“I think I am,” she murmured. “I feel that I am going to God. Oh, papa, forgive, forgive me!” she exclaimed, bursting into tears of emotion, as she raised her hands to him in the moment’s excitement. “The trouble has been too much for me; I could not shake it off. All the sorrow that has been brought upon you through us, I think of it always: my heart aches with thinking of it. Oh, papa, forgive me before I die! It was not my fault; indeed, I did not know of it. Papa”—and the sobs became painfully hysterical, and Mr. Hastings strove in vain to check them—“I would have sacrificed my life to bring good to you and my dear mamma: I would have sold myself, to keep this ill from you!”
“Child, hush! There has been nothing to forgive to you. In the first moment of the smart, if I cast an unkind thought to you, it did not last; it was gone almost as soon as it came. My dear child, you have ever been my loving and dutiful daughter. Maria, shall I tell it you?—I know not why, but I have loved you better than any of my other children.”
She had raised herself from the pillow, and was clasping his hand to her bosom, sobbing over it. Few daughters have loved a father as Maria had loved and venerated hers. The Rector’s face was preternaturally pale and calm, the effect of his powerfully suppressed emotion.
“It has been too much for me, papa. I have thought of your trouble, of the discomforts of your home, of the blighted prospects of my brothers, feeling that it was our work. I thought of it always, more perhaps than of other things: and I could not battle with the pain it brought, and it has killed me. But, papa, I am resigned to go: I know that I shall be better off. Before these troubles came, I had not learned to think of God, and I should have been afraid to die.”
“It is through tribulation that we must enter the Kingdom,” interrupted the calm, earnest voice of the clergyman. “It must come to us here in some shape or other, my child; and I do not see that it matters how, or when, or through whom it does come, if it takes us to a better world. You have had your share of it: but God is a just and merciful Judge, and if He has given you a full share of sorrow, He will deal out to you His full recompense.”
“Yes,” she gently said, “I am going to God. Will you pray for me, papa?—that He will pardon me and take me for Christ’s sake. Oh, papa! it seems—it seems when we get near death as if the other world were so very near to this! It seems such a little span of time that I shall have to wait for you all before you come to me. Will you give my dear love to mamma if I should not live to see her, and say how I have loved her: say that I have only gone on first; that I shall be there ready for her. Papa, I dare say God will let me be ever waiting and looking for you.”
Mr. Hastings turned to search for a Book of Common Prayer. He saw Maria’s on her dressing-table—one which he had given her on her marriage, and written her name in—and he opened it at the “Visitation of the Sick.” He looked searchingly at her face as he returned: surely the signs of death were already gathering there!
“The last Sacrament, Maria?” he whispered. “When shall I come?”
“This evening,” she answered. “George will be here then.”
The Reverend Mr Hastings bent his eyebrows with a frown, as if he thought—— But no matter. “At eight o’clock, then,” he said to Maria, as he laid the book upon the bed and knelt down before it. Maria lay back on her pillow, and clasping her hands upon the shawl which covered her bosom, closed her eyes to listen.