“You can speak of his love,” murmured Daniel.
“Yes,” he answered despondently, “but only as a child speaks. I shall never stir the hearts of the congregation again. My speech will be contemptible.”
“Jessica, tell him what you and I have been talking about,” said Daniel.
Jessica lifted up her face from the pillow, and turned it towards the minister, a smile struggling through her tears; and though her voice was unsteady to begin it grew calm and clear before she had spoken many words.
“We were talking how he’d never be the chapel-keeper any more, and go up into the pulpit to carry the books before you; and then we thought it was true, maybe, what the doctor says, that you’d never be well enough again to preach in such a big chapel; and so we went on talking about the time when we shall all be in heaven. We said that perhaps God would give you more beautiful thoughts there, and grander words, and you’d still be our minister; and the angels ’ud all come thronging up in crowds all about you and us to hearken to what you’d thought about Jesus Christ and about God; and there’d be a great congregation again. Only whenever you were silent for a minute we could look up and see the Saviour himself listening to us all.”
Then the minister bowed his pale face upon his hands; but he did not answer a word.
“There is one thing still I want to say,” said Daniel. “I’ve made my will, and left all I had to Jessica; but I don’t know where she’ll find a home. If you’d look out for her—”
“Jessica shall come home to me,” interrupted the minister, laying his hand upon hers and Daniel’s and clasping them both warmly.
“I’m a Christian man,” whispered Daniel. “I know that I love God, and that he has made me something like himself. There’s a verse about it in the Bible.”
“‘Beloved,’” said the minister, “‘now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.’”