes and tnimpets and lutes, and all sorts of music, and they snail dance, and shoot with little cross-bows,' " And he showed me a fine meadow there in the garden, made for dancing. There himg nothmg but golden fifes, trumpets, and fine silver cross-bows. But it was early, and the children had not yet eaten; and therefore I could not wait the dance, and I said to the man: ' Ah, dear sir! I will immediately go and write all this to my little son Johnny, and tell him to pray diligently, and to learn well, and to be good, so that he also may come to this farden. But he has an Aunt Lehne, he must ring her with him.' Then the man said: * It shalibe so; go, and write him so.' " Therefore, my dear little son Johnny, learn and pray away! and tell Lippus and Jost too, that they must learn and pray. And then you shall come to the garden together. Herewith I commend thee to Almighty God. And greet Aunt Lehne, and give her a kiss for my sake. " Thy dear Father, "Martinxjs Luther. " Anno, 1530." \ TJm Gates Afar. 145 :e. 1 • -* MA^f^ Mmi.fi t^ir^^ • ^ CHAPTER XIIL •'■ '-^^^i^' h"^ ^ h:^ I;f9^ ■ August 3rd. ':jf i* it! - .<* r The summer is sliding quietly awaj, — my desolate summer which I dreaded; with the dreams gone from its wild flowers, the crown from its sunsets, the thrill from its winds and its singing. But I hav . found out a thing. One can live without dreams and crowns ana thrills. I liave not lost them. They lie under the ivied cross with Roy for a little while. They will come back to me with him. " Nothing is lost," she teaches me. And until they come bacK, I see — for she shows me — fields groaning imder their white harvest, with laborers- very few. Ruth followed the sturdy reapers, glean- ing a little. I, perhaps, can do as much. The ways in wliich i must work seem so small iand insignificaiit, so pitifully trivial sometimes, that I do not. even like to write them down here. In fact, they are so small that, six months ago, I did not see them at all. Only to be pleasant to old Phcebe, and charitable to Meta Tripp, and faithful to my not very mteresting little scholars, and a bit watchful of worn-out Mrs. Bland, and But dear me, I won^t ! They are so little ! • K 146 The Gate* Ajar, But one's self becomes of less importance, which seems to be the point. It seems very strange to me sometimes, looking back to those desperate winter days, what a change has come over my thoughts of Roy. Not that he is any less — Oh. never any less to me. But it is almost as if she had rais- ed him from the gri ve. Why seek ye the liv- ing among the dead 1 Her soft, compassionate eyes shine with the question every hour, ^nd every hour he is helping me, — ah, Roy ! we im- derstand one another now. How he must love Aimt Winifred! How pleasant the days will be when we can talk ier over, a^d thank ht-r together! "To be happy because Roy is happy." I re- member how tnose first words of hers struck me. It does not seem to me to be impossible Aunt Winifred and I laugh at each other for talking so much about heaven. I see that the greejil)Ook is filled with my questions and her answers. The fact is, not that we do not talk as muchaboiit laundane affairs as other people, but that this one thing Interests us more. if, instead, it had been flounces, or babies, or German philosophy, the green book would have filled itself just as unconsciously with flounces^ or babies, or German phiiosopliy. — This interest in heaven is of course no sign of especial piety in me, nor could people with youngj warm, uncrushed hopes throbbing through their days be expected to feel the \ The Gates Ajar, 147 -1. same. It is only the old principle of, where the treasure is — the heart. " How spiritual-minded Mary has grown!" Mrs. Bland observes, regardingme respectfully. I try in vain to laugh her out of the convic- tion. If Roy had not gone before, I should think no more, probablv, about the coming life, than does the minister's wife herself. But now — 1 cannot help it — that is the reality, this the dream; that the substance, this the shadow. n-^unmi^v^y The other day Amit Winifred and I had a talk which has been of more value to me than all the rest. -- . Faith wasinbed;it was a cold rainy 'ev^Sijg; we were seciu'e from callers; we lighted a few kindlers in the parlour grate; she rolled ^ the easy-chair, and I took my cricket at her feet* " Paul at the feet of Glamaliel ! This is what I call comfort. Now, Auntie, let us go to heaven awhile.'* *.^ ^<^ > " Very well, what do you want there now ?" I paused a moment, sobered by a thought that has been growing steadily upon me of late. " Something more. Aunt Winifred. All these other things are beautiful and dear; butj.be- lieve I want — God. ' ^ ; " You have not saidmuch about Him. The Bible says a great deal about Him. You have given me the filling-up of heaven in all its plea- sant promise^ but— I don't know — there seems ^ be an outhne wanting,'^ 148 The Gates Ajar. She drew my hand up into hers, smiling. " I have not donp my painting by artistic methods, I know; but it was not exactly acci- dental. ' ;;^ ■?-„;..; :,;t-^ *-■ ^:s>v " Tell me, honestly, — is God more to you or less, a more distinct Being or a more vague one, than He was six months ago ? Is He, or is He not, dearer to yui now than them ?" < I thought about it a minute, and then turned, my face up to her. \ " Mary, what a light m your eyes ! How is It ' It c^me over me slowly, but it came with such a passion of gratitude and unwortliiness, that I scarcely knew how to tell her — ^that He never has been to me, in all my Hfe, what he is now at the end of these six months. He was once an abstract Grandeur which I struggled more in fear than love to please. He has become a Uving Presence, dear and real " No dead fact stranded on the shore ' ■' " ' Of the oblivious years ; But warm, sweet, tender, even yet ; -^^^ A present help.' .... He was an inexorable Mystery who took Roy froin me to lose him in the glare of a more inexorable heaven. He is a Father ^ho knew better than we that \ e should be parted for a while ; but He only means it to be for a little while. Heis keeping him for me to find in the flush of some summer morning, on wMch I shall open my eyes no less naturally than I 't The Gates Ajar. 149 i open them on June sunrises now. I always have that fancy of gomg in the morning. She understood what I could not tell her, and said, " I thought it would be so." " You, His interpreter, have done it," I an- swered her. " His heaven shows what He is, — don't you see? — like a friend's letter. I could no more go back to my old groping rela- tions to Him, than I could make of you the dim and somewhat apocryphal Western Auntie that you were before I saw you." "Which was precisely why I have dealt with this subject as I havej" ohe said. " You had all your life been directed to an indefinite heaven, where the glory of God was to crowd out all individuahty and all human joy from His most individual and human creatures, till the * Glory of God ' had become nothing but a name and a dread to you. So I let those three words slide by, ana tried to bring you to them, as Christ brought the Twelve to believe in Him, * for the works' sake.' " Yes, my child ; clinging human loves, sti- fled longings, cries for rest, forgotten hopes, shall have their answer. Whatever the be- wilderment of beauties folded away for us in heavenly nature and art, thay shall strive with each other to make us glad. These things have their pleasant place. But, through eter- nity, there will be always something beyond and dearer than the dearest of them. God himself will be first,— naturally and of neces- mtji without strain or struggle, jfifr*^.