"Grace, I leave you my place; be a helpmate to your father, be a mother to little George. Bring him up a brave, Christian man, like his father—like my father, for whom he is named. Never let him do wrong, though the greatest worldly advantages might be the result. Remember that, my child; offer your life to the Lord sooner than see your brother offend him. God bless you, my precious Grace!"
The sick woman turned her longing eyes earnestly upon her husband, and he, half kneeling, sank on the floor, and supported her head on his shoulder. The burden was featherlight, but the strong man shook and swayed as in mortal weakness, and his voice was low and broken. Grace took the child's hand, and turned away. Those last moments were too sacred even for a daughter's eye to gaze upon; angels alone listened to the secret heart-speech of those two, whose lives had been as the two strands of one rope. They had been all in all to each other. The husband's love, if the greatest, had not been the less faithful; but the burden was now for him, the reward for her. Strange dispensation—and yet one that no lover would alter if he could—that the deepest love should be but an earnest of the deepest suffering; that the higher the heart goes in its sublime learning, the greater should be its privilege of agony. And yet this thorny path is a very Via Triumphalis, and those who tread it would not give one drop of the royal purple that dyes their weary feet for all the kingly mantles of rare and costly hue that grace the throne of the earthly monarch or strew the path of the earthly victor. Edward Seymour had a double right to this brotherhood of sublimest sorrow; for in his heart his love had grown so strong that not once, but many times, it had held unholy struggles with the higher, wider Love, to whom he had vowed himself from his childhood, and he had had to wrestle mightily with its strength, and had only overcome because, after all, the enemy he fought was human, and the weapons he used were of God's eternal fashioning. In Elizabeth's calmer, more even nature, love had never risen to that height; it had flowed a tranquil stream in the channel of duty, and, if deep, had never been turbulent. The trial had never come to her which had threatened shipwreck to her husband; she had never even known of it, for it had been the one secret of his frank and pure life. The awful moment came at last; Grace and little George had come nearer again, and all three said afterwards that "Jesus" was the last sound that passed the dying woman's lips. For a few minutes a trembling stillness reigned; it was as if those left behind were listening to the feet of the bearer-angels that had come to carry their mate away. Could they but have listened at the same time to the wondrous revelation of lightning-like truth that flashed from those angels' solemn eyes, and transformed the blind belief of the living woman into the exultant faith of the heaven-illumined Catholic! Strange and awful thought! that those from whose mortal sight the scales have only just been taken by death should, on the instant, enter into such communion with the unknown, unsuspected truth, and be borne so far deeper in its blessed knowledge than those who spend lives of long and humble search on earth. Elizabeth Seymour knew now where truth had always been, and yet she must look with spirit-eyes on her loved ones bending over her beautiful, senseless body, all unconscious of that truth, all unknowing of their dark and dangerous pathway. Would her agonized prayers ever bring them to her new resting-place? Would God ever allow them to join her in the other world? And meanwhile, the minister, with his dear burden still in his clasped arms, lifted his head, and poured forth a prayer into which his very life was breathed, ending with a passionate flinging of his whole nature into the bosom of the all-knowing, all-loving Father—"Thy will be done, not mine!"
As he lifted the inanimate form gently on the pillows, closed the eyes, and pressed a kiss of all but despairing grief upon the white, warm forehead of the lost one, his daughter, letting the child go, seized his hand, and pressed it to her bosom, kissing it passionately, as if, from the very instant of her mother's departure, she was taking possession of the precious trust made over to her on the same spot only a few short moments before.
He, ever mindful of others before himself, felt his child's signal, and pressed her hand in return, leading her gently from the room, while the old nurse, his wife's attendant from her early childhood by the sunny brooks and fragrant meadows of Gloucestershire, performed the last necessary duties towards the loved remains.
Day after day the dead lay in a darkened room, with flower-wreaths framing her simple coffin, a queen in death as she had been in life, with a touching court about her of widows and orphans, of mourners comforted, of children and old men, of strong young laborers whose minds she had turned soul-wards, and whose reverence for her had been little less than that—so misconstrued by those very men—of Catholics for a patron saint. At night, when the stream of villagers would cease, the husband and the daughter watched hand-in-hand by the one they could not think of as really gone from them while her sleeping form lay so near their own resting-place. Now and then the minister would say a few words, half in soliloquy, half to his companion, and she, with her clear, pitying gray eyes upturned, would look at him in dumb sympathy, and a pang would shoot through his heart, as he read the mother's expression in the daughter's face. They renewed the flowers and rearranged the internal draperies of the coffin; they spoke in whispers, as one does in a sick-room, fearing to wake the happy dreamer whom the first sleep has just come to relieve from a load of burning pain and constant restlessness; little George was even allowed to bring his quiet toys, and crawl over the floor round the strange bed where he was told his mother was sleeping—at first sight of the coffin, he had asked gravely, Was that a cradle, and had a new baby come to play with him?—and, in a word, the death-veiled chamber seemed more like home than any other part of the cottage. Then came the last day, and the lid was to be fastened over the white-robed, white-crowned sleeper. Grace brought her father a bunch of heliotrope to lay in her mother's hands; it had been her own and her husband's favorite flower in life; and just over her heart, together with a heart-shaped paper, on which the name "Jesus" was illuminated in red and gold, was placed a triple tress of hair, and attached to it a scroll with the names of "Edward—Grace—George." Thus something living, something of her earthly treasures, went down with her to the tomb; and on the day of the great awakening, who shall say that those tokens will not make the wife and mother's heart throb with a deeper joy, as she rouses herself to meet those whose last pledge of undying love she will find thus laid on her breast?
Slowly the procession moved to the meeting-house, and slowly on to the churchyard; a neighboring minister performed the simple service, and the three bereaved ones walked immediately behind the coffin. The villagers were more awed by the face of the husband than by the black-palled coffin of the wife; and some one remarked, "It was more as if the minister had been walking between two angels to the judgment-seat of the Almighty than as if, a father and a widower, he was leading his orphan children to a new-made grave."
The silent cottage, buried under its wealth of flowering creepers, seemed very cold and desolate when the mourners returned; tea was laid in the cosey library, the blinds were drawn up, and the little birds twittered in the veranda; everything was ordinary and as usual again, the same it had been just one week ago, the day before she died; but it seemed so different! Mr. Seymour threw himself in an arm-chair by the window, and took up a paper-knife mechanically; little George had been taken up-stairs, and the third chair at the tea-table was for the kind clergyman who had come to help his brother in his affliction.
Grace had taken off her bonnet and shawl, and was making tea in the tea-pot that, together with the high, old-fashioned English urn, had been one of her mother's most cherished wedding-gifts. Tears came to her eyes and blinded her, and her hand shook as she touched the tea-caddy of old English oak and wrought iron. Still, with all these homely mementos rendering her sad inauguration of new duties sadder still, she bravely thought of her trust, and struggled successfully to be calm, at least in outward seeming. Her father's friend now came in, and sat down in silence in a low chair opposite Mr. Seymour. Grace laid her hand on her father's arm:
"Will you have your tea here by the window, on the little, low table?" she said tremulously.
"No, my pet," he answered, taking her hand, and stroking it gently; "let us sit down together, as usual." And he led her to her new place at the head, as if he wished her to see that he would not shrink from the everyday details of sorrow that each triviality of life would be too certain to throw into relief.