So I turned away from Deacon Quirk, and shut my mouth, and waited for him to finish. Whether the idea began to struggle into his mind that he might not have been making a very comforting remark, I cannot say; but he started very soon to go.
“Supposing you are right, and Royal was saved at the eleventh hour,” he said at parting, with one of his stolid efforts to be consolatory, that are worse than his rebukes, “if he is singing the song of Moses and the Lamb (he pointed with his big, dingy thumb at the ceiling), he doesn’t rebel against the doings of Providence. All his affections are subdued to God,—merged, as you might say,—merged in worshipping before the great White Throne. He doesn’t think this miser’ble earthly spere of any importance, compared with that eternal and exceeding weight of glory. In the appropriate words of the poet,—
‘O, not to one created thing
Shall our embrace be given,
But all our joy shall be in God,
For only God is Heaven.’
Those are very spiritooal and scripteral lines, and it’s very proper to reflect how true they are.”
I saw him go out, and came up here and locked myself in, and have been walking round and round the room. I must have walked a good while, for I feel as weak as a baby.
Can the man in any state of existence be made to comprehend that he has been holding me on the rack this whole evening?
Yet he came under a strict sense of duty, and in the kindness of all the heart he has! I know, or I ought to know, that he is a good man,—far better in the sight of God to-night, I do not doubt, than I am.
But it hurts,—it cuts,—that thing which he said as he went out; because I suppose it must be true; because it seems to me greater than I can bear to have it true.
Roy, away in that dreadful Heaven, can have no thought of me, cannot remember how I loved him, how he left me all alone. The singing and the worshipping must take up all his time. God wants it all. He is a “Jealous God.” I am nothing any more to Roy.
March 2.