"I can't account for it myself," Dorris continued, "but I enjoy your company as much now as I did before we were married. It does me as much good to talk love to you; I suppose it must be because you deserve it. The fact that you are as careful to look well as you ever did may have something to do with it, but it is certainly the case. I have heard men abused a great deal for neglecting their wives after marriage, but it never occurs to me to neglect you. I don't want to neglect you; I think too much of you. If I should fail to be as considerate of you as you are of me, I know that I would no longer receive the full measure of your confidence and love, which is such a comfort to me, therefore it is my first ambition to be just and honest with you in everything. The ambition affords me a great deal of pleasure, too, for I am never so well satisfied as when in your company. With you by my side, there is nothing else that I crave in this world or the next."
"O Allan! Nothing in the next?"
They had seated themselves on a rough seat in a sort of park on the hillside, and Dorris considered the matter.
"Well, if you go to heaven, I want to go. Of course you will go, for you are good enough, therefore I intend to do the best I can, so that, when we come to be judged, the Master will realize how much we love each other, and conclude not to separate us. But I depend on you; He will let me in to please you—not because I deserve it."
"I know you do not think as I do about it," she answered, "but it is possible that you have not investigated as I have. I am not a foolish girl, but a serious woman, and have studied and thought a great deal, and I am certain there is something more than this life. I have never mentioned the subject to you before, because I know that a great many come to dislike religion because they hear so much of it from persons no better than themselves, but everything teaches us that we shall live again, and it worries me a great deal because you think lightly about a matter which seems so dreadfully serious. My mother's faith convinces me of it, though I cannot tell you why. I am not prepared, as she was, by a long life of purity to receive the evidence; but promise me that you will think about it, and not combat your own judgment."
"I have never thought about it much, and investigated but little," he answered. "It has always been natural for me to think of the grave as the end of everything, so far as I am concerned. But I have confidence in your intelligence and judgment; if you have investigated, and believe, that is enough for me; I believe. Please do not worry about it any more; I will try very hard to remain with you."
He said it lightly, yet there was enough seriousness in his manner to convince her that his love for her was honest, even if his religion was not.
"Religion is not natural with me: I feel no necessity for it or lack of it," he said again. "But I have no objection to it; on the contrary, I have always liked the idea, but I lack the necessary faith. It would be pleasant for me to believe that, in the next country, a day's journey removed, good gifts might be found; but if I could not believe it, I could not be reasonably blamed for my refusal to attempt the journey. I might even regret that the accounts were not true; but I would not insist that they were true against my honest convictions, because I hoped they were. I am religious enough in sentiment, but my brain is an inexorable skeptic. Nothing is more pleasing to me than the promise of your faith. What a blessed hope it is, that after death you will live in a land of perpetual summer; and exist forever with your friends where there is only peace and content! I am sure I can never see as much of you as I want to in this life, and I cannot tell you how much I hope we will be reunited beyond the grave, and live forever to love each other, even as we do now. I am willing to make any sacrifice necessary to ensure this future; it would be a pleasure for me to make greater sacrifices than are required, according to common rumor, for they are not at all exacting, except in the particular of faith; but that I lack, to a most alarming extent, though I cannot help it. You cannot have faith because it is your duty any more than you can love because it is your duty. I only regret that I cannot be religious as naturally as I love you, but I cannot, though I try because you want me to. I want to believe that men do not grow old and become a burden to themselves and those around them; but I know differently, and while I hope that there will be a resurrection, I know that those who have gone away on the journey which begins with death send back no messenger, and that nothing is known of heaven except the declaration of pious people that they believe in it. I love to hear the laughter of children, but it does not convince me that all the world is in a laughing mood, and that there are no tears. No one can find fault with your religion except that they cannot believe in it. Everything in nature teaches us that we will return to dust, and that we will be resurrected only as dust by the idle winds. You don't mind that I speak freely?"
"No."
"I have tried all my life to convince myself that I possessed the spark of immortality, but my stubborn brain resists the attempt. All my reasoning convinces me that I live for the same reason that my horse exists. I am superior to the faithful animal only in intelligence, for in physical organization I am only an animal. When an animal dies, I see its body dwindle away until there is nothing left; it becomes dust again. I hope that I may share a different fate, but I believe that I shall pass away in precisely the same manner. Understand me; I want to be religious, but I cannot be. There are some people—I suppose there are a great many, though I never knew but one personally—who ought to live forever; they are too rare to die. You are one of them, but I fear you will be lost to the world in the course of nature. You ought to be preserved for the good you can accomplish by playing the organ. I never believe in heaven so much as when I am in the back pews listening to your music. There is more religion in the old organ when you are at the keyboard than in all the people who listen to it put together; and I sometimes think that those who write the music and the songs are inspired, though when you know them, their personal characters do not encourage that impression."