“Now that I think of it,—no. Nor a sick one. Not a beggar. Not a cripple. Not a mourner. Not—and yet what have we here? This building, by which you are leading me, bears a device above the door, the last I should ever have expected to find here.”
It was an imposing building, of a certain translucent material that had the massiveness of marble, with the delicacy of thin agate illuminated from within. The rear of this building gave upon the open country, with a background of hills, and the vision of the sea which I had crossed. People strolled about the grounds, which had more than the magnificence of Oriental gardens. Music came from the building, and the saunterers, whom I saw, seemed nevertheless not to be idlers, but persons busily employed in various ways—I should have said, under the close direction of others who guided them. The inscription above the door of this building was a word, in a tongue unknown to me, meaning “Hospital,” as I was told.
“They are the sick at heart,” said Marie Sauvée, in answer to my look of perplexity, “who are healed there. And they are the sick of soul; those who were most unready for the new life; they whose spiritual being was diseased through inaction, they are the invalids of Heaven. There they are put under treatment, and slowly cured. With some, it takes long. I was there myself when I first came, for a little; it will be a most interesting place for you to visit, by-and-by.”
I inquired who were the physicians of this celestial sanitarium.
“They who unite the natural love of healing to the highest spiritual development.”
“By no means, then, necessarily they who were skilled in the treatment of diseases on earth?” I asked, laughing.
“Such are oftener among the patients,” said Marie Sauvée sadly. To me, so lately from the earth, and our low earthly way of finding amusement in facts of this nature, this girl’s gravity was a rebuke. I thanked her for it, and we passed by the hospital—which I secretly made up my mind to investigate at another time—and so out into the wider country, more sparsely settled, but it seemed to me more beautiful than that we had left behind.
“There,” I said, at length, “is to my taste the loveliest spot we have seen yet. That is the most homelike of all these homes.”
We stopped before a small and quiet house built of curiously inlaid woods, that reminded me of Sorrento work as a great achievement may remind one of a first and faint suggestion. So exquisite was the carving and coloring, that on a larger scale the effect might have interfered with the solidity of the building, but so modest were the proportions of this charming house, that its dignity was only enhanced by its delicacy. It was shielded by trees, some familiar to me, others strange. There were flowers—not too many; birds; and I noticed a fine dog sunning himself upon the steps. The sweep of landscape from all the windows of this house must have been grand. The wind drove up from the sea. The light, which had a peculiar depth and color, reminding me of that which on earth flows from under the edge of a breaking storm-cloud at the hour preceding sunset, formed an aureola about the house. When my companion suggested my examining this place, since it so attracted me, I hesitated, but yielding to her wiser judgment, strolled across the little lawn, and stood, uncertain, at the threshold. The dog arose as I came up, and met me cordially, but no person seemed to be in sight.
“Enter,” said Marie Sauvée in a tone of decision. “You are expected. Go where you will.”