*' 150 The Gates Ajar, When I sat here last winter with my dead in my house, those words would have roused in me an agony of wild questionings. I should have beaten about them and beaten against them, and cried in my honest heart that they were false. I knew that I loved Roy more than I loved such a Being as God seemed to me then to be. *Now, they strike me simply and J)leasantiy true. The more I love fioy the more I love Him. He loves us both. ; j "You see it could not be otherwise," she w^ion, speaking low. "Where would you be, or I, or they who seem to us muqh dearer and better than ourselves, if it were not for Jesus Christ ? What can heaven be to us/ but a song of the love that is the same to us yes- terday, to-day, and forever,— that, in the mys- tery of an mtensity which we shall perhaps ne^er understand, could choose death and be gl^d^ iii the choosing, and, what is more than that, could live life for us for three-and-thirty -M>;'t WT-'*' t^t •-«■■: WAti'. "1 cannot strain my faith—or rather iDiv commQu- sense — to the rhapsodies with which ma»y people fill heaven, ^ut it seems to me like thjs : A friend goes away from us, and it may be seas or worlds that lie between us, and we love him. He leaves behind him his little keepsakes ; a lock of hair to curl about our fingers ; a picture that has caught the trick of his eyes or smile ; a book, a flower, a l6tt^r. What we do with the curling hair, what we say to the picture, what T^e dream over Jjhe flower and the letter, nobody knows but Ourselves, % > The Oates Ajar. 151 \ People have risked life for such mementoes. \Yet who loves the senseless gift more than the j[iver,— the curl more than the yomig forehead on wnich it fell, — ^the letter more than the hand vmich traced it? vT^/^ m • • ^ So it seems to me that we shall lejwn to see in God the centre of all possibilities of joy. The greatest of these lesser delights is but the greater measure of His friendship. They will not mean less of pleasure, but more of Him. They will not *pale,' as Dr. Bland would say. Human deamess will wax, not wane, in heaven ; but human friends will be loved for love of Him.'' ■i\i "I see; that helps me; like a torch in a dark room. But there will be shadows in the comers. Dc you suppose that we shall ever ftUlp feel it in the body ?" **In the body, probably not. We see through a glass so darkly that the temptation to idolatry is always our greatest. Goldfen images did not die with Paganism. At times I fancy that, somewhere between this world and another, a revelation will come upon us like a flash of what ^m really is,— such a reve- lation, lighting up the lurid background of our past in such colors, that the consciousness of what Christ has done for us will be for a time as much as heart can bear. After that, the mystery will be, not how to love Him most, out that we ever cmdd have loved any creature or thing as much." ^* We serve Godqtute as much by acHve p 152 The Gat€8 Ajar. work as by special prayer, here," I said, after some thought ; " how will it be there ?'^ "We muat be busily at work certai'nly ; b\ I think there must naturally be more commi/- nion with Him then. Now, this phrase 'com- munion with God' has been worn, and not Al- ways well worn. / "Prayer means to us, in this life, more (^iten penitent confession than happy interchange of thought with Him. It is associated/ too, with acuing limbs and sleepv eyes, and liights when the lamp goes out. Obstacles, motaX and physical, stand in the way of our knowing exactly what it may mean in the ideal of it. " My best conception of it hes in the f intend- shfy) of the man Christ Jesus. I suppose He Will bear With Him, eternally, the humanity which He took up with Him from the Judean hills. I imagine that we shall see him in visi- ble form like ourselves among us, yet not of us • that He, Himself, is ' Gott mit ihnen ;' that we shall talk with Him as a man talketh with his friend. Perhaps, bowed and hushed at his dear feet, we shall hear from His own hjps the story of Nazareth, of Bethany, of Golgotha ; of the chilly mountains Where He used to pray all night long for us ; of the desert places where He hungered ; of His cry for help — think, Mary — His / -*When there was not one in all the world to hear it, and there was silence in hea- ven, while angels strengthened Him and man forsook Him. Perhaps His voice-*-the very Yoim which hat sounded whis^^ieriDig through The Gates Ajar. 163 \ our troubled life — * Could ye not watch one hour?' — shall unfold its perplexed meaningp; shall make its rough places plain; shall show us step by step the merciful way by which He led us to that hour; shall point out to us, joy by joy,the surprises that He has been plannmg for us, that as the old father in the story plan- ned to surprise his wayward boy come home. ** And such a * commimion,' — which is not too much, nor yet enough, to dare to expect of a God who was the * friend' of Abraham, who * walked ' with Enoch, who did not call fisher- men His servants — such will be that * presence of God,' that ' adoi-ation ' on wliich we ha\8 looked from afar off with despairing eyes that wept, they were so dazzled, and turned them- selves away as trom the thing they greatly feared." I think we neither of us cared to talk for a while after this. Something made me forget even that I was going to see Roy in heaven. " Three-ahd-thirty years. Three-and-thirty years." The words fang themselves over. " It is on the humanity of Christ," she said, after some musing, '* that all my other reasons for hoping for such a heaven as I hope for, rest for foundfation. He knows exactly what we are, for He has been one of us; exactly what we hope and fear and crave, for He has hoped and feared and craved, not the less humanly, but only more intensely. ***//" it were not «o,'— do you take in \bfi thoughtful tenderness of that^ A mother, stil- 164 The Gates Ajar. ling her frightened child in the dark, might speak just so — * if it were not *o, I would mve told you.