CHAPTER XXV: I SAY GOOD-BYE
The last day arrived, a bright showery Sunday in April. I was to leave early next morning. Lord Tawborough would see me as far as Southampton.
At my last Breaking of Bread many allusions were made in prayer to my departure for foreign lands. If I was not going there avowedly in His service, none the less let His service be my chief aim and effort. I worshipped devoutly. This might be the last Lord's Supper of which I should ever partake. The Lord's People in France were the merest handful; there were not more than four Meetings in all the Empire, of which not one, Grandmother had ascertained, was in Paris or the north or any part I was likely to be near. And I might be abroad three or four years without a holiday in England.
Now that at last my hopes and ambitions were being fulfilled, sadness and regret were uppermost. The old life I knew so well, the present in which I had still one day to live, already seemed far behind me. I looked back in the anticipatorily retrospective fashion of all who live in the future; and to whom, living in the future, the present is always already the past.
Already Bear Lawn was the past, decked with a pathos that as the present it had never worn.
The last dinner was a goodly spread: a roast fowl, a hog's pudding, and apple dumplings with clotted cream. Glory and Salvation were invited. The latter slobbered noisily of how she would miss me; I realized with a sudden sentimental pang that, after all, it might be true. Glory wept till the tears streamed down her cheeks on to her untidy bodice; I watched with a feeling of guilt for her sorrow and the increasing shamefulness of her blouse.
The last night was full of odd pauses and silences. Aunt Jael kept looking at me and looking away quickly when I looked back. She tried to keep up an appearance of stoicism and sternness, and knew that she was failing. At the last moment she gave up all pretence. In my emotional mood, she seemed to atone for years of hardness when she turned sharply away from the Book of Proverbs at which her Bible opened—it was real sacrifice—and chose for the nightly portion my 137th Psalm. I thought of that dismal first night at Torribridge so many years ago.
Later on, at my bedside, my Grandmother prayed a long devoted prayer. "Oh Lord Jesus! How my old heart aches when I am sometimes tempted to fear that she may be unworthy of that Saint who sits with Thee, her dear dear mother. Grant that in foreign lands and the cities of the plain she may shun the ungodly and flee from all worldliness and evil. Grant, Oh Lord, that we three may meet together in Thine Own everlasting arms. For Jesus' sake."
Next morning I was up betimes. Mrs. Cheese, red-eyed and tearful, helped me cord my box. "I daun knaw what we shall do without 'ee, my dear. Even the ol' biddy is sorrowful, though she's not enough of a Christian to fancy showin' it."