“Why, it’s the sort o’ secret the angels in heaven must keep for us all!” cried Pollie, who had “Irish blood” on the mother’s side which moved when she was deeply stirred. “Sure, there’s many a thing they must see hanging over our heads that they just manage for us with never a word or a sign, and we never knowing what we should thank them for!”
“Well, Pollie,” said her mistress, “let me hear of you sometimes, I shall be always glad to get good news of you, and you may care to know how we get on.”
Pollie looked grave.
“There’s no fear but you’ll do well enough, ma’am,” she said, with an emphasis on the personal pronoun, which was not without significance in a prospective bride. “There’s many a girl would jump sky high to get into such a place. An’ I’d never have left you for any other missis.”
Lucy felt very lonely when she found herself left in the house with only little Hugh. The charwoman would come early in the morning, but would sleep in her own home as she had sons “to look after.” Lucy put Hugh to bed, heard him say his little prayer for dear papa, and talked about ships to him till he fell asleep, hugging a wooden rabbit which was Pollie’s parting gift. Then Lucy went wandering through the empty rooms. Pollie had left everything in “apple-pie” order. The pathetic traces of Charlie’s illness and convalescence were all cleared away. The kitchen, too, was neat and trim. Lucy mechanically pulled out the drawers, and set open the cupboard doors. All was as it should be, and Lucy was deeply thankful that Pollie had left behind no further disappointment in herself. For the hushed heart of yearning sorrow and anxiety shrinks from those squalid revelations of human nature, which torture it much as vermin might torment a helpless invalid.
Under the infliction of Pollie’s bustle and Mrs. Brand’s chatter, Lucy had actually longed for this quiet hour. She had craved for the silence and the solitude in which it had seemed to her that her spirit might get nearer to the absent Charlie. For a brief spell there was sweetness in it, but it was not long before she felt that it might become a perilous and painful luxury. When she had gone through the house, giving here and there the little touch which must be always left for the hand of the mistress, and when there was absolutely nothing more to do that night, then she found that she realised not so much any spiritual communion with Charlie, as the silence and separation which lay between them.
“I have been wrong,” she said to herself. “I have been fancying lately that the peculiar weight of my cross lay in the need for bearing it together with petty money cares, and with work for which one must brace oneself up, and shut away one’s mere personal feelings. Now I begin to see that these are less added weights than props on which from time to time the burden of a great trial may rest till it is almost lifted from one’s own strength.”
“We are taught, too,” she went on musingly, “that we can best approach God and serve Him by our service to others—the simple service which comes naturally out of our living and working among them. Does it not, therefore, seem reasonable that in the same fashion we may also best approach and serve those whom we love—the parted—or the dead?” and Lucy’s lips quivered. “It is the day’s hard work, too, which gives the sweet sleep and the good dreams! How absurd it sounds to put into words what is really the wonderful discovery that one makes, sooner or later (though one is always forgetting it!), to wit, that God knows what is best for His children, and that if they keep in His ways, they shall find the food and the tasks that are the most ‘convenient’ for them.”
“I thank Thee, my Father,” she said aloud, clasping her hands together as she stood in the shadowy little parlour, “I thank Thee that Thou hast filled my hands with duties so that I need have no empty hour. I thank Thee that my love for Charlie may run, woven into my love for Thee, through all my work and all my thoughts—the golden thread, which binds all together into a chaplet, not indeed meet to present to Thee, yet which Thou wilt accept, because it is Thy daughter’s offering. And I thank Thee—oh, how I thank Thee!—for the little child Thou hast given me, to whom I must be, for a while, both mother and father too. And, Father, be with Charlie in his ship tossing on Thy seas. Give him sweet sleep and happy dreams. Make him feel assured that all is well—with Hugh and me.” She paused; she could not bring herself to pray. “Bring him home safely, if it be Thy will.” She could only say, “Father, we are in Thy will, and there we are safe—and together—always!”
Nobody was there to see her then, or they would have marked the shining of her face—for she had been with God. But such mounts of transfiguration rise abruptly from the broil and bicker of life’s dusty plain, and often it is when we descend from them that we encounter the demons!