* That brooding love makes room for all that we can want. He has somided every deep of a troubled and tempted life. Who so sure as He to understand now to prepare a place where troubled and tempted fives may grow serene? Further than this; since He stands as our great Type^ no less in death and after than before it. He answers for us many of these lesser questions on the event of which so much of ourliappmess depends. ,^ . 'I* Shall we lose our personality in a val^e cwean of ether — ^you one puff of gas, I an- other?-- f " He, with His own wounded body, rose and ate and walked and talked. ^* Is all memory of this life to be swept away? *' He, arisen,has forgotten nothing. He waits tb ineet His disciples at^'the old,familiar places: fts natUfaUy as if He had never been paried from them. He falls in witti the current of their thoughia. •* Has any one troubled us with fears that in thW dorified crowds of heaven we may miss a j^^^earer than all the world to us? — gffrHe made Himself known to His friends; Mibiry, and the two at Emmaus, and the be- wMered group praying and perplexed in their bSted room. ^ ^^ "Bo we weary ourselves witli speculations whether human loves can outUve the shock of death?— The Gates Ajar^ 165 " Mary knew how He loved her, when,tum- ing, she heard Him call her by her name. They knew, whose hearts ' burned within them while He talked with them by the way, and when He tarried with them, the day being far spent." * *'>^'njf>:'j rfij "And for the rest?" ni'^^iivf v>^o "For the rest, about which He was silent, we can trust Him, and if, trusting, we please ourselves with fancies. He would be the last to think it blame to us. There is one promise which grows upon me the more I study it, * He that spared not His own Son, how shall He not also mth Him freely give us alt things ?' Sometimes I wonder if that does not infold a beautiful double entendre^ a hiwt of much that you and I have conjectured,— «» one throws down a hint of a surprise to a child. "Then there is that pledge to those who seek first His kingdom, ^All these things sMl; be added unto you,^ ' These things' were f^o^i and clothing, were varieties of material de- hght, and the words were spoken to men wha Uved hungnr, beggared, and died the death of outcasts. If this passage could be taken Uter- ally, it would be very significant in its beari%; on the future life; for Christ must keep His promise to the letter, in one world or anothei;. It may be wrenching the verse, not as a verse, but from the grain of the argument, to insiit; on the literal interpretation, — ^though I am not surd. 'k^m^' J* ?^rf¥^ ■•■ 4 «- 156 The Gates Ajar. >ir, ^■:^^lj.y i .:«'/ ■ >l ■•! 1 ? .Hi 1 ,', • V- V''» ''1 ' *■! 1 v^:^ CHAPTER XIV. ^ August 16th. I asked the other day, wondering whether aU ministers were like I)r. Bland, wn«^t Uncle Forceythe used to believe about heaver. Very much what I do," she said. " These ,t' ii !..Kt €(uestions were brought home to him, early m lif«% by the death of a y&ry dear sister; he had thought much about thein. I think one of the things that so much attached his people to him was the way he had of weaving their future life in with thi-^J, till it grew naturally and pleasantly into their frequent thought Oh yes, your uncle supplied me with half of my proof-texts." Aunt VTinifred has not looked quite well of late, I fancy, though it may be only fancy. She has not spoken of it, except one day when I told her that she looked pale. It was the heat, she said. 20th. Little Clo came over to-night. I beheve she thinks Aunt Winifred the best friend she has in the world. Aimtie has become much attached to all her scholars, and has a rare \ The Gates Ajar. 157 power of winning her way into their confulence. They come to her with all their Uttle interests, — everything, from saving their souls to trim- ming a bonnet. Clo, however, is the favourite, as I predicted. She looked a bit blue to-night, as girls will look; in fact, her face always has a tinge of sadness about it. Aunt Winifred, understand- ing at a glance that the child was not in a mood to talk before a third, led her away into the garden, and they were gone a long time. AVhen it grew dark 1 saw them coming up the gath, Clas hand locked in her teacher's, and er face, which was wet,uptumed like a child's. They strolled to the gate, lingered a little to talkj and then Clo said good night without commg m. •• «^;-,<:t'^', Auntie sat for a while after she had gone, thinking her over, I could see. " Poor thing I" she said at last, half to hex- self, half to me. — " poor little foolish thing! This is where the dreadful individuaUty of a human soul irks me. There comes a point be- yond wliich you can^t help people." " What has happened to Clo?' " Nothing, lately. It has been happening for two years Two miserable years are an eternity, at Clo's age. It is the old story,— a summer boarder; a little flirting; a little dreaming; a little pain; then autumn, and the nuts dropping on the leaves, and he was gone, — and knew not what he had done,— and the child 'waked up. There was the future; to' li&8 The Gates Ajar, bake and sweep, to go to sewing-circleB, and sinc^ in the choir, and bear the nioonUght nignts, — and she loved him. She has lived through two years of it, and she loves him now. Reason will not reach such a passion in a girl like Clo. I did not tell her that she would put it away with other girlish things, and laugh at it herself some happy day, as women have laughed at their young fancies before her; partly because that woidd be a certain way of repelling her confidence, — she does not believe it, and my believing could not make her; part- ly, because 1 am not quite sure about it my- self. Clo has a good deal of the woman about her; her introspective Ufe is intense. She may cherish this sweet misery as she does her musical tastes, till it has struck deep root. There is nothing in the excellent Mrs.Bentley's household, nor in Homer anywhere, to draw tiie girl out from herself in time to prevent the dream from becoming a reality." "Poor little tiling! What did you say to ^ You ought to have heard what she said to niie. I wish I were at liberty to tell you the whole story. What troubles her most is that it is not going to help the matter at all to die. A * Mrs. Forceythe,' she says, in a tone that is enough to give the heartache, even to such an old woman as Mrs. Forceytne, * Mrs. For- ceythe, what is going to become of me up there? He never loved me, you see, and he never, never will; he will have some 4)eautifttl, good wife of his own, .nd I • ^i to II Th4 Oates Ajar, 169 wou*t have any bodj! For I can't I boclv else, — Fve tned ; I tried just as I could to love my cousin '6in; For I can't love any- as hard , he's real food, and — I'm — afraid 'Bin hkes me, though ^lesa he likes his carpet-sweepers better* ()h^ sometimes I think, and think, till it seems as if I could not bear it! I don't see how God can make me happy. I wish I could be buried up and go to sleep,and never have any heF,ven!" '' And you told her?" "i^Vt- "That she should have him there. That is, if not himself, something, — somebody who would so much more than fill his place, that she would never have a lonely or un- loved minute. Her eyes brightened, and shaded, and pondered, doubting^. She 'didn't see how it coida ever be.' I told her not to try and see how, but to leaveit to Christ. He knew all about this little tixmUe of hers, and He would make it right. ^^"^i' "*|Will He?' she questioned, sighing; *but there are so many of us ! There's 'Bin, and !