Whats Mines Mine, vol 3 | Page 2

became able to
understand Ian, and perceived at length that her dread, almost dislike of
him at first, was owing solely to her mingled incapacity and

unworthiness. Before she left the cottage, it was spring time in her soul;
it had begun to put forth the buds of eternal life. Such buds are not
unfrequently nipped; but even if they are, if a dull, false, commonplace
frost close in, and numb the half wakened spirit back into its wintry
sleep, that sleep will ever after be haunted with some fainting airs of
the paradise those buds prophesied. In Mercy's case they were to grow
into spiritual eyes--to open and see, through all the fogs and tumults of
this phantom world, the light and reality of the true, the spiritual world
everywhere around her--as the opened eyes of the servant of the
prophet saw the mountains of Samaria full of horses of fire and chariots
of fire around him. Every throb of true love, however mingled with the
foolish and the false, is a bourgeoning of the buds of the life eternal--ah,
how far from leaves! how much farther from flowers.
Ian was high above her, so high that she shrank from him; there seemed
a whole heaven of height between them. It would fill her with a kind of
despair to see him at times sit lost in thought: he was where she could
never follow him! He was in a world which, to her childish thought,
seemed not the world of humanity; and she would turn, with a sense of
both seeking and finding, to the chief. She imagined he felt as she did,
saw between his brother and him a gulf he could not cross. She did not
perceive this difference, that Alister knew the gulf had to be crossed. At
such a time, too, she had seen his mother regarding him with a similar
expression of loss, but with a mingling of anxiety that was hers only. It
was sweet to Mercy to see in the eyes of Alister, and in his whole
bearing toward his younger brother, that he was a learner like herself,
that they were scholars together in Ian's school.
A hunger after something beyond her, a something she could not have
described, awoke in her. She needed a salvation of some kind, toward
which she must grow! She needed a change which she could not
understand until it came--a change the greatest in the universe, but
which, man being created with the absolute necessity for it, can be no
violent transformation, can be only a grand process in the divine idea of
development.
She began to feel a mystery in the world, and in all the looks of it--a
mystery because a meaning. She saw a jubilance in every sunrise, a
sober sadness in every sunset; heard a whispering of strange secrets in
the wind of the twilight; perceived a consciousness of unknown bliss in

the song of the lark;--and was aware of a something beyond it all, now
and then filling her with wonder, and compelling her to ask, "What
does it, what can it mean?" Not once did she suspect that Nature had
indeed begun to deal with her; not once suspect, although from
childhood accustomed to hear the name of Love taken in vain, that love
had anything to do with these inexplicable experiences.
Let no one, however, imagine he explains such experiences by
suggesting that she was in love! That were but to mention another
mystery as having introduced the former. For who in heaven or on earth
has fathomed the marvel betwixt the man and the woman? Least of all
the man or the woman who has not learned to regard it with reverence.
There is more in this love to uplift us, more to condemn the lie in us,
than in any other inborn drift of our being, except the heavenly tide
Godward. From it flow all the other redeeming relations of life. It is the
hold God has of us with his right hand, while death is the hold he has of
us with his left. Love and death are the two marvels, yea the two
terrors--but the one goal of our history.
It was love, in part, that now awoke in Mercy a hunger and thirst after
heavenly things. This is a direction of its power little heeded by its
historians; its earthly side occupies almost all their care. Because lovers
are not worthy of even its earthly aspect, it palls upon them, and they
grow weary, not of love, but of their lack of it. The want of the
heavenly in it has caused it to perish: it had no salt. From those that
have not is taken away that which they have. Love without religion