In Orchard Glen

by Mary Esther Miller MacGregor

The promise was literally true! The white Comrade walked beside her warrior brothers and they were safe. And Christina learned that morning that there was only one thing in life that mattered after all. For even though the boys had had wealth and power and great fame and social position none of these would have brought any real comfort to the heart of the mother and grandfather at that moment. The knowledge that they were safe from sin and its power was everything. And those things upon which she had set her heart and counted of supreme importance did not weigh at all in the great crisis of life.

And right on that day of exultation, when the psalm was still repeating itself triumphantly in their ears, the dreaded word came from the battlefield. Mr. Holmes received the telegram at the little office behind the store. He had been very distant with Mr. Sinclair ever since he joined the Methodists against the Presbyterians, but he forgot all about their estrangement in the terrible task that faced him of carrying the news to the Lindsay family. So he went hurriedly to the Manse with his heavy burden, and Mr. Sinclair did not seem to think it strange that he should come. The two men left their work and went up the hill to the Lindsay home walking close together like children who were afraid and were trying to give each other support.

And there by the bright fireside, sitting in the sunny window, where her scarlet geraniums bloomed as gay as the poppies in Flanders Field, they found Christina and told her the news: that Neil and Jimmie had gone over the top, together, very eager and glad, and that they would not come back.

Christina was thankful afterwards for the merciful numbness, that was like an anaesthetic in a painful operation. She had a feeling that she would awaken soon and realise fully the terrible calamity that had befallen, but just now, if she kept still it would not hurt so much.

She was filled with wonder at her mother's courage. Even in the first moments of anguish she showed not a moment of wavering faith. And she was more filled with wonder at Grandpa. Neil had been Grandpa's special pride, and she was afraid of the result of the news. She went to the bright corner of the kitchen where he sat and tried tremblingly to make him understand, holding back her own grief by main force, that she might tell it gently. He made no outcry, spoke no word of grief; but for an hour afterwards he sat quite still in deep thought, and she heard him saying over and over to himself, as though trying to grasp the magnitude of his sorrow, "Both o' them! Not the two o' them, surely?" And then after pondering a while, "Aye, the two o' them!"

But when she put him to bed that night, dumb and sick with anguish herself, she could not but notice that Grandpa was acting strangely. He had an air of suppressed excitement, as though he were hiding some good news. She did not guess what it was until she had left him, and overheard him saying, "Aye, aye, I'll see them all the sooner. All the sooner!" in a tone of exultation. She did not hand him the hymn book, thinking he would not want to sing, but when she peeped in later to see if it were time to take away the lamp, she was amazed to hear him singing very softly and low, lest any overhear him, but singing, nevertheless, in the house of mourning, the Hindmost Hymn,

"On the other side of Jordan, in the sweet fields of Eden,
Where the tree of life is blooming, there is rest for you."

For Grandpa had travelled far on the upward road, and Christina did not realise that death was a small incident in the life of one who stood just at the door into the other world.

In the morning when she went in and ran up his window blind to the top to let in the sunlight, he was lying as she had left him the night before, with the little orange-covered book held loosely in his cold hands. For Grandpa had sung the Hindmost Hymn for the last time and was even now singing the First Hymn in a new Book away in the sweet fields of Eden, where there is no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither is there any more pain.

Christina had no time for her own grief, so busy she was comforting her mother, cheering Uncle Neil, sustaining John and writing consoling letters to the absent ones. Sometimes she was so occupied that she almost forgot the terrible blow that had fallen, and then it would come upon her with an unbelievable shock that Neil and Jimmie were dead,—gone forever out of the world!