“And now you will not be alone, whatever happens,” said Edgar.
I don’t know what mixture of poignant pain came over the grateful gleam in little Jeanie’s face. She drew her hand from him, and hastened downstairs. “What does it matter to him, what does it matter to anyone, how lonely I am?” was the thought that went through her simple heart. Only one creature in the world had ever cared, chiefly, above everything else, for Jeanie’s happiness, and that one was dying, not to be detained by any anxious hold. Jeanie, simple as she was, knew better than to believe that anything her brother could give her would make up for what she was about to lose.
Edgar went into the sick-room reverently, as if he had been going into a holy place. Mrs. Murray lay propped up with pillows on the bed. For the first moment it seemed to him that the summons which brought him there must have been altogether uncalled for and foolish. The old woman’s eyes were as bright and soft as Jeanie’s; the pale faint pink of a Winter rose lingered in her old cheeks; her face seemed smoothed out of many of the wrinkles which he used to know; and expanded into a calm and largeness of peace which filled him with awe. Was it that all mortal anxieties, all fears and questions of the lingering day were over? By the bedside, in her own chair, sat the minister of the parish, an old man, older than herself, who had known her all her life. He had been reading to her, with a voice more tremulous than her own; and the two old people had been talking quietly and slowly of the place to which they were so near. I have no doubt that in the pulpit old Mr. Campbell, like other divines, talked of golden streets, and harps and crowns, in the New Jerusalem above. But here there was little room for such anticipations. A certain wistfulness was in their old eyes, for the veil before them was still impenetrable, though they were so near it; but they were not excited.
“You’re sure of finding Him,” the old man was saying; “and where He is, there shall His people be.”
“Ay,” said Mrs. Murray. “And, oh! it’s strange lying here, no sure sometimes if it’s me or no; no sure which me it is—an auld woman or a young woman; and then to think that a moment will make a’ clear.”
This was the conversation that Edgar interrupted. She held out her withered hand to him with a glow of joy that lighted up her face.
“My son,” she said. There was something in the words that seemed to fill the room, Edgar thought, with an indescribable warmth and fulness of meaning, yet with that strange uncertainty which belongs to the last stage of life. He felt that she might be identifying him, unawares, with some lost son of thirty years ago, not forgetting his own individuality, yet mingling the two in one image. “This is the one I told you of,” she said, turning to her old friend.
“He is like his mother,” said the old man dreamily, putting out a hand of silent welcome.
They might have been two spirits talking over him, Edgar felt, as he stood, young, anxious, careful, and troubled, between the two who were lingering so near the calm echoes of the eternal sea.
“You’ve come soon, soon, my bonnie man,” said Mrs. Murray, holding his hand between hers; “and, oh, but I’m glad to see you! Maybe it’s but a fancy, and maybe it’s sinful vanity, but, minister, when I look at him, he minds me o’ mysel’. Ye’ll say it’s vain—the like of him, a comely young man, and me; but it’s no in the outward appearance. I’ve had much, much to do in my generation,” she said, slowly looking at him, with a smile in her eyes. “And, Edgar, my bonnie lad, I’m thinking, so will you——”