“And why had you rather come and sit here than play?”
“Because there is a secret, and I want to try and find it out. I dare not tell you, for you might tell papa and grandmamma, and they would be angry.”
“But your mamma—you could surely tell mamma; I always tell everything to mine.”
“Do you? and have you got a mamma? Then, perhaps you could help me in finding out all about mine. You must know,” added the child, lifting up her eager face with an air of mystery, “when I was very little, I lived away from here—I never saw my mamma, and my nurse always told me that she had 'gone away.' A little while since, when I came home—my home is there,” and she pointed to what seemed the vicarage-house, glimmering whitely through the trees—“they told me mamma was here, under this stone, but they would tell me nothing more. Now, what does it all mean?”
Olive perceived by these words, that the child was playing upon her mother's grave. Only it seemed strange that she should have been left so entirely ignorant with regard to the great mysteries of death and immortality. Miss Rothesay was puzzled what to answer.
“My child, if your mamma be here, it is her body only.” And Olive paused, startled at the difficulty she found in explaining in the simplest terms the doctrine of the soul's immortality. At last she continued, “When you go to sleep do you not often dream of walking in beautiful places and seeing beautiful things, and the dreams are so happy that you would not mind whether you slept on your soft bed or on the hard ground? Well, so it is with your mamma; her body has been laid down to sleep, but her mind—her spirit, is flying far away in beautiful dreams. She never feels at all that she is lying in her grave under the ground.”
“But how long will her body lie there? and will it ever wake?”
“Yes, it will surely wake, though how soon we know not, and be taken up to heaven and to God.”
The child looked earnestly in Olive's face. “What is heaven, and what is God?”
Miss Rothesay's amazement was not unmingled with horror. Her own religious faith had dawned so imperceptibly—at once an instinct and a lesson—that there seemed something awful in this question of an utterly untaught mind.