SOULS SHALL MEET

New Zealand Tablet, 8 February 1917, Page 9

SOULS SHALL MEET

They closed the door ever so softly behind him, and he stood alone in the dim bed chamber. He did not move a step. Every power of mind and body seemed stricken with a fatal listlessness, a languor that numbed all but the terrible sense of pain in his heart. Four calm candles burned with a motionless yellow flame; he noted irrelevantly that not the slightest flicker stirred their oval contour, and that the light they shed upon the tall silver crucifix and on the calm face of the woman in the canopied bed was steady and meltingly soft. In spotless white they had layed her body, the shimmering folds of her delicate wedding gown, She looked much as she had looked then; the smile was almost the same. But now the hand which had rested so trustfully in his lay in maternal pressure upon the still child at her breast. A terrible sense of loneliness swept over him, and he fell heavily back against the closed door, his hand to his eyes. Gone, the wife of a blissful year; gone the child he had never kissed ; gone, into the inky blackness called death, like shadows that vanish in the fall of a winter twilight. The rush of memory flung over him the thousand trivial details that had made her infinitely precious: her quick sympathy, her sweet forgiveness, the blush that sprang so swiftly to her cheeks; and all were gone forever. She had died because she had loved him in the child at her breast. The flame of the candles swayed as he rushed forward in the wild impetuosity of grief. The smooth folds of her wedding gown fell in disorder as he buried his face in her dress, sobbing in gasping masculine sobs; ‘ Gone, gone, gone !’ Time passed unnoticed, swallowed up in the fathomless abyss of grief. Then a gentle knock at the door roused him slightly, and kneeling he bade the visitor enter. The door swung without sound, and he struggled to his feet, her dress still clasped in his hand, turning to greet the intruder. - It was a small, smoky -complexioned man with the nervous step of a student, and in his eyes burned keen intelligence, but a keener despair. ‘ I had heard of your loss,’ said the stranger, ‘ and I came to offer my sympathy.’ The man stretched forth his hand to this friend. He had not seen him since the days when, a callow but clever youth, he had sat at the elder man’s feet in a musty room, and listened to his enthusiastic explanation of the works of Buechner, Haeckel, and their school. The old man had turned the youth from religion to a materialistic philosophy, and then vanished into the maelstrom of a great city, ‘always‘pitiless toward the dreamer. ' tv V Now he moved across the room and stood over , the quiet woman and her babe. - «- . V-.;- ‘ She was fair,’ he murmured. ‘You were'happy ' to have possessed her even for a year.’ ■ > The man almost tore the dress he still clasped, in his gesture of passionate repudiation. No, no ; that was not enough. We had just begun to love. I want her still ; I shall always want her. Shall I never see her again?’ The look of despair in the old man’s eyes deepened. He slowly shook his head. To believe that is to hug to your heart a beautiful dream. If cannot be. The physical forces cease to act; the chemicals are dissolved; atom slips from

A ; -T * atom - and the | eternal.;cycle iof „ nature laws proceeds. ; But she"has gone forever.’ . 3 - , - Nbt> that cried the man ; ‘you : cannot talk of her as a meaningless jumble of atoms and forces. It .was not the atoms, the laws I loved It was a personality, a woman. '-. You offer me sympathy, you whom I counted among life’s few friends, and you say she is gone forever ? Give me hope of her, or I want neither you nor your philosophy of despair.’ - He sank to .the ground, his face buried in her dress, his body throbbing with the rhythm of his sobs. - And ? then'a' hand rested upon his shoulder. He shook it-off angrily, : but "when its reassuring pressure was renewed, he turned his face up through the faint light, and then, from force of habitual respect, sprang • to his feet. : • , ’ .; ; T ; The tall, stately man, whose hair shone white and silken in the candle light, was little changed since the days when he had thrilled the youthful undergraduate with his ‘ spectacular reasoning, his daring speculation. Now as then his eye was kindly, his hand clasp reassuring. Side by side, professor and former pupil stood above the peaceful woman. The man felt his visitor’s silent sympathy too vast to be couched in the broken utterances of a death chamber. The professor’s eyes dwelt long on the beautiful face before him and then travelled inconsequently toward the silver crucifix. ‘ She was a Catholic?’ he asked. ‘ It is a beautiful faith—if it were only true.’ The man’s agony burst forth afresh, - * But you believe in immortality, do you not? I cannot give her up ; love like her’s cannot die. Her. ; purity, her devotedness, her gentleness cannot be lost forever.’ He felt once more that . reassuring pressure on his arm. ; /' \ - ‘ We are immortal,’ said the low, firm voice that had so often gripped him with its vibrant power, ‘ but not as personalities. ... The great world soul, whose fragments form our thoughts, our emotions, is immortal. We live forever because the world shall never die. But as individuals death ends all.’ ‘ But it is she I want. I did not love a world soul; I loved her. Shall I not see and recognise the wife I loved again?’ ‘ I wish I could say yes; but it cannot be.’ ‘ Then,’ cried the man, ‘ what do I care for your world, soul, your great, selfish monster that swallows up all we love and sinks them in an ocean of oblivion? I want the woman I loved, the woman who died because she loved me. If you cannot give me her J you cannot give me anything but black despair.’ Once again he sank to his knees, borne down by an overwhelming sense of desolation. Then, of a sudden, he felt upon his hair the touch of a loved hand. Mother he cried, turning his face upward in wide-eyed surprise; I thought ’ The white-haired woman whose face bore his own features softened and feminised, smiled. ‘ Death,’ she said, ‘ is the mother of miracles.’ He leaped to his feet, and, quite unafraid, placed ■his arm about her waist. Together they looked into the calm face of death. ‘ My son’s wife,’ she said, and her voice fell sooth ’ ingly on his wrenched heart. ‘ She was beautiful and, better still, she was good.’ ‘ But she has gone from me forever,’ Anguish made poignant his tone. But the mother’s hand closed, upon’his as it rested on her waist. ‘ My son has forgotten much, as a man that he knew as a child. Can death end love? Do not the good deeds begotten of purity and self-sacrifice and gentleness cry out for a reward ? Shall son be torn from mother and wife from husband when a lifetime of service shall have linked them together with bonds stronger‘than steel ? My son, is the cold', lifeless form before you your wife? -Was it merely this that you loved ? Was it this only that loved you ? Or was it rather the warm, vital soul that has left you and that >vaits and watches for you beyond?’ ‘ Mother,’ he cried, ‘ shall we then meet again?’ ; As surely .gs heart cries to heart, as love demand

fruition, : as goodness and purity cannot i perish in vain. ■ Faith joins ; hearts separated by : the abysses of death. * “ Faith ‘ unites time with: eternity .: ' The woman you loved .... lives and , loves you still.’ v.,' ; ' ' :.• : V They found him crouched at the. side of his dead wife, his lips close to - her hand. ;.. Grief, they said, had mercifully been swallowed .up in i sleep Then they noted how like to the smile' of the dead woman was the smile which.softened his lips.; And they said: * Perhaps even in death their souls shall meet.’ — Rev. Daniel A. Lord, S.J., in .America.