Each saint thinks that other saints have no right or title to be pushing themselves forward into the heavenly kingdom; each sinner thinks his fellow-sinner should remain at home, and not strive to gain an entrance where he is most decidedly de trop.
Any one who has noticed the disgust of this world’s elect at the sight of any one whom they do not chance to like, seated opposite to them at dinner, will have no difficulty in understanding how hard it would be to get into heaven, if man had any power in the matter of rejection or selection. Easier a thousand times for a camel to pass through the needle’s eye, than for him who was judged by his fellow to obtain ingress there.
It is not profane to argue from analogy, even on sacred subjects, and when we see how man would deal with man in life, it is not difficult to guess how man would deal, if he could, with man after death.
“Me—me—place for me! make room for me! you surely care for me! you will certainly be glad to see me!” is the cry here; and is it too much to assume that in the secret souls of men it is the cry for hereafter?
I am certain it was so at all events with Heather’s guests: if they could have kept each other, not merely out of Berrie Down, but out of heaven, they would have done it.
To say that Miss Hope hated the entire of the Cuthbert connection would be to use too mild a word. To say that Mr. and Mrs. Black, Mrs. Ormson, and Miss Ormson, stank in her nostrils, and that the younger Dudleys stank likewise, though with a lesser offensiveness, would fail to convey an idea of the state of the lady’s real feelings on the subject of her brother-in-law’s second marriage; whilst by Mrs. Black, Mrs. Ormson, Bessie, and the younger Dudleys, Miss Hope’s dislike was returned with ample interest—honestly paid in kind.
But not here did the dislikes end. With all her heart Mrs. Black wished her sister, Mrs. Ormson, at the antipodes; while with all Mrs. Ormson’s heart she wished, not merely Mrs. Black, but also her own husband, Mr. Ormson, at New Zealand. If the gods had known much about human nature—which, judging from results, we may conclude they do not—they would have mated Mr. Black with Mrs. Ormson, Mr. Ormson with Mrs. Black.
“There would have been the wife for me,” Mr. Black stated one day, in strict confidence, to Heather, “but she was secured, ma’am—snapped up.”
How badly off Heather thought mankind must have been for wives, when two of the sex considered Mrs. Ormson a desirable helpmeet, she did not deem it needful to state. One virtue of Arthur Dudley’s wife was, that she knew when to hold her tongue,—an incalculable advantage in a woman, when such silence does not arise from indifference or stupidity: Heather was neither indifferent nor stupid, but she possessed that one great gift of discretion, without which, as Solomon says (and we may safely consider him an authority), “beauty is to a woman but as a jewel in a swine’s snout.”
And Heaven knows there was need both for discretion and patience, in those days, at Berrie Down!