‘Yes. She’ll get to her grave now,’ said my aunt, with a trembling in her voice I had never heard before.
‘No,’ objected my uncle. ‘Her body will go to the grave, but her soul will go to heaven.’
‘Dear me, Willie! don’t you know that?’ said my aunt. ‘Don’t you know you’ve got a soul as well as a body?’
‘I’m sure _I_ haven’t,’ I returned. ‘What was grannie’s like?’
‘But,’ I said, turning to my uncle, ‘if her body goes to the grave, and her soul to heaven, what’s to become of poor grannie--without either of them, you see?’
My uncle had been thinking while we talked.
‘That can’t be the way to represent the thing, Jane; it puzzles the child. No, Willie; grannie’s body goes to the grave, but grannie herself is gone to heaven. What people call her soul is just grannie herself.’
My uncle fell a-thinking again. He did not, however, answer this last question, for I suspect he found that it would not be good for me to know the real cause--namely, that people hardly believed it, and therefore did not say it. Most people believe far more in their bodies than in their souls. What my uncle did say was--
‘I hardly know. But grannie’s gone to heaven anyhow.’
‘I’m so glad!’ I said. ‘She will be more comfortable there. She was too old, you know, uncle.’
He made no reply. My aunt’s apron was covering her face, and when she took it away, I observed that those eager almost angry eyes were red with weeping. I began to feel a movement at my heart, the first fluttering physical sign of a waking love towards her. ‘Don’t cry, auntie,’ I said. ‘I don’t see anything to cry about. Grannie has got what she wanted.’
She made me no answer, and I sat down to my breakfast. I don’t know how it was, but I could not eat it. I rose and took my way to the hollow in the field. I felt a strange excitement, not sorrow. Grannie was actually dead at last. I did not quite know what it meant. I had never seen a dead body. Neither did I know that she had died while I slept with my hand in hers. Nannie, seeing something peculiar, had gone to her the moment I left the room, and had found her quite cold. Had we been a talking family, I might have been uneasy until I had told the story of my last interview with her; but I never thought of saying a word about it. I cannot help thinking now that I was waked up and sent to the old woman, my great-grandmother, in the middle of the night, to help her to die in comfort. Who knows? What we can neither prove nor comprehend forms, I suspect, the infinitely larger part of our being.