“And if I don’t know very well at first. He will help me. But, Eppie dear, I think Miss Baines must have had something more than this. I wish I had asked her about it,” said Frederica, regarding the old woman with wistful eyes.
“Dear me, lassie,” said Eppie, at a loss what to say to her; “what has putten such like thoughts into your head? you are not an ill bairn, and you will learn as you grow older. You have no call to vex yourself with such thoughts more than usual.”
“But, Eppie, it is for mama. She is ill, and suffers a great deal, and she has only Selina with her; and if I only knew what made Miss Baines so happy, I could tell mama. But mama could not begin at the beginning, and go to church, and visit poor and sick people. There must be some other away for her. For, Eppie, I am almost sure that mama would be afraid to die.”
There were no tears in the great wistful eyes turned towards her, but there was something which the old woman found it quite as hard to meet.
“Poor body,” murmured she; “the Lord help her!”
“And, Eppie, Miss Baines said something about the Lord Jesus caring for her. And He died, you know. It is in the service, ‘Crucified, dead, and buried,’ and in the Bible there is something about it.”
“Surely,” said Eppie, eagerly, “that is just it. We are sinners, both by Adam’s fall and by actual transgression. And God sent His Son to die in our room and stead. And we must lippen to Him. He will save us.”
“And it would not make any difference because mama is a Jewess, would it?”
“Preserve us a’! What will the lassie say next?” muttered the bewildered Eppie. “No difference but what would be in her favour, I would think. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, the Word says, and the apostles were bidden begin at Jerusalem,” said she, the long-forgotten words coming back to her in the exigency of the moment. “And they are all to be gathered in, Paul says. I mind weel my father and our minister ay used to pray for the ingathering of the Jews. No, I’m sure it would be in her favour rather than the contrary,” repeated Eppie confidently, growing more assured as she went on. “They were a grand people, the Jews—God’s own chosen people. They did ill things. They killed our Lord, and I canna just reconcile it all, but I’m sure the Lord loves them yet.”
Frederica did not reply, but sat gazing in among the dying embers in the grate. As she sat watching her abashed but anxious face, a great longing to help and counsel her came over the poor old woman’s kind heart, but there came also sharply a sense of her utter inability to do so, a vague but painful doubt whether she had ever seen clearly the way of safety herself.