‘Not at all,’ contributed Kingston; ‘what about the blind man in the Temple? They asked Christ, “Did this man sin, or his parents, that he was born blind?” How could he have sinned, then, before he was born, except in some other existence? And Christ passed the question. If He had disbelieved the theory of reincarnation, He was quite capable of saying so very definitely. But He did not. By His silence He implicitly admitted its truth, instead of challenging it, and devoted Himself to the healing of the blind man.’
‘So wonderfully hot it is in here to-night,’ said Gundred.
‘I always feel,’ went on Isabel, ‘whenever I have a bad time, I am paying for having enjoyed a too good one once in a wrong way. I expect this broken leg of mine is the result of some selfish enjoyment of mine in bygone days that I have forgotten. I had prepared this penalty for myself in some mysterious way. For these things come automatically. Touch a button—commit the tiniest, wee-est action, good or bad—and years and years later, long after one has thought the action dead and forgotten, something happens that shows it has been alive and steadily working from the first hour to the last. Every littlest thing that happens, pleasant or painful, can always be traced back, I expect, to some cause, infinitely small and infinitely remote in the past, far, far away beyond one’s recollection.’
‘Don’t you wonder,’ said Kingston, ‘what your actions of yesterday and to-day will produce, and how long it will be before their effects come down upon us? We shall probably have forgotten all about to-day by then, but everything that we have done must bear some sort of fruit some day or other, as you say. Your accident, for instance, will have some effect upon us, and Nurse Molly must make some change in our lives, sooner or later. If one cannot introduce a fresh action without effect into our lives, still less can one introduce a fresh person. Nurse Molly, with her marvellous fringe, will certainly bring some new element with her into our lives. Now, what will it be, Isabel?’
Gundred saw a chance of being apposite.
‘Talking of Nurse Molly,’ she said, ‘really, she must be terribly vain. Morgan tells me she lights all the candles she can get together, and then sits and looks at herself in the glass. The servants are perfectly scandalized. And when she goes away from the room, she never dreams of putting the candles out. She leaves them all burning quite happily, and never thinks about them again. Such a sinful waste—yes? And she might set these old wooden rooms on fire any day, by her carelessness.’
Isabel ignored her cousin’s intervention, and went back to the original topic. ‘I hope,’ she said, ‘I have atoned for my wickedness of the past with this broken leg of mine. What I want to do is to lay up for myself a great fat store of merit, so as to go on getting happier and happier in all the later stages of my existence.’
‘Yes, but before one can attain the perfect happiness,’ replied Kingston, ‘remember that one has to lose the desire for it. After ages and ages of purification, one leaves the last trace of desire behind—even the desire for good. Then one becomes the perfect knowledge which is the perfect peace.’
‘So dreadfully chilly it sounds—yes?’ said Gundred.
‘Well, but the warmth of life is also the torment of life,’ replied Kingston. ‘Desire may be as warm and pleasant as possible, but all desire is sorrow. Without desire there is no disappointment, no suffering, none of the horrible things in life that we all want to get away from.’