Hearing their pathetic though unconscious confession of ignorance, Mrs. Doring wondered if little Isabel’s short, loving, trusting life was not more complete than theirs of long years full of impermanent and illusory importance. She wished she could tell them what she had learned of life and its meaning and future, but, alas! she had already been stoned and knew the danger of letting her light shine before those who had not become as little children—receptive, willing to learn.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE STORY OF ONE RETURNED FROM THE DEAD.
“Is it wonderful that I should be immortal, as every one is immortal? I know it is wonderful, but my eye-sight is equally wonderful, and how I was conceived in my mother’s womb is equally wonderful.”
—Walt Whitman.
Thought in the mind hath made us.
What we are
By thought was wrought and built.
If a man’s mind
Hath evil thoughts, pain comes on him as comes
The wheel the ox behind.
All that we are is what we thought and willed;
Our thoughts shape us and frame.
If one endure
In purity of thought joy follows him
As his own shadow sure.—Sir Edwin Arnold.
Mrs. Doring had read that the people of the unseen world, or other invisible intelligent beings, sometimes condescended to write on slates under certain conditions. As she now believed that Chrissalyn possessed all the psychic gifts, she bought a slate and used her most artful eloquence to persuade her friend to experiment. The capricious creature consented after fishing up objections enough to make her acquiescence received with great gratitude. This was her innocent way of making her services valuable and herself important. But for love of her friend, and also no doubt for love of Prescott, who was the only person on the other side of silence that she cared to hear from, apparently, or at least was not afraid of, she finally consented.
Not knowing the correct manner of procedure they could do no more than experiment blindly, till they learned something about it. They held the slate under the table till their arms were all tired out and got nothing. Then they laid it on the table, and becoming interested in talking, forgot all about it and their experiment, till they heard a soft, rapid scratching.
Looking down simultaneously, they saw an incredible thing. The tiny pencil, no bigger than a grain of rice, was writing, though no visible hand guided it, and this was its message:
“Each soul is its own redeemer, here, hereafter and forever.”
The two spectators looked at each other in awe-struck silence. From whom this came they knew not, for the one that wrote it wrote nothing more. But for their familiarity with communications from the silent majority they would have been sore afraid. As it was they were awed by this extraordinary evidence of the nearness of unseen beings presumably like themselves.
Talking about it they sat there till the evening was nearly spent. At last, Chrissalyn idly laid her hand on the slate, and almost immediately it began to throb or vibrate curiously, like a living thing. Startled, she removed her hand, and instantly the throbbing ceased. Turning the slate over they found the under side written full in a feminine hand of exquisite daintiness, and signed with the name of one of our most eminent women, one who has been dead nearly a century.