SHOWING HOW LITTLE LILY’S LIFE BEGAN TO CHANGE
INTO A RETROSPECT; AND HOW ON A SUDDEN SHE BEGAN TO
FEEL BETTER.
As time wore on, little Lilias was not better.
When she had read her Bible, and closed it, she would
sit long silent, with a sad look, thinking; and often
she would ask old Sally questions about her mother,
and listen to her, looking all the time with a strange
and earnest gaze through the glass door upon the evergreens
and the early snowdrops. And old Sally was troubled
somehow, and saddened at her dwelling so much upon
this theme.
And one evening, as they sat together in the drawing-room—she
and the good old rector—she asked him,
too, gently, about her; for he never shrank from talking
of the beloved dead, but used to speak of her often,
with a simple tenderness, as if she were still living.
In this he was right. Why should we be afraid
to speak of those of whom we think so continually?
She is not dead, but sleepeth! I have met a few,
and they very good men, who spoke of their beloved
dead with this cheery affection, and mingled their
pleasant and loving remembrances of them in their
common talk; and often I wished that, when I am laid
up in the bosom of our common mother earth, those
who loved me would keep my memory thus socially alive,
and allow my name, when I shall answer to it no more,
to mingle still in their affectionate and merry intercourse.
‘Some conflicts my darling had the day before
her departure,’ he said; ’but such as
through God’s goodness lasted not long, and ended
in the comfort that continued to her end, which was
so quiet and so peaceable, we who were nearest about
her, knew not the moment of her departure. And
little Lily was then but an infant—a tiny
little thing. Ah! if my darling had been spared
to see her grown-up, such a beauty, and so like her!’
And so he rambled on; and when he looked at her, little
Lily was weeping; and as he looked she said, trying
to smile—
’Indeed, I don’t know why I’m crying,
darling. There’s nothing the matter with
your little Lily—only I can’t help
crying: and I’m your foolish little Lily,
you know.’
And this often happened, that he found she was weeping
when he looked on her suddenly, and she used to try
to smile, and both, then, to cry together, and neither
say what they feared, only each unspeakably more tender
and loving. Ah, yes! in their love was mingling
now something of the yearning of a farewell, which
neither would acknowledge.
‘Now, while they lay here,’ says sweet
John Bunyan, in his ’Pilgrim’s Progress,’
’and waited for the good hour, there was a noise
in the town that there was a post come from the celestial
city, with matter of great importance to one Christiana.
So enquiry was made for her, and the house was found
out where she was; so the post presented her with a
letter, the contents whereof were, “Hail, thou
good one! I bring thee tidings that the Master
calleth for thee, and expecteth that thou shouldst
stand in his presence, in clothes of immortality,
within these ten days."’
