I told him all, and he did not speak a word until my tale was finished.
“Were you very frightened,” he then asked, “when you found you had lost your way, and darkness was coming?”
“I was frightened, or I would not have gone to the lady. But I wish I had staid on the moor for you to find me. I knew you would soon be out looking for me. Until she came I comforted myself with thinking that perhaps even then you were on the moor, and I might see you any moment.”
“I thought that God was out on the moor, and if you were not there, he would keep me company.”
“Ah!” said my uncle, as if thinking to himself; “she but needs him the more when I am with her!”
“Yes, of course!” I answered; “I need him then for you as well as for myself.”
“That is very true, my child!--Shall I tell you one thing I thought of while looking for you?”
“I thought how Jesus' father and mother must have felt when they were looking for him.”
“And they needn't have been so unhappy if they had thought who he was--need they?”
“Certainly not. And I needn't have been so unhappy if I had thought who you were. But I was terribly frightened, and there I was wrong.”
“Another little one of the same father as he.”
“I hardly had time to be frightened before the lady came.”
“Yes; you see I needn't have been so unhappy!”
My uncle always treated me as if I could understand him perfectly. This came, I see now, from the essential childlikeness of his nature, and from no educational theory.
“Sometimes,” he went on, “I look all around me to see if Jesus is out anywhere, but I have never seen him yet!”
“We shall see him one day, shan't we?” I said, craning round to look into his eyes, which were my earthly paradise. Nor are they a whit less dear to me, nay, they are dearer, that he has been in God's somewhere, that is, the heavenly paradise, for many a year.
“I think so,” he answered, with a sigh that seemed to swell like a sea-wave against me, as I sat on his arm; “--I hope so. I live but for that--and for one thing more.”
There are some, I fancy, who would blame him for not being sure, and bring text after text to prove that he ought to have been sure. But oh those text-people! They look to me, not like the clay-sparrows that Jesus made fly, but like bird-skins in a glass-case, stuffed with texts. The doubt of a man like my uncle must be a far better thing than their assurance!