“You are quite right in your conclusion. The liquor habit is also perilous and unprofitable, yet the man addicted to it keeps right on in it. One must do something to keep from remembering certain other things. With me it’s a case of keeping my mind off misery. I got into it because in the first year of my married life my husband neglected me shamefully, spending most of his time with a mincing little woman who posed for goodness itself. For a time I broke my heart over it; all women do. Then I braced up and began to administer his own medicine to him, only not in such repugnantly large doses. We all do things it would be better not to do, because somebody else does us an injury. We get into one trouble in trying to escape from another. It’s merely a matter of choice between the frying pan and the fire,—a puzzle far too deep for my light head to work on.”
Nothing is accidental. We meet the people we are destined to meet, and with their help or hindrance work out our problem, be it hard or easy. The most feather-weight of mortals may prove our greatest teacher. In whose keeping we shall find the most precious treasures we know not. But it was written in the great unopened book that the Butterfly was to be help and healing to the bruised heart of Cartice Doring, and to bear a torch which should light for her the very darkest page of life.
When affairs are at their worst a change has to come. Misery itself does not stand still. It moves slowly, nevertheless it moves. The finances of the Laytons and Dorings had reached the stage of desperation. Colonel Layton found the situation too grave to face without frequent liquefactions. The result was that he escaped facing it altogether, for he forgot it completely during the day, and at night went into a stupor too profound for landlords or other monsters to invade.
The Butterfly and Cartice thought of a means of extricating themselves at last. They decided to leave the hotel, take lodgings and eat, Bohemian fashion, when they could pay for it, and fast when they had no money.
They found furnished rooms, side by side, which they provided with some tiny traps for cooking, by selling some of the Butterfly’s personal treasures. To the surprise of the others, Colonel Layton volunteered to go daily to market and bring in supplies for both families, a task he performed for some time with a faithfulness not natural to his character, which was uncertain and ease-loving to the last degree. He went early and returned loaded like a porter. Among his purchases, cream cheese in liberal quantities was always a certainty. This was the bait that lured him to the market. He had a boyish fondness for it, and like a boy was willing to go out of his way to get it.
Cartice and the Butterfly rejoiced in each other more and more every day. They shared their money and whatever else they possessed freely, and the unqualified frankness of their confidences was salvation for them. To tell a trouble to sympathetic ears is, in a measure, to throw it off. Repression kills, but expression is life. The seed that sends a plant upward from the earth expresses itself. Were conditions such that it could not do so, it would die and rot away in the darkness.
The blessed Butterfly, whose extraordinary baptismal name of Chrissalyn, fitted her so exquisitely, had a far nobler mission in the world than she herself dreamed.
Mrs. Doring continued to search for the meaning of things. She had sought happiness and found wretchedness, and in the first anguish of disappointment failed to see that she was not the only one who had had a fruitless quest. There was the Butterfly whose experience was the same, and many others, now that she thought of it. Perhaps all had more or less disappointment were their inner lives known.
Dimly she began to see that the pursuit of happiness could not be the true purpose of life, though all the world assumed that it was. Her dream of conjugal companionship had vanished altogether. There were times when she hated her husband, times when she pitied him, times when she despised him, and times when she tried to believe that she loved him,—must love him or die. Had any soul in the universe so yearned for love as she and been from birth so stinted of it? Behind the immobile mask that hid her proud, suffering heart from other eyes, her soul cried for it. What could not she have endured, with a laugh on her face and a song on her lips, had love walked by her side? Could poverty or any other terror which civilization has nursed daunt her then? No, a thousand times no, she said.