It was not only her sons who grieved, but the faithful friends who were with them, for was she not their mother too? Had she not taken as much care of them as if they had been her children?
Augustine scarcely left her side, and she was glad to have him with her. As she thanked him one day for some little thing he had done for her, his lip quivered. She thought he was thinking of all the suffering he had caused her, and smiled at him with tender eyes. "You have always been a good son to me," she said. "Never have I heard a harsh or reproachful word from your lips."
"My life was torn in two," says Augustine. "That life which was made up of mine and hers."
They were all with her when she pa.s.sed peacefully away a few days later. They choked back their tears. "It did not seem meet," says Augustine, "to celebrate that death with groans and lamentations.
Such things were fit for a less blessed deathbed, but not for hers."
Then, as they knelt gazing at the beloved face that seemed to be smiling at some unseen mystery, Evodius had a happy inspiration.
Taking up the Psalter, he opened it at the 110th Psalm.
"I will praise Thee, O Lord, with my whole heart," he sang softly, "in the a.s.sembly of the just and in the congregation."
"Great are the works of the Lord," sang the others, with trembling voices, "sought out as they are according unto all His pleasure."
Friends and religious women who had gathered near the house to pray entered and joined in the chant. It was the voice of rejoicing rather than the cry of grief that followed that pure soul on its way to heaven. Augustine alone was silent, for his heart was breaking.
We are but human, after all, and the sense of their loss fell upon them all later. That night Augustine lay thinking of his mother"s life and the unselfish love of which it had been so full. "Thy handmaid, so pious towards Thee, so careful and tender towards us.
And I let go my tears," he tells us, "and let them flow as much as they would. I wept for her, who for so many years had wept for me."
They buried her, as she herself had foretold, in Ostia, where her sacred relics were found a thousand years later by Pope Martin V., and carried to the Church of St. Augustine in Rome.
The memory of the mother to whom he owed so much remained with Augustine until the day of his death. He loved to speak of her.
Thirty years later, while preaching to his people at Hippo, he said: "The dead do not come back to us. If it were so, how often should I see my holy mother at my side! She followed me over sea and land into far countries that she might not lose me for ever. G.o.d forbid that she should be less loving now that she is more blessed. Ah, no! she would come to help and comfort me, for she loved me more than I can tell."
The dead do not come back. But who that has followed the career of the great bishop and doctor of the Church can doubt that she who prayed for him so fervently on earth had ceased to pray for him in heaven?