“You look paler than usual.”
“Paler, because a little fatigued, dear. But a night's rest will bring me up even again,” Mrs. Montgomery replied cheerfully.
“How is the pain in your side, now?” asked Blanche, still with a look of concern.
“Easier. I scarcely notice it now.”
“Blanche is over anxious about my health, dear girl!” said Mrs. Montgomery, as the bride moved to another part of the room. “She thinks me failing rapidly. And, without doubt, the foundations of this earthly house are giving way; but I trust, that ere it fall into ruin, a house not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens, will be ready for my reception.”
There was no depressing solemnity in her tones, as she thus alluded to that event which comes to all; but a smiling cheerfulness of manner that was contagious.
“You think of death as a Christian,” said I.
“And how else should I think of it?” she replied. “Can I not trust Him in whom I have believed? What is it more than passing from a lower to a higher state of life—from the natural to the spiritual world? When the hour comes, I will lay me down in peace and sleep.”
She remained silent for some moments, her thoughts apparently indrawn. The brief, closing sentence was spoken as if she were lapsing into reverie. I thought the subject hardly in place for a wedding occasion, and was about starting another theme, when she said—
“Do you not think, Doctor, that this dread of dying, which haunts most people like a fearful spectre—the good as well as the bad—is a very foolish thing? We are taught, from childhood, to look forward to death as the greatest of all calamities; as a change attended by indefinable terrors. Teachers and preachers ring in our ears the same dread chimes, thrilling the strongest nerves and appalling the stoutest hearts. Death is pictured to us as a grim monster; and we shudder as we look at the ghastly apparition. Now, all this comes from what is false. Death is not the crowning evil of our lives; but the door through which we pass, tranquilly, into that eternal world, which is our destined home. I hold in my thought a different picture of Death from that which affrighted me in childhood. The form is one of angelic beauty, and the countenance full of love. I know, that when I pass along the dark and narrow way that leads from this outer world of nature, to the inner world from which it has existence, that my hand will rest firmly in that of an angel, commissioned of God to guide my peaceful footsteps. Is not that a better faith?”