^ Elenty more, and I don't see how it's ^oing to e smoothed out. Everything is in a jumble, Mrs. Forceythe, don't you see? for some peo- ple canH like and keep living so many tknes.' Something canie into my mina about the rough places that shall be made plain, and the crook- ed things straight. I tried to explain to her^ and at last I Kissed away her tears, and sent her home, if not exactly comforted, a little less miserable, I think, than when she came. Ah, well— I wonder myself sometimes about thest ♦^ 160 The Gates Ajar. * crooked thinp;' but, though I wonder,! never doubt." She finished her sentence somewhat hurried- ly, and half started from her char, raising both hands with a quick, involuntary motion that attracted my notice. The lights came in just then, and, imless I am much mistaken, her face showed paler than usual; but when 1 asked her if she felt faint, she said, " Oh no, I believe 1 am alittle tired,and will go to bed." September Ist. I am glad that the summer is over. This heat has certainly worn on Aunt Winifred, witli that kind of wear which slides people into con- firmed invalidism. I suppose she would bear it in her saintly way, as sne bears everything, but it would be a bitter cup for her. i kiiow she was always pale, but this is a paleness which Night. A dreadful thing has happened. I was in the middle of my sentence, when I heard a commotion in the street, and a child's voice shouting incoherently something about the doctor, SLud ^' Mother\s killed / Oh, mo- therms killed/ mother's burnt to death f* I wasat the window in time to see a blonde-haired 1 running wildly past the house, and to see ,t it was molly Bland. ii The Gates Ajar^ 161: M At the same moment I saw Aunt Winifred snatching her hat from its nail in the entry. She beckoned to me to follow, and we were half-way over to the parsonage before I had a distinct thought of what I was about. We came upon a horrible scene. Dr. Bland was trying to do everything alone; there was not a woman in the house to help him, for they have never been able to keep a servant, and none of the neighbors had had time to be there before us. The poor husband was growing faint, I think. Aunt Winifred saw by a look that he could not bear much more, sent him after Molly for the doctor, and took everything meantime into her own charge, I shall not write down a word of it. It was a sight that,once seen, mil never leave me as long as I live. My nerves are thoroughly shaken by it, and it must be put out of thought as far as possible. . It .seems that the little boy — the baby — crept into the kitchen by himself, and began, to throw the (Contents of the match-box on the stove, " to make a bonfire," the poor little fellow said. In five minutes his apron was ablaze. His mother was on the spot at his first cry, and smothered the little apron, and saved the child, but her dress was muslin, and everybody was too far off^ to hear her at first, — and by the time her husband came in from the garden it was too late. She is living yet. Her husband, pacing the room baek and forth, and crouching on his L 162 The Gates AjoTi knees by tl ^ hour, ia praying God^ to let her die before £he morning. Morning.* There is no chance of life, the doctor says. But he has been able to find something that has lessened her sufferings. 8he lies partially unconscious. >>ii*J-t: Wednesday Night. Aunt Winifred and I were over at the par- sonage.to-night, when she roused a little from her stupor and recognized us. She spoke to her husband, and kissed me good-bye, and asked for the children. They were playing softly in the next room ; we sent for them, and they came in, — the four unconscious, motherly little -^.things, — with the sunlight in their hair. The bitterness of death came into her marred face at sight of them, and she raised her hands to Auntie — ^to the only other mother there — with a sudden helpless cry : "I could bear it, I could bear it, if it weren't for them. Without any mother all their lives, — such little things, — ^and to go away where I can't do a single thing for them !'' Aunt Winifred stooped down and spoke low, but decidedly. **You will do for them. God knows all about it. He will not send you away from them. You shall be just aA much their mo- The Gates Ajar. 163 ther, every day of their lives, as you have been here. Perhaps there is something to do for them which you never could have done here. He sees. He loves them. He loves you.'' If I itonld paint, I might paint the look that struck through and through that woman's dy- ing face ; but words cannot touch it. If I were Aunt Winifred, I should bless God on my knees to-night for having shown me how to give such ease to a soul in death. ::':A. Thursday Morning. i; x*. God is merciful. Mrs. Bland died at five o'clock. IQtb. How such a voice from the heavens shocks one out of the repose of calm sorrows and of calm joys. This nas come and gone so sud- denly that I cannot adjust it to any quiet and trustful thinking yet. The whole parish mourns excitedly; for, though they worked their minister's wife hard, they loved her well. I cannot talk it over with the rer.t. It jars. Horror should ?iever be dissected. Besider, my heart is too full of those four little children with the sunlight in their hair and the unconsciousness in their eyes. 15th. Mrs. Quii'k came over to-day in great per- 164 The Gates Ajar, plexity. She had just come from the minis- ter's. " I don't know what we're a goin' to do with him !" she exclaimed, in a gush of impatient, uncomprehending sympathy ; " you can't let a man take on that way much longer. He'll worry himself sick, and then we shall either lose him or have to pay his bills to Europe ! Why, he jest stops in the house, and walks his study up and down, [day and night; or else he jest sets and sets and don't notice nobody but the children. Nov/ I've jest ben over makin' him some cliicken- pie, — he used to set a sight by my chicken-pie, — and he made behevetoeat it, 'cause I'd been at the trouble, I suppose, but how much do you supi)ose he swallowed? Jest three mouth- fulsl Thinks says I, I won't spend my time over cJiicken-pie for