“Absence makes the heart grow fonder”—possibly, and possibly not always fonder of the unseen beloved, but of one’s own personality, projected into the suitable position.
But if any moment of serious doubt came, the remembrance of the betrothal in the garden quenched it. There was always that to fall back upon. Milly lived that over again, and again, and again, never without the solemn rush of feeling that had accompanied the pledge with God for their witness—“never to be forgotten, never to be denied”—the latter words Norton had himself used in a letter to her once, a letter from which she never parted.
With love came at last the teaching of death to Milly, and she went down into the shadows and cried out affrighted. All props were torn away from her, and she stood alone trembling, reaching out on the right hand and on the left. “I had not thought it meant this,” she wrote piteously. “I believe in God, and in heaven, why, then, should this desolation touch me? Words—words that I have said all my life and believed in, mean nothing to me. I believe in them now, but they mean nothing. I can’t make anything real but death, not even your love! Oh, help me, tell me that I shall not die alone, that you will go with me, tell me that you are not afraid; help me, Norton. You must know something to make it all better!”
She had gained some peace before his reply reached her—a sense of the eternal Fatherhood that pervaded the unseen world as well as the one she walked and lived and loved in now—a protection that was a rest and brought light into the sunshine once more. But he wrote,
“Milly, if you love me, don’t send me any more letters like the last. To think of such things would drive me mad. I can’t think of death. It’s as much as I can do to work for a living, and try and be worthy of you, and I’ll have to leave the rest to the good Lord, I expect. I’ll be coming home some day before you know it—drop me a line to tell me how you’d feel if you saw me walking in just after you get this.”
If there was a graver look in Milly’s eyes than had been, there was also a sweeter depth. The lines around her mouth were very gentle. She did not talk much. It was the third summer of the separation; she no longer tried to solve the problem of the Prestons, but accepted the fact that she stood a little nearer to each of them than anyone else did. People said she was a good listener, but although she seemed to give a quiet attention to them, it was the voice across the sea that she was always listening for. The letters came now so full of matters and people that she knew nothing of; the whole burden of them for her lay in the few loving sentences that began and ended the pages. Had she ever had a lover? It was so long ago, and for so short a time! Yet at last she had word that he was coming home.
It was after this news had reached her, and nearly three years from the day of the revealing of love in the garden, that the second revelation was given her. This time it was of immortality.
She was kneeling in the church during the afternoon service; the church was almost empty. She had had a singularly calm spirit all day, and as she knelt in the dim aisle, her gaze directed upward to the stained glass window in one of the arches of the ceiling, she was not praying, she was only peaceful. The window was partly open, so that a glimpse of pale blue sky slanted through it with the afternoon sunshine. And as she gazed, not consciously, her spirit went from her and mingled with that sunlight, becoming one with it, and in a rapture of buoyancy, of radiance, of exultant immortality. It had in it no acknowledged perception of God, no conviction of sin, no so-called “experience”; it was simply life eternal, utterly free from the body, the spirit divested of the hampering bonds of the flesh. The wonder of it, the joy of it—yet the wonderful and joyful familiarity with it, as of something known always, that had been only forgotten for a little while, and was now remembered; and beyond and through all something indescribable. One cannot translate the meaning of life into words that belong to mortality.
Milly bowed her head and the light closed over her and her spirit came back to her body once more. She neither wept nor trembled; like Mary of old she marveled and was silent. She thought she would write it all to Norton, but she could not; she thought to tell him when he came, but she did not. She never had the revelation again, but like the first it could never be forgotten nor denied.