“Now let Thy good Word be fulfilled, and let Thy kingdom come.”
AT a late hour that night René left the cottage. His friends supposed he was going, as on former occasions, to his sister’s home; but he had decided, in his own mind, that he would not expose the Brissacs, as well as himself, to the risks such an unseasonable visit might entail. There was another sleeping place not far distant, towards which his heart yearned. Nowhere could he spend the night more safely, or with a more restful heart, than beside his father’s grave.
Everything favored his plan; the air was soft and mild, the stars shone brightly, and a young moon gave just a little light. When he reached the sacred spot, he saw with pleasure that it had been carefully and lovingly tended during his absence. Flowers were planted there, and a young evergreen oak marked and overshadowed the place.
He half sat, half reclined beside it, saying in his heart, “It is good for me to be here.” Not that he was nearer the ransomed spirit, because so close to the dust that had been its mortal tenement; but the spot, so dear to memory, the thoughts it awakened within him, the softly gleaming moonlight, the quiet hour, and the sense at once of perfect isolation and perfect security, stilled and calmed his soul, and raised it above “the changes and chances of this troublesome world.”
And there, every event of the solemn night that made him an orphan came back upon his mind with vivid distinctness. As in a dream he saw all―lived through all again. But the pain was gone; he thought not now of the anguish of those who mourned, left behind in desolation; but of the joy of him who entered into the rest that remaineth for the people of God.
Into something of the same rest―that great deep rest which comes to those that see “the end of the Lord” —he himself seemed to be entering, even now. Eyes touched by the dust of graves see far. The past, read in the light of eternity, wonderfully illumes the future.
He thanked God for his father’s Life and death, and for the fragrant memory he left behind him. Then, in the still midnight, it almost seemed as though he heard a voice, long silent in the grave― “My child, it is not your father who is lying there.”
He looked up; thin, fleecy clouds were drifting slowly over the pure deep blue of the solemn starlit sky. The calm was unbroken; the solitude perfect—but God was near―God and perhaps also, those He had in his keeping―the beloved and blessed dead. Who could tell?
After he had left his friends, he called to mind, almost with a pang of jealousy, how that not once, in the joy of their reunion, they had named him whose memory was unspeakably precious to all. For himself, What had he that he did not owe to Majal? His friendship with the Meniets, his affianced bride, his calling and consecration to the ministry―yea, his “own self besides” ―all had been given him through that meeting with the Pastor of the Desert at his father’s grave.
How many lives had been, like his, “delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God,” through that one young Life, cut off ere it reached its prime? Victory through defeat, success through failure, joy out of anguish, Life out of death―was not this, indeed, “the secret of the Lord,” revealed first, like all other secrets, through Christ and in Him?
That which had been should be again—for himself and for others. For himself, perchance a doom like Majal’s? If so, as his day his strength should be; and God would take care of her whose life was dearer to him than his own.
Yet René was not destined to be called to such a trial. Each heroic death, like Majal’s, had done its part towards making such deaths impossible thenceforward. The long roll of martyr ministers was nearly full now; only two honored names―Étienne Lafage and Frangois Rochette―had yet to be inscribed upon it. Rochette was the last minister, and Grenier de Lourmade (the youngest of his three companions in suffering) the last layman in France to whom Rome ever formally offered the choice between conversion and death. That was seven and twenty years before the great Revolution, like a devouring flood, swept before it, and the world was changed.
That changed world René Plans lived to see. But if thus early, in dream or vision, he could have foreseen it, the vision must have been altogether unlike the reality. It could not have entered his imagination that he should one day stand, in thought, beside a scaffold, whereas of old the drums were beating with pitiless clamor, to drown the victim’s dying words―that victim, no Pastor of the Desert, but the grandson and successor of Louis XV. Truly, “God is a righteous judge, strong and patient;” and He “visits the sins of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation.”
What René might have foreseen, and with truth, for himself and those dear to him, was a tried and troublous, yet happy life. Peril, poverty, conflict, often the lack of all things, even of daily bread and nightly shelter, might be his lot, and hers who had bravely chosen to share it. But the Lord would be their inheritance, and their portion in the land of the living. Like his servants in earlier days, they would be in this world “as unknown, and yet well-known; as dying,” yet could they say, “behold! we live; as chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing all things.” And, perhaps, ere they went to rest, if God so willed it, they might “see their children’s children, and peace upon Israel.”
Peace upon Israel! Kneeling there, upon the martyr’s grave, René raised his eyes to heaven, while his heart went onwards to “the good time coming” ―prayed for, hoped for, believed in, through the darkest hour, by his fathers and his fathers’ fathers. “I die; but God will surely visit you,” ―saint after saint had murmured with failing lips, ere he was laid in the grave often so hard to find for him in his native land. Sweet as the music of distant Christmas bells which it recalled, as the song of angels which it interpreted, came back to him Majal’s message: “The Lord shall comfort Zion; He shall comfort all her waste places; He shall make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody.”
Already René seemed to see, on the far away Eastern hills, the dawn of that new day. And those everlasting hills themselves seemed to echo the glorious words of prophecy and promise: “The mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but My kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of My peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee. O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest and not comforted, behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colors, and lay thy foundations with sapphires; and I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncle, and all thy borders of pleasant stones.”
“Amen, and amen!” said the Pastor of the Desert, as the vision filled his heart with its splendor. “May the Lord perform it in his time! And if, in the new day of peace and prosperity, when they sit beneath their vine and their fig tree, none making them afraid, the children of the martyrs should forget Him who was the joy and strength of their fathers, or hold with looser hand the precious faith for which they died, yet may He remember them, and fulfill his word: ‘I will be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.’ Speak then to Thy Zion, O Eternal!” he prayed; “speak low and soft with Thy prevailing voice. Say unto her, ‘I remember thee―the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals, when thou wentest after me in the “Desert,” in a land that was not sown.’ And let her last love and her last works be even more than the first, for the sake, not of her martyrs, but of her martyrs’ Lord and King.”
The sun arose, and touched René’s kneeling form with glory ere his prayer was ended. He had not slept; but he had rested, and was refreshed. Thankful for the past, content in the present, and fearless for the future, he went his way; and once more that lonely valley resounded with the song of praise and holy confidence:
“The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want;
He makes me down to he
In pastures green; He leadeth me
The quiet waters by.”
THE END.