The Little Pilgrim | Page 8

the Sage, 'to us who are born of the earth it is hard to
remember that the child belongs not first to the parents, nor the
husband to the wife, nor the wife to the husband, but that all are the

children of the Father. And He is just; He will not neglect the little one
because of those prayers which the father and the mother pour forth to
Him, although they cry with anguish and with tears. Nor will He break
His great law and violate the nature He has made, and compel His own
child to what it wills not and loves not. The woman is comforted in the
breaking of her heart; but those whom she loves, are not they also the
children of the Father, who loves them more than she does? And each
is to Him as if there were not another in the world. Nor is there any
other in the world,--for none can come between the Father and the
child.'
A smile came upon the little Pilgrim's face, yet she trembled. 'It is dim
before me,' she said, 'and I cannot see clearly. Oh, if the time would but
hasten, that our Lord might come, and all struggles be ended, and the
darkness vanish away!'
'He will come when all things are ready,' said the Sage; and as they
went upon their way be showed her other sights, and the mysteries of
the heart of man, and the great patience of our Lord.
It happened to them suddenly to perceive in their way a man returning
home. These are words that are sweet to all who have lived upon the
earth and known its ways; but far, far were they from that meaning
which is sweet. The dark hours had passed, and men had slept; and the
night was over. The sun was rising in the sky, which was keen and
clear with the pleasure of the morning. The air was fresh with the dew,
and the birds awaking in the trees, and the breeze so sweet that it
seemed to blow from heaven; and to the two travellers it seemed almost
in the joy of the new day as if the Lord had already come. But here was
one who proved that it was not so. He had not slept all the night, nor
had night been silent to him nor dark, but full of glaring light and noise
and riot; his eyes were red with fever and weariness, and his soul was
sick within him, and the morning looked him in the face and upbraided
him as a sister might have upbraided him, who loved him. And he said
in his heart, as one had said of old, that all was vanity; that it was vain
to live, and evil to have been born; that the day of death was better than
the day of birth, and all was delusion, and love but a word, and life a lie.

His footsteps on the road seemed to sound all through the sleeping
world; and when he looked the morning in the face he was ashamed,
and cursed the light. The two went after him into a silent house, where
everybody slept. The light that had burned for him all night was sick
like a guilty thing in the eye of day, and all that had been prepared for
his repose was ghastly to him in the hour of awaking, as if prepared not
for sleep but for death. His heart was sick like the watch-light, and life
flickered within him with disgust and disappointment. For why had he
been born, if this were all?--for all was vanity. The night and the day
had been passed in pleasure, and it was vanity; and now his soul
loathed his pleasures, yet he knew that was vanity too, and that next
day he would resume them as before. All was vain,--the morning and
the evening, and the spirit of man and the ways of human life. He
looked himself in the face and loathed this dream of existence, and
knew that it was naught. So much as it had cost to be born, to be fed,
and guarded and taught and cared for, and all for this! He said to
himself that it was better to die than to live, and never to have been
than to be.
As these spectators stood by with much pity and tenderness looking
into the weariness and sickness of this soul, there began to be enacted
before them a scene such as no man could have seen, which no one was
aware of save he who was concerned, and which even to him was not
clear in its meanings, but rather like a phantasmagoria, a thing of the
mists; yet which