“What do you believe?”
“Many things that I have to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”
“I have sometimes wondered, for I cannot help it,” I said, “whether he is shut off from all knowledge of me for all these years till I can go to him. It will be a great while. It seems hard. Roy would want to know something, if it were only a little, about me.”
“I believe that he wants to know, and that he knows, Mary; though, since the belief must rest on analogy and conjecture, you need not accept it as demonstrated mathematics,” she answered, with another smile.
“Roy never forgot me here!” I said, not meaning to sob.
“That is just it. He was not constituted so that he, remaining himself, Roy, could forget you. If he goes out into this other life forgetting, he becomes another than himself. That is a far more unnatural way of creeping out of the difficulty than to assume that he loves and remembers. Why not assume that? In fact, why assume anything else? Neither reason, nor the Bible, nor common sense, forbids it. Instead of starting with it as an hypothesis to be proved if we can, I lay it down as one of those probabilities for which Butler would say, ‘the presumption amounts nearly to certainty’; and if any one can disprove it, I will hear what he has to say. There!” she broke off, laughing softly, “that is a sufficient dose of metaphysics for such a simple thing. It seems to me to lie just here: Roy loved you. Our Father, for some tender, hidden reason, took him out of your sight for a while. Though changed much, he can have forgotten nothing. Being only out of sight, you remember, not lost, nor asleep, nor annihilated, he goes on loving. To love must mean to think of, to care for, to hope for, to pray for, not less out of a body than in it.”
“But that must mean—why, that must mean—”
“That he is near you. I do not doubt it.”
The sunshine quivered in among the ivy-leaves, and I turned to watch it, thinking.
“I do not doubt,” she went on, speaking low,—“I cannot doubt that our absent dead are very present with us. He said, ‘I am with you alway,’ knowing the need we have of him, even to the end of the world. He must understand the need we have of them. I cannot doubt it.”