“What verse would you like?”
He thought for a little.
“Isna there a text that says, ‘The deid shall hear his voice’?”
“Yes: ‘The dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God.’”
“Ay. That’s it. Weel, jist put that on.—They canna do better than hear his voice,” he added, with a strange mixture of Scotch ratiocination.
I led the way home, and he accompanied me without further objection or apology. After dinner, I proposed that we should go upon the downs, for the day was warm and bright. We sat on the grass. I felt that I could not talk to them as from myself. I knew nothing of the possible gulfs of sorrow in their hearts. To me their forms seemed each like a hill in whose unseen bosom lay a cavern of dripping waters, perhaps with a subterranean torrent of anguish raving through its hollows and tumbling down hidden precipices, whose voice God only heard, and God only could still. This daughter might, though from her face I did not think it, have gone away against her father’s will. That son might have been a ne’er-do-well at home—how could I tell? The woman might be looking for the lover that had forsaken her—I could not divine. I would speak no words of my own. The Son of God had spoken words of comfort to his mourning friends, when he was the present God and they were the forefront of humanity; I would read some of the words he spoke. From them the human nature in each would draw what comfort it could. I took my New Testament from my pocket, and said, without any preamble,
“When our Lord was going to die, he knew that his friends loved him enough to be very wretched about it. He knew that they would be overwhelmed for a time with trouble. He knew, too, that they could not believe the glad end of it all, to which end he looked, across the awful death that awaited him—a death to which that of our friends in the wreck was ease itself. I will just read to you what he said.”
I read from the fourteenth to the seventeenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel. I knew there were worlds of meaning in the words into which I could hardly hope any of them would enter. But I knew likewise that the best things are just those from which the humble will draw the truth they are capable of seeing. Therefore I read as for myself, and left it to them to hear for themselves. Nor did I add any word of comment, fearful of darkening counsel by words without knowledge. For the Bible is awfully set against what is not wise.
When I had finished, I closed the book, rose from the grass, and walked towards the brow of the shore. They rose likewise and followed me. I talked of slight things; the tone was all that communicated between us. But little of any sort was said. The sea lay still before us, knowing nothing of the sorrow it had caused.
We wandered a little way along the cliff. The burial-service was at seven o’clock.