And while such things were being said and done in the lonely night, and
deeply pondered through the long, silent days, Veronica came and went
peacefully, with sad but not unhappy eyes, her thoughts fixed upon the
new path by which her single sorrow was to lead her up to the eternity
of all celestial joys.
In those days she determined to lead a holy life, in the memory of the
dead betrothed, and perhaps in the thought that by the outpouring of
much good around her, she might yet obtain mercy for the soul of one
self-slain. She meant not to cut herself off from all mankind, devoting
her maidenhood to heaven and her body to the servitude of slow
suffering, whereby some say that the spirit may be saved most
certainly--in the hard rule of daily dying, and daily rising again one
day nearer to death. That was not what she meant to do; that depth of
godly dreaming was too cold and still a depth for her. There must be
motion and life in her means of grace, since she had the power to make
others move and live. Marriage, wifehood, motherhood, should not be for
her, she said; but there was all the rest. There were the many
hundreds--the thousands, indeed, had she known it--of men and women and
poor children, toiling against the impossible with hands that had long
learned to labour in vain, save for the bare bread of life. To them all,
in many quarters of the land, she would be a mother, to help them, to
feed them, and to heal them; to work for them and their welfare, as they
had worked and toiled for the greatness of her dim, great ancestors,
repaying to humanity, in one lifetime, what humanity had been forced to
give them through many generations.
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