the afflicted agin,' and on ironing-day, too I When I knocked at the study door, he said, *Come in,' and stopped his Wallan' and turned so quick. I thought " ' Oh,' says he, 'good morning, it was Mrs Forceythe.' "I told him no, I wasn't Mrs Forceythe, but I'd come to comfort him in his sorrer all the same. But that's the only thing I have agin our minister. He won't he comforted. Mary Ann Jacobs, who's ben there kind of looking after the children and things for him, you , Imow, sence the funeral, she says he's asked three or four times for you, Mrs For- ceythe. There's been plenty of hispeopie in to The Gates Ajar, 166 *r see him, but you haven't ben nigh him, Mary- Ann says." *• I stayed away because I thought the presence of friends at this time would be an intrusion," Aimtie said; "but if he would like to see me, that alters the case. 1 will go, cer- tainly." "I don't know," suggested Mrs Quirk, look- ing over the tops of her spectacles, " I s'pose it's proper enough, out you beiii' a widow, you know, and his wife" ^ Aunt Winifred's eyes shot fire. She stood up and turned upon Mrs Quirk with a look the like of which I presume that worthy lady had i;ever seen before, and is not hkely to see again (it gave the beautiful scorn of a Zenobia to her fair, slight face), moved her lips sUghtly, but said nothing, put on her bonnet, and went straight to Dr. inland's. The minister,they told her, was in his study. She knocked lightly at the door, and was bidden in a lifeless voice to enter. Shades and blinds were drawn, and the glare of the sun quite shut out. Dr Bland sat by his study-table, with his face upon his hands. A Bible lay open before him. It had been lately used; the leaves were wet. He raised his head dejectedly, but smiled when he saw who it was. He had been thii^^k- ing about her, he said, and was glad that she had come. I do not know all that passed be^^ween them, but I gather, from such tiints as Auntie in her 166 The Gates Ajar. > ■ imconsciousness throws out, that she had things to say which touched some comfortless places in the man's heart. No Greek and Hebrew " original," no polished dogma, no Hnk in^his stereotyped logic, not one of his eloquent sermons on the future state, came to his relief. These were meant for happy days. They rang cold as steel upon the warm needs of an afllict- ed man. Brought face to face, and sharply, with the blank heaven of his belief, he stood up from before his dead, and groped about it, and cried out against it in the bitterness of his soul. " I had no chance to prepare myself to bow to the will of God," he said, his reserved mmisterial manner in curious contrast with the caged way in which he was pacing the room, — " I had no chance. I am taken by surprise, as by a thief in the night. I had a great deal to say to her, and there was no time. She coulS tell me what to do with my poor little children. I wanted to tell her other things. I wanted to tell her Perhaps we all of us have our regrets when %e Lord re- moves our friends; we may have done or left undone many things; we might have made them happier. My mind does not rest with assurance in its conceptions of the heavenly state. If I never can tell her" He stopped abruptly, and paced into the darkest shadows of the shadowed room, his face turned away. " You said once some pleasant thing about heaven?'' he said at last, half appealing, stopp- \ The Gates Ajar. 167 ing in front of her, hesitating; like a man sjid like a minister, hardly ready to come with all the learning of his schools and commentators and sit at the feet of a woman. She talked with him for a time in her unob- trusive way, deferring, when she honestly could, to his clerical judgment, and careful not to wound him by any word; but frankly and clearly, as she always talks. When she rose to go he thanked her quietly. " This is a somewhat novel train of thought to me," he said; "I hope it may not prove an imscriptmal one. I have been reading the book of Revelatioh to-day with these questions especially in mind. We are never too old to learn. Some passages may be capable of other interpretations than I have formerly given them. 1^0 matter what I m«A, you see, I must be guided by the Word of my God." Auntie says that she never respected the man so much as she did when, hearing those words, she looked up into his haggard face, convulsed with its human pain and longing. " I hope you do not think that / am not gixided by the Word of God," she answered." "I mean to be." " I know you meau to be," he said cordially. "I do not say that you are not. 1 may come to see that you are, and that you are right. It will be a peaceful day for me if I can ever quite agree with your methods of reasoning, fiut I must think tnese things over. I thank 168 The Oates Ajar. you once more for coining. Your sympathy is grateful to me." Just as she closed the door he called her back. " See/' he said, with a saddened smile. "At least I shall never preach this again. It seems to me that Ufe i^ always imdoing for us some- thing that • e ^ , e just laboriously done.'' He held uji d /orehim a mass of old blue manuscript, * 1 fcir w it, as he spoks, upontlie embers left in his grate. It smoked and blazed up and bu::ned out. It was that sermon on heaven, of which there is an abstract in this journal. 20th. Aunt Winifred hired Mr. Tripp's gray this afternoon, and drove to East Homer on some unexplained errand. She did not invite me to go with her, and Faith, though she teased im- pressively, was left at home. Her mother was gcme till late, — so late that I had begun to be anxious about her, and heard through the dark the first sound of the buggy wheels, with great relief. She looked very tired when I met er at the gate. She had not been able, she said, to accomplish her errand at East Homer, and from there had gone to Worcester by rail- road, leaving Old Gray at the East Homer Eagle till her return. She told me nothing mor^, and I asked no'^questions. -/ The Oaies Ajar, IS IS e e 1 CHAPTER XV. 29th. Dr. Bland gave us a good sermon yesterday. There is an indescribable change in p'^ his ser- mons. There is a change, too, in hi man, and that something more than the 1> e'g* Iness of grief. I not only respect him ?* I *in sorry for him, but I feel more ready to be j-r^ht by him than ever before. A certain indefinable humanness softens his eyes ana ^ones, 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 bv the expression of his face. I wondered if he were not slowly finding the " peaceful day," of which he told Aunt Winifred. Shej by the way, has taken another of her mysterious trips to Worcester. 