Very wasteful is the mighty mother, knowing that her materials are inexhaustible. And so they lay Jack down in the wormy grave.
"Bear, bear him along,
With his few faults shut up like dead flow'rets."
No one will ever abuse him or say anything ill-natured of him again; for to speak evil of the helpless, speechless, answerless dead, requires a heart as bad, a nature as cowardly vile, as his must be that foully murders a young child. And the mourners go home, and take off their hatbands and scarves, and give them to their wives to make aprons of. And old Luath lies in the hall, watching still, with ears attentively pricked at any incoming footstep, and hope drooping, as day droops too, begins to howl dismally towards sun-down.
And Esther—"You ought not to grieve for him; it is a happy change for him; he is in Heaven!" So they had said to her weepingly, as people do say to us, when the desire of our eyes has left us; but even as they spake them, she felt that they were but words, hollow and empty as the greetings in the market-place with which we salute our indifferent acquaintance. Was she so sure that the change had been a happy one? It was a change from the known to the unknown, from moderate certain evils, and moderate probable good, to infinite possibilities of horror or blessedness. Where lay this heaven, this promised land, where we so confidently lodge our dead? Was it up above that highest bluest arch that looks in truth pure enough, and solid enough, to be the floor of some sweet elysium? Ah! no! Human knowledge, that like a naughty, prying child, has found out at once so infinitely too much and too little, tells us that that skyey vault is but thin air. She thinks, shuddering—"What if heaven itself be but thin air? Is it anywhere? What if its existence at all be but the fine-spun fancy of poor human hearts, that must needs frame for themselves some blessed definite hope, since real hope have they none? Is it a beautiful tender fraud practised by themselves upon themselves, to save them from the despair of the black vagueness into which they must send out their departed ones, and go out themselves when life's little day is over? Oh, light! light! When the great God said, 'Let there be light!' in the material world, why did not He say so too in the world of spirits? I know that my soul shall live for ever! I know that there is that within me over which the most insatiable of monsters, insatiabler than any slain in classic tale—a monster that turns beauty to unsightliness, whose handmaid is corruption, and whose drink is tears—has no power. But alas! alas! can I rejoice in my immortality, when I know not where, or under what conditions, those endless, endless æons will roll themselves away into the past?"
"We must bow beneath the rod," says old Mrs. Brandon, nodding her head and her poke bonnet. It is the identical poke bonnet, and not another, in which she once paid her congratulatory visit. The summer sun had browned it a little, but otherwise it is in a state of high efficiency. "We must bow beneath the rod, knowing that it is a tender Father's hand that wields it."
"I suppose so," answers Esther, listlessly. To her it seems a matter of indifference whose hand it was that inflicted such an immedicable hurt, seeing that it has been inflicted by some one, and now yawns, a gaping rift in her soul, never to be assuaged by any balsam.
"Suppose!" cries Miss Bessy, her long, uncertain nose reddening a little in her righteous zeal, at the slackness of Esther's faith. "Surely, surely, if we are Believers, there can be no 'suppose' in such a case."
"I did not mean to express any doubt," Esther says, gently, but wearily.
"Suppose will not do us much good at the Last Day," continues Miss Bessy, rather venomously. "Unless we can lay fast hold upon Jesus" (laying hold of a roll of paper to exemplify the tenacity of her own grasp[1]), "unless we have assurance that we are Elect, where are we?"