“They seem to have pretty well dried on me,” he answered, “but I shall feel better for a hot bath; I am chilled to the very bone. And, meanwhile, there is some one else, Alice, love, who will need your care. Your brother asked to send poor little Pinkie here for a few days, and of course I had no wish to refuse. You will not mind the trouble, I know. The carriage will be here in a few moments.”
“Poor little Pinkie!” Alice’s eyes filled with the first tears that she had shed for Mrs. Randolph. “No, no, she will not be a trouble; but I must tell Freddy.” She paused, hesitated, and came back. “What shall I say to him, Fred? I can’t tell him that his aunt has gone to heaven. I don’t know that there is such a place.”
“She has gone into the unknown,” he replied; “but that would be nonsense to Freddy. I do not know what better name you can find, my dear, than just heaven. And if you don’t believe in golden harps and a glassy sea,—well, neither do you put much faith in the country above the bean-stalk; yet you tell Freddy about that.”
Alice went away, not quite satisfied, yet seeing no other course practically open to her than that suggested by her husband. It was a comfort that Freddy needed not now to be instructed in the nature or whereabouts of the Celestial Country. His small imagination took fire at once at the idea that Aunt Jennie had gone there; and he talked so eloquently to Pinkie of harps and crowns and angels with great white wings that, what with his conversation, and the pride and honor of paying a visit all alone, the little thing dried her tears for the mother whom she had been told she was never to see again, and was comforted until bedtime. But by bedtime Alice’s hands were so full as to promise her every opportunity to put her new creed into action.
For Dr. Richards’s hot bath had proved quite ineffectual to take the chill out of his bones. Alice found him sitting huddled over the fire, shivering with what he asserted to be only a nervous chill. He could not eat, but was insatiably thirsty, and said that his eyes bothered him; he supposed the snow had dazzled them. She tried vainly to persuade him to go to bed, until her persuasions were re-enforced by the positive orders of Dr. Harrison, who happened to come in. Before morning he was burning with fever, and tormented with all the worst agonies of inflammatory rheumatism.
Truly, it seemed that Mrs. Randolph had been right, and that an avenging God was punishing the faithless for their disloyalty to him. And yet how had this illness come? By spending and being spent for others; by rendering good for the evil rendered unto him. Has not Christ said, “Inasmuch as ye did it unto these, ye did it unto me”? Can he return evil for good?
Only a step of the way can our dull eyes see; and oftentimes that step is rough and hard, and to us looks very evil. But the evil shall pass away, the good remaineth.
It was strange what comfort and strength Alice found in her new creed, meagre though it were in comparison with the creeds of Christendom.
“I believe there are those whom I must live to help.”
Simple and practical, at least.