Mimosa?
I was in a far corner of the compound at the time; a scout flew to tell me. And, as I ran across the playground, detaining little hands caught at my sdrz, and little dots of blue danced and tumbled round me, but I hardly saw them. I saw only a small, slim figure in its orange and crimson raiment and pretty silver bangles against the green shadows of the mango-trees, saw the brave brown eyes trying to smile through tears, saw the little hands held up in a gesture of farewell. Fled were the twenty-two years like twenty-two minutes. Mimosa here!
““Where is she?’’ I asked the panting child who trotted alongside.
““On Premie Sittie’s verandah.”’
A moment later I was there. Facing the door, as I went through it, stood a man, and in that flash of time two currents set from him to me, joy, sorrow; but the sorrow flowed over the joy and ended it. ‘“O Servant of Righteousness (his baptismal name), is it thou?”’
Then the woman who was standing with her back to the door turned quickly, a tired, old, old woman. Mimosa? Where was Mimosa? The little girl of the bright raiment and the jewels and the tears, where was she? But in a moment she was in my arms like a long-lost child found at last. Tears? There were tears, who could have restrained them? And through my own I saw her, an old, tired woman, years and years older than I felt myself.
Beside her stood three boys, weary but polite, in her arms was a baby extremely impolite. He created a diversion by wailing a vehement protest, and his mother dashed the tears from her eyes with the gesture so well remembered, and comforted her baby, and peace reigned again, and we all made friends.
Two of the boys were her little sons, one, from that half-way halting place, was a nephew, notorious as a scampish young madcap, who had elected to come, ‘‘to see what it was like,’’ he said.
At first it was as if there were nothing left of that little lost girl but the soft brown eyes, but gradually, as she rested, there appeared slowly, as a face rising slowly through clear water, the dear and familiar in this child of our desires. The character was there, the quick intelligence, the wonderful look of spiritual apprehension that in childhood was impressive in both sisters. But all was masked by age. Star, two years older, looked much younger. Four times we have been down with her to the borders of death; doctors have given her up; only our hope held on; she can never be strong, we are told, and she has often suffered; life has not always been kind to her; but, beside this wayworn woman, Star looked as if she had glided down the smooth river of the years in a cushioned barge. But the calm eyes of quiet brown told of victory and peace: ‘“As dying, and, behold, we live.”
Oh, what will it be when such as she bathe in the pool of immortality? Will they rise with youth renewed, the pain they wore so long stripped off like an encumbering wrap, the real essential spirit of the life lived here shining forth like a light through clear crystal?
What will it be, when they escape from the cramping ways of time and find themselves in the infinite? For the entrance of the greater world is wide and sure, and they who see the straitness and the painfulness from which they have been delivered must wonder exceedingly as they are received into those large rooms with joy and immortality.