“Names? What matter, to the stranger passing, who lie beneath the stone? As for the meaning, let those who come and go question till it appear.”
“I’m the first questioner, Miriamne. The application?”
“Remember that my mother, in her almost solitary grief, held her dead children for a time against her broken heart, but it was a heart filled with a mother-love which never faltered. There is nothing in love surpassing such on earth. Then at last, when her life work was done, her cup full, my mother, as her final consolation, held to her heart the Son whose death gives life, as yon Madonna holds the Christ.”
“I bow to Miriamne’s judgment; the creation is appropriate; Glorious Madonna!”
“I have a hope that it may stand here in the Hauran an enduring sermon to the varied races who pass. They who come and go here, reminded that the Nephalim with all their arrogant might left little but their crumbling tombs; that Astarte, once the potent, dangerous goddess of the groves, here faded from the love of her fevered hosts, who themselves in turn faded from the face of the earth, may pause to question what the meaning and power of this last, new, fresh presentment! Perhaps they will hear from those made wise, and in time learn to tell one another, that these two figures speak of the Deathless Kingdom, its white loves, its wondrous rewards and its Spirit of might expressed by all who are in it through the power of an endless life, and through the agency of immortal influence.”
“Miriamne, I see thee a palpitating angel in the flesh! I can say no more!”
As the young missioner thus spoke he stretched out his arms toward the woman he loved as if he would restrain her. The motion came from his heart, which was anxiously saying within: “She is growing upward and away from her consort.” But he had neither courage nor words to voice the vague thought which brought admiration mixed with fears.
They turned toward their temporary home in the Giant City. As they went, the rising sun flooded the marble forms by the graves with a golden light, and the twain, beholding the glory of that morning benediction, felt an illumining in their hearts that some way made heaven seem very near.
“And now, darling, we’ll return to Jerusalem, and quietly pursue our work until we join those loved ones gone on before,” spoke the husband the day after the monument’s unveiling.
“I trust we shall work in future with better plans and grander results than we have had before.”