“Ah, Edith,” saith she, “the Lord payeth His bills in gold of Ophir. I warrant you David felt his deep places sore trying. But ask thou at him, when ye meet, if he would have missed them. He shall see clearer then when he shall wake up after His likeness, and shall be satisfied with it.”
“What sort of deep places mean you, Aunt?” saith Helen, looking on her somewhat earnestly.
“Thou dost well to ask, Nell,” quoth she, “for there be divers sorts of depths. There be mind depths, the which are at times, as Milly saith, displeasant: at other times not displeasant. But there be soul depths for the which displeasant is no word. When the Lord seems to shut every door in thy face and to leave thee shut up in a well, where thou canst not breathe, and when thou seest no escape, and when thou criest and shoutest, He shutteth out thy prayer: when thine heaven above thee is as brass, and thine earth below thee iron: when it seems as if no God were, either to hear thee or to do for thee—that is a deep pit to get in, Helen, and not a pleasant one.”
“Aunt Joyce! can such a feeling be—at the least to one that feareth God?”
“Ay, it can, Nelly!” saith Aunt Joyce, solemnly, yet with much tenderness. “And when thou comest into such a slough as that, may God have mercy upon thee!”
And methought, looking in Aunt Joyce’s eyes, that at some past time of her life she had been in right such an one.
“It sounds awful!” saith Milisent, under her breath.
“It may be,” saith Aunt Joyce, looking from the window, and after a fashion as though she spake to herself rather than to us, “that there be some souls whom the Lord suffers not to pass through such quagmires. May-be He only leads the strongest souls into the deepest places. I say not that there be not deeps beyond any I know. Yet I know of sloughs wherein I had been lost and smothered, had He not held mine hand tight, and watched that the dark waters washed not over mine head too far for life. That word, ‘the fellowship of His passions,’ hath a long tether. For He went down to Hell.”
“But, Aunt, would you say that meant the place of lost souls?” saith Helen.
“I am wholesomely ’feared of laying down the law, Nell,” saith Aunt Joyce, “touching such matters as I can but see through a glass darkly. What He means, He knoweth. But the place of departed spirits can it scarce fail to be.”