I laid the wood across and started the fire, and it blazed and gave light, and threw strange shadows about the room, and I kneeled beside it, on the hearth, as I used sometimes when I was a little child, and warmed my hands, and still I cried, and there was no one to comfort me.
Mally says she would have been afraid—in that room. I cannot understand. It is because her dearest have not died. What of him could have been anything but precious? To have felt his spirit near me! That would indeed have been holy consolation.
But what if that were true? I do not know. While I so crouched in the chimney corner, my heart bleeding, and the tears bathing my poor face, there was a soft touch, lighter than the flight of a thistledown, passing over my head, as if the gentlest hand God himself could make gentle had smoothed my hair, and sought to comfort me.
Then some one said: “I came here to be with you.” But I do not know whether it was I who so said in my own heart, or whether the words were spoken to my ear. I only know that I was comforted, and the fire warmed my aching limbs, and my head drooped against the wall, and I slept with long sobs, as I slept once when I was a child, and my dear father ministered to me.
It was broad daylight when I awoke, and I felt soothed and strong. I rose to go and make ready to lock and leave the house. But first I knelt and prayed, and I am praying still.
Live in me, O God, as my father lives in me, and as thou didst live in him. Let me live the life and die the death which he sought to live, to die, for thee. Give thou unto him through me abiding fruit in the salvation of souls; and grant us such grace as that we may humbly and worthily fulfil thy gracious will, I on earth, as he in heaven.
CHAPTER VII
She [Dorothea] could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp, and artificial protrusions of drapery.—Middlemarch, George Eliot.
A small house in a small street of a small provincial city. A faded brown house with its front door directly on the street, the steps jutting into the sidewalk. A narrow strip of yard overlaid with grimy snow separated this house from others on either side, equally unnotable and uninteresting, the dwellings of mechanics and small tradesmen.
It was the close of a rough March day, the wind had not died with sunsetting, and a thin, piercing rain, colder than snow, was driven before it into the very teeth of the few passers-by.