Chapter XXII

Thus the grave yawns for another victim, and having swallowed him, and a million more that same day, returns to its former state of insatiable famished greed. It is a law--natural, wise, and comprehensible by the feeblest understanding--that all created beings, in which there is progressive life, must come forth, ripen, decay, and fall. But why, oh! why, in too many cases does the decay and fall forerun the ripening? Why is so many a worm permitted to gnaw out so many a closed bud's green heart? Why is the canker death allowed to pasture on so many an unblown life? Why are so many little toddling children, not yet come into the heritage of reason to which we are all by our human birth entitled, borne from their mother's emptied arms to their small short graves? Is it, as Hartley Coleridge very nobly, whether truly or untruly, said--

"God only made them for his Christ to save?"

Very wasteful is the mighty mother, knowing that her materials are inexhaustible. And so they lay Jack down in the wormy grave.

"Bear, bear him along,
With his few faults shut up like dead flow'rets."

No one will ever abuse him or say anything ill-natured of him again; for to speak evil of the helpless, speechless, answerless dead, requires a heart as bad, a nature as cowardly vile, as his must be that foully murders a young child. And the mourners go home, and take off their hatbands and scarves, and give them to their wives to make aprons of. And old Luath lies in the hall, watching still, with ears attentively pricked at any incoming footstep, and hope drooping, as day droops too, begins to howl dismally towards sun-down.

And Esther--"You ought not to grieve for him; it is a happy change for him; he is in Heaven!" So they had said to her weepingly, as people do say to us, when the desire of our eyes has left us; but even as they spake them, she felt that they were but words, hollow and empty as the greetings in the market-place with which we salute our indifferent acquaintance. Was she so sure that the change had been a happy one? It was a change from the known to the unknown, from moderate certain evils, and moderate probable good, to infinite possibilities of horror or blessedness. Where lay this heaven, this promised land, where we so confidently lodge our dead? Was it up above that highest bluest arch that looks in truth pure enough, and solid enough, to be the floor of some sweet elysium? Ah! no! Human knowledge, that like a naughty, prying child, has found out at once so infinitely too much and too little, tells us that that skyey vault is but thin air. She thinks, shuddering--"What if heaven itself be but thin air? _Is it anywhere?_ What if its existence at all be but the fine-spun fancy of poor human hearts, that must needs frame for themselves some blessed definite hope, since _real_ hope have they none? Is it a beautiful tender fraud practised by themselves upon themselves, to save them from the despair of the black vagueness into which they must send out their departed ones, and go out themselves when life's little day is over? Oh, light! light! When the great God said, 'Let there be light!' in the material world, why did not He say so too in the world of spirits? I know that my soul shall live for ever! I know that there is that within me over which the most insatiable of monsters, insatiabler than any slain in classic tale--a monster that turns beauty to unsightliness, whose handmaid is corruption, and whose drink is tears--has no power. But alas! alas! can I rejoice in my immortality, when I know not where, or under what conditions, those endless, endless æons will roll themselves away into the past?"

* * * * *

"We must bow beneath the rod," says old Mrs. Brandon, nodding her head and her poke bonnet. It is the identical poke bonnet, and not another, in which she once paid her congratulatory visit. The summer sun had browned it a little, but otherwise it is in a state of high efficiency. "We must bow beneath the rod, knowing that it is a _tender Father's_ hand that wields it."

"I suppose so," answers Esther, listlessly. To her it seems a matter of indifference whose hand it was that inflicted such an immedicable hurt, seeing that it has been inflicted by some one, and now yawns, a gaping rift in her soul, never to be assuaged by any balsam.

"Suppose!" cries Miss Bessy, her long, uncertain nose reddening a little in her righteous zeal, at the slackness of Esther's faith. "Surely, surely, if we are _Believers_, there can be no '_suppose_' in such a case."

"I did not mean to express any doubt," Esther says, gently, but wearily.

