Drawn by the noise, the nurse came hurriedly from my Grandmother's room. But already Satan was cast out; now she was sobbing, grunting, wailing, in a maudlin pitiful way. For a moment our eyes met. I saw shame there, and my heart quickened towards her. "Never mind, Aunt. You had a nightmare. It is over now."
In the opposite bedroom, the end drew gentlier near. In her less painful hours, my Grandmother was livelier than I had ever known her. With the scent of Death's nostrils in the room, she grew skittish, gay, worldly. She gave me droll winks and knowing smiles, as she recounted pranks of eighty years ago: mighty jam-stealing forays, ginger battues, historic bell-ringing expeditions; tremendous truantries, twelve-year-old amours.
"Grandmother," I said gravely (I was the godly parent now and she the child) "you've waited a long time to tell me this!" For a moment genuine priggery, and sour remembrance of the blows meted out for my own lean escapades, hindered my joining in her brazen glee. Then we laughed together till we cried.
"Ah, they were happy days," she said, wiping her eyes. "My unsaved days," she added, the holy familiar tone coming into her voice, "the days before I found the Lord."
Then she fell to talking of the Faith, and for the first and last time in her life spoke critically of the ways of the Lord's People.
"They do too much for them that are saved already, and too little to bring in them that are lost. 'Tain't the Lord's precept at all. 'Remember the ninety-and-nine.'"
As in everything, my Grandmother was right. Apart from the Foreign Field, our people make small stir to rescue the perishing. That, they feel, is not the business of religion: which is not so much to reclaim sinners as to edify saints, not to fight the Devil but to worship God. Thus they are in sharpest contrast with the later nineteenth-century evangelism, with its hordes of professional missioners—mountebanks, gipsies, Jews—its Transatlantic sensationalism and sentimentalism, its hysterical appeals to the spiritual egotism of the individual, its sinner hunts, its spectacular war with Satan.
Though they are not always free from the danger of spiritual pride, it may at least be said of our people that they worship the Lord in a quieter holier way, that they practise the fast-vanishing art of personal religion. Yet my Grandmother was right: "It is the sinners that Christ came to save. 'Remember the ninety-and-nine!'"
One morning I found Aunt Jael greatly changed. Her eyes were gentler than ever before, her face more peaceful.
I could see she had been waiting for me.