“No; for I have seen my mother die. Her last breath was on my mouth. I felt her spirit pass, and I knew that it was passing unto God.”
“And you can rejoice?”
“Yes; since for all I lose on earth, heaven—the place of souls, which we call heaven, whatever or wherever that may be—grows nearer to me. It will seem the more my home, now I have a mother there.”
Harold Gwynne fell on his knees at the bedside, crying out:
“Oh, God! that I could believe!”
CHAPTER XXXIII.
It was again the season of late summer; and Time's soothing shadow had risen up between the daughter and her grief. The grave in the beautiful churchyard of Har-bury was bright with many months' growth of grass and flowers. It never looked dreary—nay, often seemed almost to smile. It was watered by no tears—it never had been. Those which Olive shed were only for her own loneliness, and at times she felt that even these were wrong. Many people, seeing how calm she was, and how, after a season, she fell into her old pursuits and her kindly duties to all around, used to say, “Who would have thought that Miss Rothesay would have forgotten her mother so easily?”
But she did not forget. Selfish, worldly mourners are they, who think that the memory of the beloved lost can only be kept green by tears. Olive Rothesay was not of these. To her, her mother's departure appeared no more like death, than did one Divine parting—with reverence be it spoken!—appear to those who stood and looked upward from the hill of Bethany. And thus should we think upon all happy and holy deaths—if we fully and truly believed the faith we own.
Olive did not forget her mother—she could as soon have forgotten her own soul. In all her actions, words, and thoughts, this most sacred memory abided—a continual presence, silent as sweet, and sweet as holy. When her many and most affectionate friends had beguiled her into cheerfulness, so that they fancied she had put aside her sorrow, she used to say in her heart, “See, mother, I can think of you and not grieve. I would not that it should pain you to know I suffer still!”