"If he had only followed the beaten track, there was every prospect of success before him; for, mind you, he had a fair share of ability."
"I wonder what will the bishop do?"
"I dare say he'll withdraw faculties and ask him to seek a mission abroad."
"Well, it is a warning to the other young fellows, who were tempted to follow him."
I was hoping that the return of Bittra and Ormsby would wean him away from his anxiety. But this, too, was pitiful and sad beyond words. I ventured to go see her the morning after their arrival. Ormsby came into the drawing-room first, and told me all particulars of their journey, and prepared me to see a great change in his young wife. Nevertheless, I was startled to see what a transformation a few days' agony had caused. Bittra had a curious habit of holding her face upwards, like a child, when she spoke; and this innocent, ingenuous habit, so typical of her candor and openness of mind, was now accentuated by the look of blank and utter despair that had crept over her. If she had wept freely, or been hysterical, it would have been a relief; but no! she appeared dazed, and as if stricken into stone by the magnitude of her sorrow; and all the little accidents of home life,—the furniture, the gardens, her father's room and his wardrobe, his few books, his fishing-rods and fowling-pieces,—all were souvenirs of one whose place could not be filled in her soul, and whose tragic end, unsupported by the ministrations of religion, made the tender and reverent spirit of his child think of possibilities which no one can contemplate without a shudder. How different the Catholic from the non-Catholic soul! What an intense realization of eternity and the future of its immortal spirits in the one! How utterly callous and indifferent to that immortality is the other! What an awful idea of God's justice in the one! What cool contempt for God's dispensations in the other! And how the one realizes the bursting of bonds and the setting free of the immortal spirit unto the vast environments and accidents of life, whilst the other sees but dead clay with some dim ideas of a shadowy and problematical eternity! "His soul! his soul!" Here was the burden of Bittra's grief. Ormsby could not understand it; he was frightened and bewildered. I tried every word of solace, every principle of hope, that are our inheritance, only to realize that—
"Not all the preaching since Adam
Can make Death other than Death!"
Then I took her out into the yard, and placed her where her father had stood on the morning of her marriage, and where he heard "the Mass of his sad life ringing coldly to its end." I repeated every word he said,—his remorse, his faith, his determination for a future, his regret that he was not with her on the morning of her nuptial Communion, his promise to be at Communion the Sunday after they returned from the Continent. "And here," I said, "he stood when the Angelus rang, and, taking off his hat, reverentially said it; and I counted the silver in his hair. And do you think, you little infidel, that our great Father has not numbered the hairs of his head also—ay, and the deep yearnings of his heart?"
She looked relieved.
"Come now," I said, "put on your hat and let us see Dolores. She knows eternity better than you or I."
"May I ask Rex to come with us?"