“Then why remember it?”
“‘Save but to swell the sense of being blest.’ Besides, forgetfulness of the disagreeable things of this life implies forgetfulness of the pleasant ones. They are all tangled together.”
“To be sure. I don’t know that I should like that.”
“Of course you wouldn’t. Imagine yourself in a state of being where you and Roy had lost your past; all that you had borne and enjoyed, and hoped and feared, together; the pretty little memories of your babyhood, and first ‘half-days’ at school, when he used to trudge along beside you,—little fellow! how many times I have watched him!—holding you tight by the apron-sleeve or hat-string, or bits of fat fingers, lest you should run away or fall. Then the old Academy pranks, out of which you used to help each other; his little chivalry and elder-brotherly advice; the mischief in his eyes; some of the ‘Sunday-night talks’; the first novel that you read and dreamed over together; the college stories; the chats over the corn-popper by firelight; the earliest, earnest looking-on into life together, its temptations conquered, its lessons learned, its disappointments faced together,—always you two,—would you like to, are you likely to, forget all this?
“Roy might as well be not Roy, but a strange angel, if you should. Heaven will be not less heaven, but more, for this pleasant remembering. So many other and greater and happier memories will fill up the time then, that after years these things may—probably will—seem smaller than it seems to us now they can ever be; but they will, I think, be always dear; just as we look back to our baby-selves with a pitying sort of fondness, and, though the little creatures are of small enough use to us now, yet we like to keep good friends with them for old times’ sake.
“I have no doubt that you and I shall sit down some summer afternoon in heaven and talk over what we have been saying to-day, and laugh perhaps at all the poor little dreams we have been dreaming of what has not entered into the heart of man. You see it is certain to be so much better than anything that I can think of; which is the comfort of it. And Roy—”
“Yes; some more about Roy, please.”
“Supposing he were to come right into the room now,—and I slipped out,—and you had him all to yourself again—Now, dear, don’t cry, but wait a minute!” Her caressing hand fell on my hair. “I did not mean to hurt you, but to say that your first talk with him, after you stand face to face, may be like that.
“Remembering this life is going to help us amazingly, I fancy, to appreciate the next,” she added, by way of period. “Christ seems to have thought so, when he called to the minds of those happy people what, in that unconscious ministering of lowly faith which may never reap its sheaf in the field where the seed was sown, they had not had the comfort of finding out before,—‘I was sick and in prison, and ye visited me.’ And to come again to Abraham in the parable, did he not say, ‘Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime hadst good things and Lazarus evil’?”
“I wonder what it is going to look like,” I said, as soon as I could put poor Dives out of my mind.