"You are wearing yourself out," he added, observing that Roy's complexion, tanned by the sea-voyage, was fast regaining its natural hue, and that his eyes bore evidence of grief and anxiety. "Jessie is safe in her sister's care, and while she sleeps cannot miss you. Bide here a bit with me"—he often relapsed into the Scotch dialect— "and refresh yourself by a survey of this picture. I must quit you all to-morrow, and I would have a few words with you before I go."
Jessie was alone when she awoke. Eunice had been called to the parlor to see a parishioner from the other side of the mountain who had not heard of Mr. Kirke's decease until that morning, had ridden twenty miles to attend the funeral, and arrived too late. Eunice had been too long the obedient servant of the congregation to hesitate as to the course she should pursue in the dilemma. Jessie slept soundly and peacefully, and Roy would be back soon. She closed the door noiselessly, and obeyed the summons of her father's friend.
Summer zephyrs were coquetting with the sombre pine-branches; summer-scents were stealing up to Jessie's windows from the garden. To such wooing whispers and goodly odors had she awakened many mornings during many years. She mistook the colored light visible through the shutters for dawn; marvelled sleepily that her limbs ached and her head was weary.
"It must be time to get up!" she meditated, 'twixt sleeping and waking. "Yet I am not rested. I have · not heard Eunice or Patsey go downstairs."
In tossing her arm up to pillow her head for a second nap, she saw her sleeve. How had she happened to fall asleep without undressing? She sat upright, and tried to remember when and how she had gone to bed overnight. How queerly her head felt!
"As if it had been dead and was coming to life again!" was her simile.
She was at home, and in her own room; everything about her was in its usual order. Yet something had happened. What was it? A Bible lay on the stand by the bed. Between the leaves was a handkerchief. She drew it out, and saw Eunice's name in the corner. How came it there? Had Eunice sat with her, last evening? If so, why? Her feet were oddly numb when she stood up; she was weak and dizzy as from illness or fasting; but she walked to the door, opened it, and hearkened for movements upon the lower floor. It was so quiet, she heard the droning of a humming-bird moth which had come to look for untimely blossoms in the honey-suckle draping the hall-window. Another sound, almost as monotonous, blended with this—the steady flow of a man's voice talking or reading in the study. Who was her father's guest? And what hour of day was it? It must be morning, since she had just awakened, yet looked, and felt like evening.
A draught from the open door she had left blew that opposite slightly ajar. Surely, that was Dr. Baxter's voice! Had she dreamed of his arrival! A fearful dream, the dim recollection of which made her sick and faint? Sinking to a settee that stood outside the study-door, seeking to stimulate her half-dead brain by rubbing her temples hard, she endeavored to gather the meaning of what Dr. Baxter was saying. He was in the middle of one of the monologues which were sometimes a bore; sometimes a delight. A gleam of amusement flitted over the wan, vacant visage of the eavesdropper as she pictured to herself—still as if she were somebody else and not Jessie Kirke—the knotted handkerchief she doubted not was on active duty.
"Is it consistent with the Divine economy for an immortal being to spend twenty-five, fifty, threescore and ten years, in the acquisition of knowledge and experience for which he is to have no use in the world to come? Believe me, they are in grievous error, denying themselves the abundant consolations which the hope of a continued and eternal existence should bring, who overlook the plain teachings of the word and the almost divine intuitions of the human soul on this question. The Future Life! What is it but the stretching into regions yet unknown to us, into the Eternity of which we have but imperfect conceptions, of the life which now is? the Present, which is the journey toward the continuing City. Into that state we shall, it is true, be born as spiritual babes. But not idiots! As the instincts and actions of the babe prefigure the disposition and appetites of the man, so the habits of thought and feeling, the inclinations and aspirations of the newly disembodied spirit will bear a certain relation to that which it will at length become—the perfect man in Christ Jesus. As hereditary taints and hereditary virtues are reproduced in the mortal babe, we shall find definite traces of our earthly individuality in the heavenly nurseling. And that the proportion which the loftiest attainments of the profoundest philosopher will bear to the infancy of this celestial creature will be less—far less than that which the mere instincts of the earthly infant bear to the wisdom and strength of the adult, I also believe. We shall have to begin with the rudiments of infinite knowledge. But we shall have Eternity in which to learn."
Jessie still chafed her forehead, where wrinkles of pained perplexity gathered and deepened, as she tried to put word to word and sentence to sentence. She lost what came next in vainly attempting to get the sense of these last sentences. Perhaps she should understand better when she was quite awake.