30th. We were wondering to-day where it will be, —I meau heaven. " It is impossible to do more than wonder.' Auntie smd, *^ though we are explicitly told >n 170 The Gates Ajar. that there will be new heavens aiwia new earth, which seems, if anything can be taken Uterally 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 V " 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 buriecl, tmce over; but I know that somebody else claims with equal solemnity to have discovered that they could all be buried in the State of Penn- sylvania! But it would be of little consequence if we could not all find room here, since there must be other provision for^us." " Certainly" there is ' a place' ^in which we are promised tliat we shall be ' with Christ,' this world being yet the great theatre of human life and battle-ground of Satan; no place, cer- tainly, 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 woeful world. " The old astronomical idea, stars aroimd a sun, and systems around a centre, and that centre the Throne of God, is not an unreason- able one. Isaac Taylor, among his various conjectures, inclines,*! fancy, to suppose that the sun of each system is the heaven of that .i h The Gates Ajar. 171 V 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. 1 hope I shall be one of them. 1 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 alterations 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 Thermin's. Do vou re- member it? Do read it over, if you haven't read it lately. "As to our coming back here, there is an echo to St. Peter's assertion, in the idea of a world under a curse, destroyed and regenerated, — ^the atonement of Christ reaching, with some- thing 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 cleans- ng, what must be needed for you and me? " How many pleasant talks we have had about these things, Mary! Well, it cannot be 172 The Gates Ajar. long, at the longest, before vre know, even as we are known." I looked at her smilmg white face,— it is al- ways very white now, — and something struck slowly through me like a chill. October 16th, midnight. There is no such tiling as sleep at present. Writing is better than thinking. , Aunt Winifred w^nt 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 after- noon, — 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 attrac- tions,! surrendered unconditionally to the little maiden. She took me up garret, and down cellar, on top 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-temper- ed 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 buhnshes, and of what I was, the time laileth me to tell The Gatet Ajar. 173 > ^ 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 tremend- ous risKS of " I spy" absorbing all my present; while what was liappening was happenmg, 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 bv 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 mak- ing a chain of them. The picture that she made sitting there on the short, dying grass — the light which broke all about ner and over her at the first, creeping slowly down and away to the west, her little fingers Unking the rich, bright flowers tube into tube, the dimple on her cheek and tlie love in her eyes— has, pho- tographed itself into my thinking. How her voice rang out, when the wheels sounded at last, and the carriage, somewhat slowly driven, stopped I " Mamma, mamma ! see what IVe got for you, mamma!" * Auntie tried to step from the carriage, snd called me:—" Mary, can you help me a little? I am— tired.'' '' 174 The Gates Ajar. 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,mam- ma," began Faith, and stopped, struck by her mother's look. . V ^ ^ , i " 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. J| " 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 own 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. 1 sat down on my cricket by her sofa. " Shall Phoebe light the lamp ?" " Not just yet." "Can't you drink a cup of tea if I bring it V' "Not just yet." " Did you find the sack-trimming T I ven- tured, after a pause. r "I believe so, — yes." She drew a little package from her pocket, held it a moment, then let it roll to the floor 1' V \ The Gates Ajar. 175 forgotten. When I picked it up, the soft, tis- sue-paper wrapper was wet and hot with tears "Mary!" u-...;^..-. "Yes." ' i " I never thought of the little trimming till the last minute. I had another errand." I waited, -.^^^^i^^-'^^t^wi •■ " I, thought at first I would not tell you just yet. But I suppose the time has come; it will be no more easy to put it off. I have been to Worcester all tnese times to see a dqptor." I bent my head in the dark, and listened for the rest. ^ ^,.. . , " He has his reputation; they said he could help me if anybody could. He thought at first lie could. But to-day—Mary, see here." ,u^^, She walked feebly towards the window, where a faint, grey light struggled in, and opened the bosom of her dress There was silence between us for a long while after that; she went back to the sofa, and I took her hand and bowed my face over it, and so we sat. The leaves rustled out of doors. Faith, up- stairs, was singing herself to sleep with a dron- ing sound. " He talked of risking an operation," she said, at length, " but decided to-day that it was quite useless. I suppose I must give up and be sick now; I am feeling the reaction from having kept up so long. He thinks 1 shall not 176 The Gates Ajar» suffer a very great deal. He thinks he can re- lieve me, and that it may be soon over." "There is no chance ?" Sii "No chance." ;. I took both of her hands, and cried out, I believe,as I did that first night when she spoke tome of Roy, — "Auntie, Auntie, Auntie ! and tried to think what I was doing, but only cried out the more. " Why, Mary !" she said,—" why, Mary !" and again, as before, she passed her soft hand to and fro across my hair, till by and by I began to think, as I had thought before, that I could bear anything which God who loved us all— who sicrely loved all — should send. So then, after I had grown still, she began to tell me about it in her quiet voice, and the leaves rustled, and Faith had sung herself to sleep, and I hstened wondering. For there was no pain in the quiet voice, — no pain, nor tone or fear. Indeed, it seemed to me that I detected, through its subdued sadness, a secret, suppressed buoyancy of satisfaction, with which something struggled. "And you ?" I asked, turning quickly upon her, " I should thank God with all my heart,Mary, if it were not for Faith and you. But it is for Faith and you. That's all." When I had locked the front door, and was creeping up here to my room, my foot crushed something, and a faint, wounded perfume came up. It was the Lttle pink and purple chain. The Gates Ajar. 177 CHAPTER XVI. :fJT • iv H October 17th, " The Lord God A'mighty help us! but His ways are past finding out. What with one tiling and another thmg, that child soon to be without a mother, and you with the crape not yet rusty for Mr. Roy'l, it doos seem to me as if His manner of treating folks beats all! But I tell you this, Miss Mary, my dear, you jest say your prayers regular, and stick to iTtm^and Hell pull you through, sure!" This was what Phcebe said when I told her* * ^ November 8th. To-night, for the first time, Auntie fairly gave up trying to put Faith to bed. She had insisted on it until now, crawling up by the banisters hke a wounded thing. This time she tottered and sank upon the second step. She cried out, feebly " I am afraid I must give it up to Cousin Mary. Faith!" — the child clung with both hands to her, — "Faith, Faith! Mother's little girl !";^ It was the last dear care of motherhood yield- ed; the last link snapped. It seemed to be the very bitterness of parting. M .:fe 178 The Gates Ajar, I turned awav, that they mi>fht bear Jt to- gether, they two alone. 