Chapter Fourteen.
An Unexpected Declaration.
“I have never had time to think of being sick myself, or to think of myself in any way. I used to worry over every thing, and strove to gather sufficient force in one day to last a week, but the effort was useless. I now realise that I am not doing this living. I am being lived. There is much rest to me in that thought.”
“You speak in riddles,” said the doctor, “how can an unimaginative fellow like me solve the mystery of ‘I am being lived?’”
“It is not a riddle, and it is not for the imaginative,” said Kate. “It is reality of which I speak. We talk of the burden of life. But life is not a burden. If you look about at the over-burdened world you will find that its people are weighed down with loads of their own accumulation. Apprehension, fretfulness, discontent—a thousand things—dissipate the strength and happiness of mortals. I have come to believe that individual life, as it was given from the hand of God, is a fulness—not a strife. The familiar old figure of speech, ‘Life is a river,’ expresses it to me, and the river just flows along and takes all the goodly, streams that flow into it all the length of its course. So it grows and is filled, not filling itself.”
“But don’t you see, Miss Darcy, that the river must also take all the bad that flows into it.”
“But don’t you see,” asked Kate, “that pursuing its course to the great ocean it purifies and brings to sparkling clearness all that comes to it. That is always the result of patient and cheerful acceptance.”
It is in unexpected places and at unexpected times that we most often find ourselves speaking of heart-experiences, and spiritual beliefs and attainments. To Dr Fox this was a rare occasion. In the life he had known since he had left his native shores, the questions of the hour arising for the earnest thinker had not been presented to him. Like other men away from the influence of home and intelligent high-toned womanhood, he had drifted into careless modes of thought.
The ease that comes from a happy-go-lucky philosophy is not the peace that comes of trust. Dr Fox felt this with a startling clearness. Through the woman by his side came the white, searching light of a pure soul within, shining upon his own and revealing the barrenness of life without earnestness. How had she reached her spiritual altitude amid the ambitions and crushing disappointments of her past?
“Miss Darcy,” said the doctor, “you are one of the rare beings who see only the good in every thing. You seem to know no other force. This may do for women, but how can men, with grosser natures, come into such a wide place?”