"It is you queens only who can feel the depths of pain, and conceive the way to its healing."
Ah! that is enough. She has lost her desire to recall more. She would fain turn back to the former delight and forget the existence of pain. But the steady voice persists, and will not be quenched.
"Instead of trying to do this, you turn away from it; you shut yourselves within your park walls and garden gates; and you are content to know that there is beyond them a whole world in wilderness, a world of secrets which you dare not penetrate, and of suffering which you dare not conceive."
Hazel looks round on the garden. How pleasant it is! Why should she leave it? Why should she concern herself with what may lie outside this home-kingdom of hers? She tries again to banish the voice, yet she knows in her heart, if she would only look for its knowledge, that, outside of that little rose-covered wall, the wild grass, to the horizon, is torn up by the agony of men, and beat level by the drift of their life-blood.
Yes, it is useless; there is no escaping the truth the voice tells. So Hazel yields herself to listen as it goes on.
"I knew you would like that to be true; you would think it a pleasant magic if you could flush your flowers into brighter bloom by a kind look upon them; nay, more, if your look had the power, not only to cheer, but to guard.... This you would think a great thing! And do you not think it a greater thing that all this (and how much more than this) you can do for fairer flowers than these, flowers that could bless you for having blessed them, and will love you for having loved them; flowers that have thoughts like yours, and lives like yours, and which, once saved, you save for ever? Is this only a little power? Far among the moorlands and the rocks, far in the darkness of the terrible streets, these feeble florets are lying, with all their fresh leaves torn and their stems broken; will you never go down to them, nor set them in order in their little fragrant beds, nor fence them, in their trembling, from the fierce wind?"
Engrossed with the voice, Hazel has been walking on, little heeding whither she goes, when, as its tones die away, a groan startles her. How terrible its sound; how incongruous, interrupting the soft harmonious chorus of the soaring, singing birds! So painfully near it seemed, too, it could but have been a very little distance off outside that gate which she sees before her. Her first impulse is to draw back and retire, shuddering, far into the garden. But, behold! the gate swings back of its own accord, and in the face of that fact, and with the remembrance of the words she has heard, she dare not do other than pass through the open way.
What a strange, wide world, and how dreary! A great, mad battle is raging; the grass, sloping up to the horizon, is scorched with the heat of the sun—the sun which only made a pleasant warmth in the shady garden. There is the fierce galloping of horses, and wrestling and fighting of men. Shouts and groans fill the air and drown the song of the birds. There are heaps of dying and wounded. Ah! there is one man not a stone's throw from her; his must have been the voice that reached her within her gates. How remarkable that she should have heard nothing before of all the great din. Another groan, followed by some inaudible words, causes Hazel timidly to approach the wounded man. He is evidently one of the very poorest of the "common" soldiers; and there is a look in his face which speaks the word death with a shudder in the girl's heart. A gleam lightens the agony in the man's eyes as he sees the white form and gentle face above him. He gazes steadily a moment, as though to make sure his vision is not a passing illusion; then Hazel catches the words, "Were you sent to me?"
Very quietly she tells him in whose name she comes. Then, with a long, struggling sigh of satisfaction, without a shadow of further questioning in the dying eyes or voice, he whispers—"Hope even for me in Him, then, since He sent you!"
So the low, flickering flame of life, set free, leaps up to its source; and the forsaken home rests in unbroken peace.