19th. Yet I think that took away the sting. The days are slipping away now very quietly, and — to her I am sure, and to me for her sake — very happily. .. . ^ i ; , ; u-a.^ She suffers less than I had feared, and 3he lies upon the bed and smiles, and Faith comes in and plays about, and the cheery ^ morning simshine falls on everything, and when her strong hours come, Wi^ have long talks togei:ik% hand clasped in hand. Such pleasant talks! We aveqifitelraveto speak of any thingj'since we know that vvl t is to be is best just so, and since we fear .lo pf.r ing, I tell her that Faith and I will j^oon learn to ut our eyes and thinly we see her, and try to imakeit almost the Tshm/ ^'or she will never be •very faraway, will ble And then she shakes her head smilingly, for it pleases her, aiid she kisses me softly. Then we dream of how it will all be, and how we shall love and try to .please each other quiet as much as now. " It will be like going around a corner, don't you see?" she says. "You will know that I am there all the while, though hidden, and that if you call me I shall hear." Then we talk of J|lh Faith, , and of how I shall comfort her ; that I shall / mother. ' Sometimes Faith comes up andwcints to know what we are saying, and lays poor Mary Ann, sawdust and all, upon the pillow, and wants " her toof -ache kissed away." So Aun- tie kisses away the dolly's "toof -ache"; and kisses the dolly's little mother, sometimes with a quiver on her hps, but more often with a smile in her eyes, and Faith runs back to play, and her laugh ripples out, and her mother li 5t- ens — hstens \. ^ .vi^a^iur^ i?*i v*rv.^- Sometimes, too, we talk of some of the peo- ple for whom she cares; of her husban^rs mends; of her scholars, or Dr. Bland, or Olo. or poor 'Bin Quirk, or of somebody down to^n whom she was planning to help this winter. Little Clo comes in as often as she is strong enough to see her, and sends over untold jel- lies and blanc-manges, which Faith and I have to eat. "But don't let the child know that." .-, ; jfV. 'A M,- "yr ^"f^^^i^ Auntie says* ' But more often we talk of the Ufe whica^ is so soon to begin; of her husband ^nd is/if, of what she will try to say to Christ; Ixw much dearer He has grown to her nnce she has lain here in pain at His biddin, and how he helps her, at morning and at e\ wUtide and in the night-watches. We talk of the trees and the mountains and the liUes in the garden, on w xh the glory ol the light that is not the light of the sun may shine; of the "little brooks" by which she longs to sit and sing to Faith; of the treasui'es of art which she may fancy to have about her; ot the home in which her busbar d may be mak- 180 The Gates Ajar. ing ready for her coming, and we v/under what he has'there, and if he knows how near the time is now. But I notice lately that she more often and more quickly wearies of these things; that she comes back, and comes back again to some lov- ing thought — as loving as a child's — of Jesus Christ. He seems to be — as she once said she tried that He should be to Faith — her " best friend.; ■wim^'i'^m ^i ^'>-a;:^?Qr \ Sometimes, too, we wonder what it means to piass out of the body, and what one will be first conscious of. ^m, v^/*'/n'ti,r um..\m&u^^ " I used to have a very h man, and by no means slight, dread of the physical pain of death," she said to-day; " but, for some reason or other, that is slowly leaving me. I imagine that the suffering of any fatal sickness is worse than the immediate process ot dissolution. Then there is so much beyond it to occupy one's the lights. One thing I have thougiit much about; it is that, whatever may be our first experience after leaving the body. It is not likely to be a revolutionary one. It is more in analogy with God's dealings that a quiet pro- cess, a gentle accustoming, should open our eyes on the light that would blind if it came in a flash. Perhaps we shall not see Him — per- haps we could not bear it ^to see Him at once. It may be that the faces of familiar human iriends will be the first to greet us; it may be that the touch of the human hand dearer than any but His own shall lead us, as we are able, t The Gaffes Ajar. 181 ' behind the veil, till we are a little used to the glory and the wonder, and lead us so to 6im. " Be that as it may. and be heaven where it n:iay, I am not afraid. With all my guessing and my studying and my dreaming over these things., I am only a child in the dark. * Never- theless, I am not afraid of the dark.' God bless Mr. Robertson for saying that! I'm going to bless him when i see him. How plea- sant it will be to see him, and some other friends whose faces 1 never saw in this world. David, for instance, or St. Paul, or Cowper, or President Lincoln, or Mrs. Browning. The only trouble is that / am nobody to them. How- ever, I fancy that they will let me shake hands with them. **No, I am quite willing ^ trust all these things to God. ■Hi.' * And what if much be still unknown? Th)'- Lord shall teach thee that, When thou shalt stand before His throne, Or sit as Mary sat. ' I may find them very different from what I have supposed. I know that I shall find them infinitely more satisfying than I have supposed. As Schiller said of liis philosophy, ' Perhaps I may be ashamed of my raw design, at the sight of the true original. This may happen; I ex- pect it; but then, if reality bears no resemblance to my dreams, it will be a more majestic, a more delightful surprise.' " I beheve nothing that God denies. I can- not overrate the beauty of His promise, So it 182 The Gates Ajar. surely can have done no harm for me to take the comfort of my fancying till I am there ; and what a comfort it has been to me, God only knows. I could scarcely have borne some things without it." " You are never afraid that anything prov- ing a little different from what you expect might" " Might disappoint me? No; I have settled that in my heart with God. I do not think I shall be disappointed. The truth is, Helms obviously not openec^the gates which bar heaven