Part 39 (1/2)

Then it was over, and she was half ashamed, thinking it was of no use, and he would not understand; perhaps that he would only set the whole down to nerves and fidgets and contrariness, and give her no common sense that she wanted, after all.

But Uncle t.i.tus spoke, slowly; much as if he, too, were speaking out involuntarily, without thought of his auditor. People do so speak, when the deep things are stirred; they speak into the deep that answereth unto itself,--the deep that reacheth through all souls, and all living, whether souls feel into it and know of it or not.

”The real things are inside,” he said. ”The real world is the inside world. _G.o.d_ is not up, nor down, but in the _midst_.”

Then he looked up at Desire.

”What is real of your life is living inside you now. That is something. Look at it and see what it is.”

”Discontent. Misery. Failure.”

”_Sense_ of failure. Well. Those are good things. The beginning of better. Those are _live_ things, at any rate.”

Desire had never thought of that.

Now _she_ sat still awhile.

Then she said,--”But we can't _be_ much, without doing it. I suppose we are put into a world of outsides for something.”

”Yes. To find out what it means. That's the inside of it. And to help make the outside agree with the in, so that it will be easier for other people to find out. That is the 'kingdom come and will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.' Heaven is the inside,--the truth of things.”

”Why, I never knew”--began Desire, astonished. She had almost finished aloud, as her mother had done in her own mind. She never knew that Uncle Oldways was ”pious.”

”Never knew that was what it meant? What else can it mean? What do you suppose the resurrection was, or is?”

Desire answered with a yet larger look of wonder, only in the dim light it could not be wholly seen.

”The raising up of the dead; Christ coming up out of the tomb.”

”The coming out of the tomb was a small part of it; just what could not help being, if the rest was. Jesus Christ rose out of dead _things_, I take it, into these very real ones that we are talking of, and so lived in them. The resurrection is a man's soul coming alive to the soul of creation--G.o.d's soul. _That_ is eternal life, and what Jesus of Nazareth was born to show. Our coming to that is our being 'raised with Him;' and it begins, or ought to, a long way this side the tomb. If people would only read the New Testament, expecting to get as much common sense and earnest there as they do among the new lights and little 'progressive-thinkers' that are trying to find it all out over again, they might spare these gentlemen and themselves a great deal of their trouble.”

The exclamation rose half-way to her lips again,--”I never knew you thought like this. I never heard you talk of these things before!”

But she held it back, because she would not stop him by reminding him that he _was_ talking. It was just the truth that was saying itself. She must let it say on, while it would.

”Un--”

She stopped there, at the first syllable. She would not even call him ”Uncle t.i.tus” again, for fear of recalling him to himself, and hus.h.i.+ng him up.

”There is something--isn't there--about those who _attain_ to that resurrection; those who are _worthy_? I suppose there must be some who are just born to this world, then, and never--'born again?'”

”It looks like it, sometimes; who can tell?”

”Uncle Oldways,”--it came out this time in her earnestness, and her strong personal appeal,--”do you think there are some people--whole families of people--who have no business in the reality of things to be at all? Who are all a mistake in the world, and have nothing to do with its meaning? I have got to feeling sometimes lately, as if--_I_--had never had any business to be.”

She spoke slowly--awe-fully. It was a strange speech for a girl in her nineteenth year. But she was a girl in this nineteenth century, also; and she had caught some of the thoughts and questions of it, and mixed them up with her own doubts and unsatisfactions which they could not answer.

”The world is full of mistakes; mistakes centuries long; but it is full of salvation and setting to rights, also. 'The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened.' You have been _allowed_ to be, Desire Ledwith. And so was the man that was born blind. And I think there is a colon put into the sentence about him, where a comma was meant to be.”

Desire did not ask him, then, what he meant; but she turned to the story after he had gone, and found this:--