“You know you do not believe what you are saying; but still it is very pleasant to have everything put into shape for one in a moment. There is not a thought crosses my mind, not a doubt perplexes me, but I find the same thought has occupied and the same doubt perplexed some other human being long before I was born. Your uncle makes me not feel so lonely in my mind, Phemie—that is the secret of my liking to have him near me.”
And it was but natural that this should be so—that the texts, the quotations, the scraps of poetry, the verses of pathetic songs should, as Miss Derno said, render the mental road she was travelling less solitary and weary.
Long time had passed since Mr. Aggland led the quire at Tordale, and his voice was not so true or full as formerly; but still, in the evenings, the invalid loved to lie and listen to the hymns and the songs with which his memory was stored.
It is one thing to hear religious and serious subjects spoken of at great length, till the brain grows weary and the mind wandering—to have a full meal forced upon weak digestion at stated intervals—and another to have the cup of refreshment touch the lips whenever they are parched and feverish.
When there is too much thrust upon the patient the power of assimilation ceases, and the food which was intended to nourish turns to poison in the system; and, more especially when the act of dying is spread over a long period, the sufferer wearies of the constant recurrence to spiritual topics and longs for rest—longs for time to think out one fact ere another is placed before him for consideration.
This was Miss Derno’s case at all events. She could not have borne any one beside her who would constantly have been praying or constantly reading. This excitement, beneficial doubtless in some cases, would have driven her distracted; but she loved to talk in the evenings to Mr. Aggland on those subjects which had always dwelt next to his heart.
He had thought under the shadow of the everlasting hills about that land “where sorrow cometh never.” Walking round his farm, he had reflected on many things besides wheat and turnips, sheep and harvest time. He had considered his life, and felt, though at the period Carlyle was as a sealed book to him, life was no idle dream, but a solemn reality—his own—all, as the great writer says, “he had to front Eternity with.”
A man of this nature was just the person Miss Derno needed to be near her in the hour of her bitterest trial: one who could remind her that “God is better than his promise, if He takes from man a long lease and gives him a freehold of a greater value;” who never remained silent for lack of words, as so many of us do, but could always fit in the right sentence in the right place; whose “mynde to him a kyngdome was,” and who felt himself monarch over every idea it contained.
Who was more fitted to remind the dying woman that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever?” Who could better bring in the quotation, “Religion troubles you for an hour—it repays you by immortality?”
Did she shrink from the path before her—he was able to quote Moir—