‘Oh! are they sure?—can it be?—is he dead?’ at last she gasped.
‘My child, it is too true; all we can say is, “Be still, and know that I am God!”’
‘I shall try to be still, mother,’ said Mary, with a piteous, hopeless voice, like the bleat of a dying lamb; ‘but I did not think he could die!—I never thought of that!—I never thought of it!—Oh! mother! mother! mother! oh! what shall I do?’
They laid her on her mother’s bed,—the first and last resting-place of broken hearts,—and the mother sat down by her in silence. Miss Prissy stole away into the Doctor’s study, and told him all that had happened.
‘It’s the same to her,’ said Miss Prissy, with womanly reserve, ‘as if he’d been an own brother.’
‘What was his spiritual state?’ said the Doctor, musingly.
Miss Prissy looked blank, and answered mournfully,—
‘I don’t know.’
The Doctor entered the room where Mary was lying with closed eyes. Those few moments seemed to have done the work of years,—so pale, and faded, and sunken she looked; nothing but the painful flutter of the eyelids and lips showed that she yet breathed. At a sign from Mrs. Scudder, he kneeled by the bed, and began to pray,—‘Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations,’—prayer deep, mournful, upheaving like the swell of the ocean, surging upward, under the pressure of mighty sorrows, towards an Almighty heart.
The truly good are of one language in prayer. Whatever lines or angles of thought may separate them in other hours, when they pray in extremity, all good men pray alike. The Emperor Charles V. and Martin Luther, two great generals of opposite faiths, breathed out their dying struggle in the self-same words.