Part 29 (1/2)
”_Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth._”
That had been the text of the sermon a few weeks before. Sleepily, heavily, he tried to fix his mind upon it and recall it. What was it that Doctor Snodgra.s.s had said? Ah, yes--that it was a mistake to pause here in reading the verse. We must read on without a pause--_Lay not up treasures upon earth where moth and rust do corrupt and where thieves break through and steal_--that was the true doctrine. We may have treasures upon earth, but they must not be put into unsafe places, but into safe places. A most comforting doctrine! He had always followed it. Moths and rust and thieves had done no harm to his investments.
John Weightman's drooping eyes turned to the next verse, at the top of the second column.
”_But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven._”
Now what had the Doctor said about that? How was it to be understood--in what sense--treasures--in heaven?
The book seemed to float away from him. The light vanished. He wondered dimly if this could be Death, coming so suddenly, so quietly, so irresistibly. He struggled for a moment to hold himself up, and then sank slowly forward upon the table. His head rested upon his folded hands. He slipped into the unknown.
II
How long afterward conscious life returned to him he did not know. The blank might have been an hour or a century. He knew only that something had happened in the interval. What it was he could not tell.
He found great difficulty in catching the thread of his ident.i.ty again. He felt that he was himself; but the trouble was to make his connections, to verify and place himself, to know who and where he was.
At last it grew clear. John Weightman was sitting on a stone, not far from a road in a strange land.
The road was not a formal highway, fenced and graded. It was more like a great travel-trace, worn by thousands of feet pa.s.sing across the open country in the same direction. Down in the valley, into which he could look, the road seemed to form itself gradually out of many minor paths; little footways coming across the meadows, winding tracks following along beside the streams, faintly marked trails emerging from the woodlands. But on the hillside the threads were more firmly woven into one clear band of travel, though there were still a few dim paths joining it here and there, as if persons had been climbing up the hill by other ways and had turned at last to seek the road.
From the edge of the hill, where John Weightman sat, he could see the travellers, in little groups or larger companies, gathering from time to time by the different paths, and making the ascent. They were all clothed in white, and the form of their garments was strange to him; it was like some old picture. They pa.s.sed him, group after group, talking quietly together or singing; not moving in haste, but with a certain air of eagerness and joy as if they were glad to be on their way to an appointed place. They did not stay to speak to him, but they looked at him often and spoke to one another as they looked; and now and then one of them would smile and beckon him a friendly greeting, so that he felt they would like him to be with them.
There was quite an interval between the groups; and he followed each of them with his eyes as it pa.s.sed along the ribbon of the road rising and receding across the wide, billowy upland, among the rounded hillocks of aerial green and gold and lilac, until it came to the high horizon, and stood outlined for a moment, a tiny cloud of white against the tender blue, before it vanished over the hill.
For a long time he sat there watching and wondering. It was a very different world from that in which his mansion on the Avenue was built; and it looked strange to him, but most real--as real as anything he had ever seen. Presently he felt a strong desire to know what country it was and where the people were going. He had a faint premonition of what it must be, but he wished to be sure. So he rose from the stone where he was sitting, and came down through the short gra.s.s and the lavender flowers, toward a pa.s.sing group of people. One of them turned to meet him, and held out his hand. It was an old man, under whose white beard and brows John Weightman thought he saw a suggestion of the face of the village doctor who had cared for him years ago, when he was a boy in the country.
”Welcome,” said the old man. ”Will you come with us?”
”Where are you going?”
”To the heavenly city, to see our mansions there.”
”And who are these with you?”
”Strangers to me until a little while ago; I know them better now. But I have known you for a long time, John Weightman. Don't you remember your old doctor?”
”Yes,” he cried--”yes; your voice has not changed at all. I'm glad indeed to see you, Doctor McLean, especially now. All this seems very strange to me, almost oppressive. I wonder if--but may I go with you, do you suppose?”
”Surely,” answered the doctor, with his familiar smile; ”it will do you good. And you also must have a mansion in the city waiting for you--a fine one, too--are you not looking forward to it?”
”Yes,” replied the other, hesitating a moment: ”yes--I believe it must be so, although I had not expected to see it so soon. But I will go with you, and we can talk by the way.”
The two men quickly caught up with the other people, and all went forward together along the road. The doctor had little to tell of his experience, for it had been a plain, hard life, uneventfully spent for others, and the story of the village was very simple. John Weightman's adventures and triumphs would have made a far richer, more imposing history, full of contacts with the great events and personages of the time. But somehow or other he did not care to speak much about it, walking on that wide heavenly moorland, under that tranquil, sunless arch of blue, in that free air of perfect peace, where the light was diffused without a shadow, as if the spirit of life in all things were luminous.
There was only one person except the doctor in that little company whom John Weightman had known before--an old book-keeper who had spent his life over a desk, carefully keeping accounts--a rusty, dull little man, patient and narrow, whose wife had been in the insane asylum for twenty years and whose only child was a crippled daughter, for whose comfort and happiness he had toiled and sacrificed himself without stint. It was a surprise to find him here, as care-free and joyful as the rest.
The lives of others in the company were revealed in brief glimpses as they talked together--a mother, early widowed, who had kept her little flock of children together and laboured through hard and heavy years to bring them up in purity and knowledge--a Sister of Charity who had devoted herself to the nursing of poor folk who were being eaten to death by cancer--a schoolmaster whose heart and life had been poured into his quiet work of training boys for a clean and thoughtful manhood--a medical missionary who had given up a brilliant career in science to take the charge of a hospital in darkest Africa--a beautiful woman with silver hair who had resigned her dreams of love and marriage to care for an invalid father, and after his death had made her life a long, steady search for ways of doing kindnesses to others--a poet who had walked among the crowded tenements of the great city, bringing cheer and comfort not only by his songs, but by his wise and patient works of practical aid--a paralysed woman who had lain for thirty years upon her bed, helpless but not hopeless, succeeding by a miracle of courage in her single aim, never to complain, but always to impart a bit of her joy and peace to every one who came near her. All these, and other persons like them, people of little consideration in the world, but now seemingly all full of great contentment and an inward gladness that made their steps light, were in the company that pa.s.sed along the road, talking together of things past and things to come, and singing now and then with clear voices from which the veil of age and sorrow was lifted.
John Weightman joined in some of the songs--which were familiar to him from their use in the church--at first with a touch of hesitation, and then more confidently. For as they went on his sense of strangeness and fear at his new experience diminished, and his thoughts began to take on their habitual a.s.surance and complacency. Were not these people going to the Celestial City? And was not he in his right place among them? He had always looked forward to this journey. If they were sure, each one, of finding a mansion there, could not he be far more sure? His life had been more fruitful than theirs. He had been a leader, a founder of new enterprises, a pillar of Church and State, a prince of the House of Israel. Ten talents had been given him, and he had made them twenty. His reward would be proportionate. He was glad that his companions were going to find fit dwellings prepared for them; but he thought also with a certain pleasure of the surprise that some of them would feel when they saw his appointed mansion.