“We were not friends,” say I, writhing
a little; “why do you say so?”
She looks at me with a great and unfeigned astonishment.
“Not friends!” she echoes, slowly
repeating my words; then, seeing the expression of
my face, stops suddenly.
“Are you sure,” cry I, feverishly
snatching her hands and looking with searching anxiety
into her face, “that you spoke truth just now?—that
you do not mind much—that you will get over
it!—that it will not kill you?”
“Kill me!” she says, with a little
sorrowful smile of derision; “no, no! I
am not so easily killed.”
“Are you sure?” persist I, with
a passionate eagerness, still reading her tear-stained
face, “that it will not take the taste out of
every thing?—that it will not make you
hate all your life?—it would me.”
“Quite sure!—certain!”
she says, looking back at me with a steady meekness,
though her blue eyes brim over; “because God
has taken from me one thing—one
that I never had any right to expect—should
I do well, do you think, to quarrel with all that
He has left me?”
I cannot answer; her godly patience is too high a
thing for me.
“Even if my life were spoilt,”
she goes on, after a moment or two, her voice gaining
firmness, and her face a pale serenity, “even
if it were— but it is not—indeed
it is not. In a very little while it will seem
to me as good and pleasant and full as ever; but even
if it were” (looking at me with a lovely
confidence in her eyes), “it would be no such
very great matter—this life is not
every thing!”
“Is not it?” say I, with a doubting shiver.
“Who can tell you that? who knows?”
“No_one_ has been to blame,” she continues,
with a gentle persistence. “I should like
you to see that! There has been only a—a—mistake”—
(her voice failing a little again), “a mistake
that has been corrected in time, and for which no
one—no one, Nancy, is the worse!”
So this is the way in which Barbara’s hope dies!
Our hopes have as many ways of dying as our bodies.
Sometimes they pine and fall into a slow consumption,
we nursing, cockering, and physicking them to the last.
Sometimes they fall down dead suddenly, as one that
in full health, with his bones full of marrow, and
his eyes full of light, drops wordless into the next
world unaware. This last has been Barbara’s
case. When she thought it healthiest, and most
vigorous in its stalwart life, then the death-mark
was on it. To most of us, O friends, troubles
are as great stones cast unexpectedly on a smooth
road; over which, in a dark night, we trip, and grumblingly
stumble, cursing, and angrily bruising our limbs.
To a few of us, they are ladders, by which we climb
to God; hills, that lift us nearer heaven—that
heaven, which, however certainly —with
