IV
But secretly she knew her most perilous enemy. It was not sadness, or selfishness, or the Voices, or the odd wilderness of a determined recluse. It was Eternity.
There was no telling when Eternity might claim her. Sometimes she awoke at dawn, and went down into the dewy garden to work among the roses and iris and pansy plants, with the birds all singing and the sun dancing like a great wise morning star. The day wore on, as she digged and transplanted and clipped and watered, till, weary a little, she went into the house and took up the endless bit of sewing, or some story or poem to finish. And all at once, in spite of the sun, the earth-smell, the brisk village-sounds beyond her garden-fence, she knew that her anchor dragged,—she had slipped her moorings in the safe harbor of Time, and was drifting off, off into Eternity.
Then she cared nothing for rose-bugs, or iris-roots, or stockings to darn, or stories to read. She thought of Love, and Sin, and Death; of nations at war and her friends' souls in joy or agony, of God Himself,—and they were all as nothing. She saw the flickering garden, she heard the song-sparrow and the clucking hen, she felt her own scrubbed and earth-stained fingers and her beating heart, but these were not necessary to her. She was terribly remote; terribly careless and still and proud; for she was in Eternity.
'What does it all matter?' she would murmur. 'What if they drink and steal and sin and die? or love and lose and win and die too? And what of me? What of me?—We are all in Eternity. God Himself is in Eternity.'
But she kept the peril close. None of the neighbors, who hailed her on the street or gossiped on the vine-hung porch, ever noticed that often, as she talked, she would clasp her hands with a sudden fierce little gesture, as if she were holding tight to some strong arm, and that in her heart she was whispering, even while the swift crooked smile danced across her lips, 'O God, make me remember! make me remember! We're in Time, now: not in Eternity yet: not in Eternity yet!'
