Anxiety and worry fell away from Cartice Doring soon as she determined to rest and trust. A profound philosophic truth is here revealed. When we trust, God Himself carries our burdens, and we are set free from care. Trust is the essence, the vital principle of religion, which is at heart a recognition of the divine intelligence within us, about us, and is reflected by us,—the reality we call God.
It was a joy to be the mistress of her own time, to know when she began the day that she could do with it what she pleased. It was luxury to sit at an open window and feel the air blow over her, and not be goaded by any thought of duty undone. She went about the city and enjoyed its treasures of art and beauty. She formed new friendships and cultivated old ones. She read and, through sympathy, entered into, the lives and feelings of authors and the people of their creation, as never before. She became better acquainted with herself, and by that means with all others. She went to Gabriel Norris’s unsectarian temple and helped him feed his sheep. There the music of her beautiful voice called in many a lost one. The bitter loneliness that shadowed her at times fled away and troubled her no more. Her spirit came in sympathetic and loving touch with others, with all that is, with the universal mind itself, for this is the purpose of life, the union of the entire being with its original. This is the true freedom which is the destiny of the human race. The individual self becomes one with the universal, and is henceforth free from limitations, from restrictions, from bondage of every kind. It exchanges its little circle of personal desires for the great world-consciousness. Whosoever does this even in the most limited degree puts care and trouble behind him.
Thus it was that this truth which Cartice Doring had long theoretically accepted, became a part of her being. She began to live it and be it, for we only really accept truth when we are it. Her eyes lost the look of suffering that lighted them at times with a moving and resistless fire, and became trustful, hopeful, peaceful, like those of a happy child.
Difficulties and disappointments vanished and fear vexed her no more. She was like those who have won all battles, put all troubles behind them. She had the knowledge that within herself was power over all temporal dragons; that her welfare depended on no man’s whim; that there are no accidents; that He who slumbers not nor sleeps, is “guiding each of His creatures in the current of an eternal purpose”; that she was as indestructible as the universe, and as old, as young and as deathless as its builder. She thought no more of happiness, because blessedness had come into her life,—the blessedness which “consists in progress toward perfection.” In an undefined way she felt herself approaching high summits, understanding that there is neither high nor low, near nor far in the universe save in thought.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE BOOK AND ITS CRITICS.
The tale is as old as the Eden Tree—and new as the new-cut tooth—
For each man knows ere his lip-thatch grows he is master of Art and Truth;
And each man hears as the twilight nears, to the beat of his dying heart,
The Devil drum on the darkened pane: “You did it, but was it Art?”—Rudyard Kipling.
One day Mrs. Doring received a letter from a lawyer announcing Kendall’s death, and advising her that by his will she was sole heir to his property, which was valued at about twenty-five thousand dollars—a fortune in Bohemia. A few lines from the testator were enclosed, the last his hand penned. He had but one request to make in regard to the disposition of it, and that was that she use part of it in bringing out her book.
“See,” she said to Lilla Joy, who had long lived with her in the little flat, “how my trust is rewarded. Influences unseen were working for me while I rested. Had I been a little wiser, I might have saved myself much torment all my life. Worry hinders instead of helps, I believe it is one of the forty deadly sins the Egyptians tried to avoid.”
With money to work with it was not difficult to find a publisher for the book. It was a true tale, told in a simple, straightforward manner, of life and its meaning, as its author understood them. The theme of it was that life goes on after the change we call death, and is inconceivably enlarged and ennobled for all who aspire.
Such of the critics as worship plots and believe that the chief aim of life in stories and out is to marry and be given in marriage, made it the subject of very rough surgery.