"But, oh! mother," the little one resumed with a tremulous voice, "what will it be like, that Great Day? I saw the Kaiser come into the city with the horsemen and the trumpets, and the crowd I thought would have crushed father and me, and broken down the bridge on which we stood. Will it be like that? Only, the horsemen great angels in the clouds, and the trumpets thunders, and the whole earth trembling and shaking as the bridge trembled beneath that rushing crowd, and everything falling to pieces? Will it be like the great fire when half the street was burned down—only, instead of half the street, all the world? fire, and nowhere to flee to? What will that dreadful Day be like?"
"My darling, I know not. No one knows. But the great question for us all is not, what will the Day be like? but what is the Judge like?"
"And, oh! mother, how are we to know that?"
"Think of the dear Babe in the manger," she said; "think of the patient Sufferer on the cross; think of the gracious One in the picture taking the little child in His arms; think of the story of His watching the poor widow giving her half farthings, and being pleased with her."
"Will the Judge be the same as that, mother?"
"The very same. Not what it will be like, not what the Day will be like—what He is like matters to us, and what pleases Him."
III.
On the next morning Baron Ivo woke from a heavy sleep, and shook his night thoughts of his wronged kinsman angrily from him.
The stir of life was in the castle; his labourers going out to his fields, his woodmen to his forests, his men-at-arms jesting as they brightened their weapons, whilst one in a full bass voice carolled out half unconsciously a phrase of the very hymn which had appalled them all the night before, "Apparebit repentina;" but it sounded dream-like, as the voice of an owl by day. Baron Ivo stood once more on the solid ground of possession. If the Great Day were to come this very year, it was only a little sooner than they had feared; and to-day was here, and had to be lived. Let the morrow take care of the things of itself! One thing, indeed, he did. To give up the castle and atone to his kinsman was indeed a wild fancy; but he would accept the ransom of that latest captive and set him free. And, although the ransom was in itself a robbery, it might have been larger; and so he congratulated himself on having done a good deed.