THE HOUR OF DAWN

Slowly light came, the thinnest dawn,
Not sunshine, to my night;
A new, more spiritual thing,
An advent of pure light.

All grief has its limits, all chastenings their pause;
Thy love and our weakness are sorrow’s two laws.

The winter that followed seemed very long and uneventful. After Sister Madeline went away, my days settled themselves into the routine in which they continued to revolve for many months. I was as lonely as formerly, save for the companionship of well-chosen books, and for the direction of another mind, which I felt to be the truest support and guidance. I was taught to bend to my uncle’s wishes, and to give up constant church-going, and visiting among the poor, which would have been such a resource and occupation to me. And so my life, outwardly, was very little changed from former years years that I had found almost insupportable, without any sorrow; and yet, strange to say, I was not unhappy.

My hours were full of little duties, little rules. (I suppose my heart was in them, or I should have found them irksome.) Above all, I was not permitted to brood over the past: I was taught to feel that every thought of it indulged, was a sin, and to be accounted for as such: I could only remember the one for whom I mourned, on my knees, in my prayers. This checked, as nothing else could have done, the morbid tendency of grief, in a lonely, unoccupied, undisciplined mind. I was thoroughly obedient, and bent myself with all simplicity to follow the instructions given me. Sometimes they seemed very irrelevant and useless, but I never rebelled against any, even one that seemed as hard to flesh and blood as this. And I have, sooner or later, seen the wisdom of them all, as I have worked out the problem of my correction.

Obedient as I was, though, and simple as the routine of my life continued, sometimes there came crises that were beyond my strength.

I can remember one; it was a furious storm a day that nailed one in the house. There was something in the rage without that disturbed me; I wandered about the house, and found myself unable to settle to any task. Some one to speak to! Oh, it was so dreary to be alone. I went into my uncle’s room where there were many books. Among those that were there I found one in French, (I have no idea how it came there, I am sure my uncle had never read it.) I carelessly turned it over, and finally became absorbed in it.

It is proof how child-like I had been, how obedient in suppressing all forbidden thoughts, that these words smote me with such horror. I had indulged in no speculation; I had never thought of him as haunted by the self he fled; as still bound to an inexorable and inextinguishable life,

“With time and hope behind him cast,
And all his work to do with palsied hands and cold.”

The terrors I had had, had been vague. I had thought dimly of punishment, more keenly of separation. If I had analysed my thoughts, I suppose I should have found annihilation to have been my belief death forever, loss eternal. But this if this were truth (and it smote me as the truth alone can smite), oh, it was maddening. To my knees! To my knees! Oh, that I might live long years to pray for him! Oh, that I might stretch out my hands to God for him, withered with age and shrunk with fasting, and strong but in faith and final perseverance! Oh, it could not be too late! What was prayer made for, but for a time like this? What was this little breath of time, compared with the Eternal Years, that we should only speak now for each other to our merciful God, and never speak for each other afterward? Spirits are forever; and is prayer only for the days of the body?

It was well for me that none of the doubts that are so often expressed had found any lodgment in my brain; if I had not believed that I had a right to pray for him, and that my prayers might help him, I cannot understand how I could have lived through those nights and days of thought.