“Oh, my poor child, she is safe with the Lord. Do you really know who God is?”
“Mr. Travis’s Lord Jesus lives in heaven,” said Dil, in a kind of weary, half-puzzled tone. “He told us how he come down to some place, I disremember now, an’ cured hurted people, an’ made blind folks see, an’ fed the hungry, an’ went back an’ fixed a beautiful pallis for them. There’s lots more in Barker’s Court that they swear by, but them ain’t the ones Mr. Travis meant.”
The nurse was as much astonished by the confident ignorance as Mr. Travis had been, and felt quite as helpless.
“I wish you could believe that little Bess is in heaven,” she said gently.
“She couldn’t be happy athout me,” the poor child replied confidently, with tears in her faltering voice. “I always tended her, an’ curled her hair, an’ wheeled her about, an’—an’ loved her so.” The tone sank to a touching pathos. “An’ she didn’t go crost no river—she couldn’t stand up ’thout bein’ held. An’ oh, do you s’pose I’d gone an’ left Bess for anything? No more would she gone an’ left me.”
The brown eyes were heart-breaking in their trustful simplicity. The child’s confidence was beyond any stage of persuasion. With time one might unravel the tangle in her untutored brain, but she could not in the brief while the child would remain in the hospital.
“Tell me about your friend, Mr. Travis,” the nurse said, after a silence of some moments.
“He painted pictures, an’ he made a beautiful one of Bess. But mammy burned it with the book. She said there wasn’t any heaven anyway. An’ Mrs. Murphy said it was purgatory, ’n’ if you paid money, you’d get out. But Bess would go there. An’ he didn’t say nothin’ ’bout purgatory. He come one day an’ sang the beautifullest hymn ’bout ’everlastin’ spring,’ an’ everybody cried. Poor old Mrs. Bolan was there. But when he comes back he’ll tell me just how it is.”
Perhaps that was best. Nurse went about her duties, the strange, sweet, entire faith haunting her. And the pathos of the two setting out for a literal heaven!
There were days when Dil sat in a vague, absent mood, her eyes staring into vacancy, seeming to hear nothing that went on about her. But she improved slowly; and though the nurse tried to persuade her to go to some friends of hers, she found the child wonderfully resolute.