the process of healing was already begun. Agony would many a time return
unbidden, would yet often rise like a crested wave, with menace of
overwhelming despair, but the Real, the True, long hidden from her by the
lying judgments of men and women, was now at length beginning to reveal
itself to her tear-blinded vision; Hope was lifting a feeble head above the
tangled weeds of the subsiding deluge; and ere long the girl would see and
understand how little cares the Father, whose judgment is the truth of
things, what at any time his child may have been or, done, the moment that
child gives herself up to be made what He would have her! Looking down into
the hearts of men, He sees differences there of which the self-important
world takes no heed; many that count themselves of the first, He sees the
last--and what He sees, alone _is_: a gutter-child, a thief, a girl who
never in this world had even a notion of purity, may lie smiling in the
arms of the Eternal, while the head of a lordly house that still flourishes
like a green bay-tree, may be wandering about with the dogs beyond the
walls of the city.
Out in the open world, I say, the power of the present God began at once to
work upon Isobel, for there, although dimly, she yet looked into His open
face, sketched vaguely in the mighty something we call Nature--chiefly on
the great vault we call Heaven, the _Upheaved_. Shapely but undefined;
perfect in form, yet limitless in depth; blue and persistent, yet ever
evading capture by human heart in human eye; this sphere of fashioned
boundlessness, of definite shapelessness, called up in her heart the
formless children of upheavedness--grandeur, namely, and awe; hope, namely,
and desire: all rushed together toward the dawn of the unspeakable One,
who, dwelling in that heaven, is above all heavens; mighty and
unchangeable, yet childlike; inexorable, yet tender as never was mother;
devoted as never yet was child save one. Isy, indeed, understood little of
all this; yet she wept, she knew not why; and it was not for sorrow.
But when, the coach-journey over, she turned her back upon the house where
her child lay, and entered the desolate hill-country, a strange feeling
began to invade her consciousness. It seemed at first but an old mood, worn
shadowy; then it seemed the return of an old dream; then a painful,
confused, half-forgotten memory; but at length it cleared and settled into
a conviction that she had been in the same region before, and had had,
although a passing, yet a painful acquaintance with it; and at the last
she concluded that she must be near the very spot where she had left and
lost her baby. All that had, up to that moment, befallen her, seemed fused
in a troubled conglomerate of hunger and cold and weariness, of help and
hurt, of deliverance and returning pain: they all mingled inextricably with
the scene around her, and there condensed into the memory of that one
event--of which this must assuredly be the actual place! She looked upon
widespread wastes of heather and peat, great stones here and there,
half-buried in it, half-sticking out of it: surely she was waiting there
for something to come to pass! surely behind this veil of the Seen, a
child must be standing with outstretched arms, hungering after his mother!
In herself that very moment must Memory be trembling into vision! At
Length her heart's desire must be drawing near to her expectant soul!
But suddenly, alas! her certainty of recollection, her assurance of
prophetic anticipation, faded from her, and of the recollection itself
remained nothing but a ruin! And all the time it took to dawn into
brilliance and fade out into darkness, had measured but a few weary steps
by the side of her companion, lost in the meditation of a glad sermon for
the next Sunday about the lost sheep carried home with jubilance, and
forgetting how unfit was the poor sheep beside him for such a fatiguing
tramp up hill and down, along what was nothing better than the stony bed