"_Suppose_ will not do us much good at the _Last Day_," continues Miss Bessy, rather venomously. "Unless we can lay fast hold upon Jesus" (_laying hold of a roll of paper to exemplify the tenacity of her own grasp_[1]), "unless we have assurance that we are _Elect_, where are we?"

"If it is any comfort to you, love, you know that you have our prayers," says Mrs. Brandon, squeezing Esther's hand.

"We have set apart a special day with several Christian friends," says Bessy, with animation, "to wrestle in prayer for you, that this searching dispensation may be blessed to your conversion--that you may find the Lord."

"Thanks," answers Esther, meekly, too broken-down to resent even the indignity of being set up on a metaphorical stool of repentance, amid a select circle of Miss Bessy's Christian friends.

"If we could send you anything from Plas Berwyn--" begins Mrs. Brandon.

"Any books or leaflets," interrupts Bessy.

"Any eatables, or anything of that kind," amends her mother. "I daresay you have not been thinking much about housekeeping lately, my poor child; and you know whenever you feel inclined to come to us _for good_, you will always find open hearts and open arms," concludes the good old woman, suiting her action to her words, and folding Esther in a black bombazine embrace.

"Thank you very much," replies the girl, gratefully, her low, sad voice almost smothered by her mamma-in-law's bonnet strings, amongst which her little disconsolate head is lying _perdue_.

"We are only broken cisterns, you should remember, mamma," says Bessy, a little reprovingly of her parent's carnal materialism; "leaky vessels, all of us! You should direct Esther to the one _Ebenezer_."

The race of Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite, is by no means extinct: if not in the male line, at all events in the female, it still survives in the person of many a Miss Bessy Brandon.

* * * * *

Brandon has been busy all day with Jack's lawyer: returning in the afternoon, he finds Esther sitting on the study window-ledge, on which she and Jack used to sit on summer nights, and watch the little feathery, plumy clouds sail along the sky's sapphire sea; used to watch

"The large white stars rise one by one,"

and speculate who lived in them, and what they were made of. Jack has entered into the ranks of the initiated, but she still sits and wonders.

"Come out for a stroll, Essie," says the young man, stooping over her till his yellow beard, curly as a bull's forehead, almost touches her dark, drooped head.

"If you like," she answers, indifferently; and so drags herself slowly up, and walks away heavily to get ready.

"Where shall we go?" inquires he, as they stand at the farmyard gate. The callow Cochin chickens have grown up, and are stalking about, in all the dignity of long, yellow legs and adolescence, under the frames of the corn-ricks, "Where shall we go?--to see my mother?"

"That would be returning her visit almost too promptly," answers the young girl, with a weary smile; "it is not more than half an hour since they left this house."

"_They!_ Were my sisters here too, then?" inquires Bob, quickly; his confidence in his sisters' infallibility as to words and actions not being so perfect as in his mamma's. "I hope their coming did not worry you much."

"Nothing worries me now," she answers, calmly; "I defy anything to worry, or anger, or frighten me. Do you remember a line of Mrs. Barrett Browning's? Oh no, by-the-bye, you never read poetry--

"'Fallen too low for special fear.'

"That is exactly my case."

"I never know the right sort of thing to say, don't you know," remarks Brandon, rather awkwardly, looking down, and poking about little pebbles with the end of his stick. "But I had hoped that mother might have hit upon something that would have comforted you a little."

"She meant to, I am sure," replies Esther, gravely. "She was very kind, and so were the girls, I suppose; only some of Bessy's speeches rather reminded me of Eliphaz the Temanite's, 'Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished, being innocent? or where were the righteous cut off?'"

"I wish to heaven that Bessy could be possessed with a dumb devil!" says that young lady's brother, looking up, red with sudden anger. "No one should ever have my leave to try and cast it out."

"Let us go to the common," Esther says, abruptly, not heeding him.

[1] A fact.