“Do you know quite what you are about, Rachel?” asked Polwarth.
“Perfectly, uncle,” she answered. “There is no reason why you should not talk as freely as if you were talking only to me. I will put my friend in the closet, and you need never think that anyone is in the house but ourselves.”
“Then I have no more to say,” returned her uncle with a smile. “Your FRIEND, whoever he or she may be, is heartily welcome.”
Rachel rejoined Helen, who had already drawn nearer to the door of the closet, and now seated herself right willingly in its shelter, amidst an atmosphere odorous of apples and herbs. Already the talk was going on just as before. At first each of the talkers did now and then remember there was a listener unseen but found, when the conversation came to a close, that he had for a long time forgotten it.
CHAPTER XXVII. WHAT HELEN HEARD,
Although satisfied that, after what Rachel had said to the men, there could be no impropriety in her making use of the privilege granted her, Helen felt oddly uncomfortable at first. But soon the fancy came, that she was listening at the door of the other world to catch news of her Leopold, and that made her forget herself and put her at peace. For some time, however, the conversation was absolutely unintelligible to her. She understood the words and phrases, and even some of the sentences, but as she had no clue to their drift, the effort to understand was like attempting to realize the span of a rainbow from a foot or two of it appearing now and then in different parts and vanishing again at once. It was chiefly Polwarth, often Wingfold, and now and then Drew that spoke, Rachel contributing only an occasional word. At length broke something of a dawn over the seeming chaos. The words from which the light that first reached Helen flowed, were the draper’s.
“I can’t think, for all that,” he said, “why, if there be life beyond the grave, and most sincerely I trust there is—I don’t see why we should know so little about it. Confess now, Mr. Polwarth!—Mr. Wingfold!” he said appealingly, “—does it not seem strange that, if our dearest friends go on living somewhere else, they should, the moment they cease to breathe, pass away from us utterly—so utterly that from that moment neither hint nor trace nor sign of their existence ever reaches us? Nature, the Bible, God himself says nothing about how they exist or where they are, or why they are so silent—cruelly silent if it be in their power to speak,—therefore, they cannot; and here we are left not only with aching hearts but wavering faith, not knowing whither to turn to escape the stare of the awful blank, that seems in the very intensity of its silence to shout in our ears that we are but dust and return to the dust!”
The gate-keeper and curate interchanged a pleased look of surprise at the draper’s eloquence, but Polwarth instantly took up his answer.
“I grant you it would be strange indeed if there were no good reason for it,” he said.