With the beloved nurse it is the same in a sense; but here it is not the deep inextricable bond of blood, but the bond of perfect love. I lose myself in wonder in thinking of it; that one who is hired—that is the strange basis of the relationship—for a simple task, should become absolutely identified with love, with those whom she serves. I do not believe that Susan has a single thought or desire in the world that is not centred on my mother or myself. The tie between us is simply indissoluble. And I feel that if we wandered, we three spirits, disconsolate and separate, through the trackless solitudes of heaven, she would somehow find her way to my side.
I have noticed that since my illness began she has slipped into the use of little nursery phrases which I have not heard for years; I have become “Master Henry” again, and am told to “look slippy” about taking my medicine. This would have moved me in other days with a sense of pathos; it is not so now, though the knowledge that these two beloved, sweet-minded, loving women suffer, is the one shadow over my tranquillity. If I could only explain to them that my sadness for their sorrow is drowned in my wonder at the strangeness that any one should ever sorrow at all for anything!
38
Sep. 22, 1900.
To-day I am calmer, and the hours have been passing in a long reverie; I have been thinking quietly over the past years. Sometimes, as I lay with eyes closed, the old life came so near me that it almost seemed as if men and women and children, some of them dead and gone, had sate by me and spoken to me; little scenes and groups out of early years that I thought I had forgotten suddenly shaped themselves. It is as if my will had abdicated its sway, and the mind, like one who is to remove from a house in which he had long dwelt, is turning over old stores, finding old relics long laid aside in cupboards and lumber-rooms, and seeing them without sorrow, only lingering with a kind of tender remoteness over the sweet and fragrant associations of the days that are dead.
I have never doubted that I am to die, and to-day it seems as though I cared little when the parting comes; death does not seem to me now like a sharp close to life, the yawning of a dark pit; but, as in an allegory, I seem to see a little dim figure, leaving a valley full of sunlight and life, and going upwards into misty and shapeless hills. I used to wonder whether death was an end, an extinction—now that seems impossible—my life and thought seem so strong, so independent of the frail physical accompaniments of the body; but even if it is an end, the thought does not afflict me. I am in the Father’s hands. It is He that hath made us.