"Why—why?" cried impatient Gibby. "Why cannot I see her now? She has done more for me than ever I deserved——"
"That is the way of women," said the doctor, "but you cannot thank her now. She is dead."
"Dead—dead!" gasped Gilbert, stricken to the heart; "then she gave her life for me!"
"Something like it," said the doctor, a trifle grimly. For though he was a wise man, the ways of women were dark to him. He thought that Gilbert, though a fine lad, was not worth all this.
"Dead," muttered Gibby, "and I cannot even tell her—make it up to her——"
"She left you a message," said the doctor very quietly.
"Oh, nothing much," said Dr. Durie; "there was no hope from the first, and she knew it. Her mind was clear all the three days, almost to the last. She may have wandered a little then, for she told me to tell you——"
"What—what—oh, what? Tell me quickly. I cannot wait."
"That the flowers were blooming in the Upper Garden, and that she would meet you at the Gate!"
The Reverend Gilbert Denholm never married. He bears a scar or two on his open face—a face well beloved among his people. There is a grave in Rescobie kirkyard that he tends with his own hands. None else must touch it.
It is the resting-place of a woman whom love made young and beautiful, and about whose feet the flowers of Paradise are blooming, as, alone but not impatient, she waits his coming by the Gate.
Unless you happen to have made one of a group of five or six young men who every Sunday morning turned their steps towards the little meeting-house in Lady Nixon’s Wynd, it is safe to say that you did not know either it or the Doctor of Divinity. That is to say, not unless you were born in the Purple and expert of the mysteries of the Kirk of the Covenants.
The denomination was a small one, smaller even and poorer than is the wont of Scottish sects. By the eternal process of splitting off, produced by the very faithfulness of the faithful, and the remorseless way in which they carried out their own logic, by individual pretestings and testifyings, by the yet sadder losses inflicted by the mammon of unrighteousness, when some, allured by social wealth and position, turned aside to worship in some richer or more popular Zion, the Kirk of the Covenants worshipping in Lady Nixon’s Wynd had become but the shadow of its former self.