"Prom my childhood," continued Susan, "I have been among the people of my race, but not of them. I have stood alone, in a shroud of thoughts, which were not their thoughts; but few understand me, my dear, for I live in an ideal world, and whatever calls me back to this gross creation, makes me perfectly miserable: say, my dear Miss Lindsay, are these your feelings?"
"Alas, no," replied Emma; "I love the world too well, and have spent many wretched, sleepless nights because I was unwilling to leave it: but that time is passed. If I have any fear now, it is that my work on earth will not be well done before I am called away."
Susan turned a wondering eye upon the pale, weary-looking girl, and for a moment forgot her intense sympathy for herself. "You are sick," said she, with an expression of real interest and concern.
"Yes," replied Emma, "that is evident. My friends have tried to hide it from me, and from themselves. They have sent me from place to place, but death is following me everywhere. I never felt it so surely as I do this morning:" and Emma laid her head upon the moss-turf beside Susan. She looked like a faded lily, as she lay there; her white dress scarcely more white than the forehead and cheek upon which her dark damp hair rested heavily. Susan took a handkerchief from her pocket, and wrung it in the clear, cool waters of the brook, and kneeling upon the ground beside Emma, wiped her pale face, and tucking up her sleeves, chafed her poor withered arms, until Emma revived.
"Thank you," said she; "I was a little faint. Mamma is so desirous for me to exercise in the open air, that I go every day to the farthest limit of my strength. I was not able to climb that hill this morning."
Susan made no reply, but sat looking mournfully into her face. All the morning she had been weeping over the sorrows of an imaginary being whom she had found in a novel wandering about, and falling at every step into the most superlative misery. It was hard for Susan to read, and not identify herself with this beautiful suffering shadow; but now she had come from her ideal world, and was forced, for a time, to forget both the shadow and herself. Close to her father's old farm-house, and in the woods of Sliver-Crook, she saw what, described in a romance, would have been pathetic enough, but which, seen in reality, called out from her heart the good rational sympathy which, though buried in sentimental rubbish, was not dead.
"Do you really think," said she, bending over Emma, "that you must——"
Emma smiled, as she replied, "What difficulty we find in pronouncing that word! One would think that there was a sting in the very name of death: and so there is, Miss Sliver, until God gives us the victory, through Jesus Christ."
"Jesus was a beautiful character," said Susan, taking up Emma's Bible, beside which the red-covered novel lay blushing as if in an agony of shame. "I have often felt," she continued, "a strong desire to visit the places hallowed by his personal ministry; the garden where he kept his sad night-watch, Miss Lindsay; the Mount of Olives, and the clear-gliding Kedron. O," continued Susan, enthusiastically, "I should like to stand where the Marys stood, on the dreadful day of his crucifixion, and visit the tomb where they went, bearing sweet spices. O, wouldn't it be delightful?"
"Yes," replied Emma, languidly; "but we should not find him there now,—upon Calvary, or the Mount of Olives; by the sweet-gliding Kedron, or in the Garden of Gethsemane,—unless we were like him, meek and lowly, and such can find him anywhere, Miss Sliver. The spirit of Jesus would hallow this book, making it blessed and holy like the waters of Kedron; and this high hill might be to us what the Mount of Olives was to the disciples—for that was sacred only because Jesus talked with them there. Dora told me last night that the Holy Spirit could make any place holy."