from our sight, but He has as obviously not t^Ai^^ them; they stand aiar, with the Bible and reason in the way, to keep them from clos- ing; surely we should look in as far as we can, and surely, if we look with reverence, our eyes willbe hoiden, that we may not cheat our- selves with mirages. And, as the Httle Swe- dish girl said, the first time she saw the stars: * father, if the wrong side of heaven is so beautiful, what must the right dde be?"' January. I write Httle now, for I am Uving too much. The days are stealing away and lessening one by one, and still Faith plays about the room, though very softly now, and still the cheery sunshine shimmers in, and still we talk with clasping hands, less often and more pleasantly. Morning and noon and evening come and go; the snow drifts down and the rain falls softi.r; (jlouds form and break and hurry past the wib« ' The Gates Ajar, 183 I dows; shadows nidt and lights are shattered, and little rainbows are prisoned by the icicles that hang from the eaves. I sit and watch them, and watch the sick- lamp flicker in the night, and watch the blue morning crawl over the hills; and the old words are steaUngdownmy thought: — That is the sub- stance, this the shadow; that the reality, this the dream. , . ., I watch her face upon the pillow; the happy secret on its Kps; the smile within its eyes. It is nearly a year now since God sent the face to me. What it has done for me He knows; what the next year and all the years are to be with- out it, He knows, too. It is sHpping away, — slipping. And I — must — lose it. Perhaps I should not have said what I said to-night; but being weak from watchiiig, and seeing how glad she was to go, seeing how all the peace was for her^ all the pain for us, I cried, "0 Auntie, Auntie, why can't we go too] Why can't Faith and I go with you?" But she answered me only, ** Mary, He knows." We will be brave again to-morrow. A little more sunshine in the room? A little more of Faith and the dolly I The Sabbath. Sheftskedforthechildatbedtimeto-night,and I laM ber down in her night-dress on her mo^ 184 The Gates Ajar, ther's arm. She kissed her, and said her prayers, and talked a bit about Mary Ann, and to-morrow, and her snow man. I sat over by the window in the dusk, and watched a little creamy cloud that was folding in the moon. Presently their voices grew low, and at last Fath's stopped altogether. Then I heard in frag- ments this: — "Sleepy, dear! But you won't have many more talks with mamma. Keep awake just a minute, Faith, and hear— can you hear? Mam- ma will never, never forget her little girl; she won't ffo away very far; she will always love " you. Will you remember as long as you live? She will always see you, though you can't see her perhaps. Hush, my darling, donH cry! Isn t God naughty] No, God is good; God is always good. He won't take mamma a great way oft One more kiss'^ There ! Now you may go to sleep. One more ! Come, Cousin Mary." r-^BiU^^r June 6th. vi- -^ i^#> vi; h It is a long time since I have written here. I did not want to open the book till I was sure that I could open it quietly, and could speak as she would like to have me speak, of what remains to be written. But a very few words will tell it all. It happened so naturally and so happily, she was so md when the time came,and she made me so glad for her sake, that I cannot grieve. \\ The Gates A, or. 185 I say it from my honest heart, I cannot meve. In tne place out of which she has gone,she has left me peace. I think of something that Miss Procter said about the opening of tnat golden gate, ** Round which the kneeling spirits wait. The halo seems to linger round those kneeling closest to the door: The joy that lightened from that place shines still upon the watcher's face." I think, more often of some things that she her- self said in the very last of those pleasant talks, when, turning a leaf in her little Bible, she pointed out to me the words: — " It is expedient for you that I po away; for. if I go not away, the Comforter will not come. It was one spring-like night — the twenty- ninth of March, ^.ft^ She had been in less pain, and had chatted and laughed more with us than for many a day. She begged that Faith might stay till dark,and might bring her Noah's ark and play down upon the foot of the bed where she could see her. I sat in the rocking-chair with my face to the window. We did not light the lamps. The night came on slowly. Showery clouds flitted by,but there was a blaze of golden colour behind them. It broke through and scattered them; it burned them and melted them; it shot great pink and purple jets up to the ze- nith; it fell and lay in amber mist upon the hills. A soft wind swept by, and darted now IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) 1.0 I.I 11.25 Utfli 125 ■ SO ■^™ ■■■ liQ 111112.0 1.4 12.2 1.6 V y] Photographic Sciences Corporation 23 WIST MAIN STMIT WEBSTER, N.Y. 14SS0 (716) 872-4503 186 Tht Gates Ajar. and then into the glow, and shifted it about, colour away from colour, and back again. " See,Faith!" she said softly; "put down the little camel a minute, and look,^' and added after, but neither to the child nor to me, it seemed: " At eventide there shall be Hght." Phoebe knocked presently, and I went out to see what was wanted, and planned a little for Auntie's breakfast, and came back. Faith, with her little ark, was still playitig quietly upon the bed. I sat down again in my rocking-chair with mv face to the window. Now and then the child's voice broke the islence, asking where should she put the ele- Ehant, and was there room there for the yellow ird? and now and then her mother answered her, arid so presently the skies had faded, and so the night came on. r was thinking that it was Faith's bedtime, and that I had oetter light the lamp, when a few distinct, hurried words from the bed at- tracted my attention. " Faith, I think you had better kiss mamma now, and get down." v There was a change in the voice. I was there in a moment, and lifted the child from the pillow, where she had crept. But she said, " Wait a mhmte," — for Faith clung to her, with one hand upon her cheek, softly pat- ting it. I went over and stood by the window. It was her mother herself who gently put the little finders away at last, 1^' The Gates Ajar. m i^ " M^thei-'s own little girl! Good night, my darling, my darling." So I took the child away to Phcebe, and came back, and shut the door. " I thought you might have some message for Roy," she said. "Now?" " Now, I think." . *' We had often talked of this, and she had Eromised to remember it, whatever it might e. So I told her But I will not write what I told her.* 4 * A striking instance of a message sent by a dying friend occurred some years ago. A lady was watching by the bed of a relative, who ex- pressed very strongly the assurance that