The minister, they told her, was in his study. She knocked lightly at the door, and was bidden in a lifeless voice to enter.
Shades and blinds were drawn, and the glare of the sun quite shut out. Dr. Bland sat by his study-table, with his face upon his hands. A Bible lay open before him. It had been lately used; the leaves were wet.
He raised his head dejectedly, but smiled when he saw who it was. He had been thinking about her, he said, and was glad that she had come.
I do not know all that passed between them, but I gather, from such hints as Auntie in her unconsciousness throws out, that she had things to say which touched some comfortless places in the man’s heart. No Greek and Hebrew “original,” no polished dogma, no link in his stereotyped logic, not one of his eloquent sermons on the future state, came to his relief.
These were meant for happy days. They rang cold as steel upon the warm needs of an afflicted man. Brought face to face, and sharply, with the blank heaven of his belief, he stood up from before his dead, and groped about it, and cried out against it in the bitterness of his soul.
“I had no chance to prepare myself to bow to the will of God,” he said, his reserved ministerial manner in curious contrast with the caged way in which he was pacing the room,—“I had no chance. I am taken by surprise, as by a thief in the night. I had a great deal to say to her, and there was no time. She could tell me what to do with my poor little children. I wanted to tell her other things. I wanted to tell her—Perhaps we all of us have our regrets when the Lord removes our friends; we may have done or left undone many things; we might have made them happier. My mind does not rest with assurance in its conceptions of the heavenly state. If I never can tell her—”
He stopped abruptly, and paced into the darkest shadows of the shadowed room, his face turned away.
“You said once some pleasant things about heaven?” he said at last, half appealingly, stopping in front of her, hesitating; like a man and like a minister, hardly ready to come with all the learning of his schools and commentators and sit at the feet of a woman.
She talked with him for a time in her unobtrusive way, deferring, when she honestly could, to his clerical judgment, and careful not to wound him by any word; but frankly and clearly, as she always talks.
When she rose to go he thanked her quietly.