What did it all mean, the loving and the suffering, the dreaming and the awakening, the meeting and the parting? The road together had been long and hard, yet here was the end—the same end to which all roads lead—but what was the purpose of it all?
The problem of life; what can it be but the development of the individual, the unfolding of the soul, that marvelous, persistent, god-like thing of whose unlimited possibilities we are but beginning to dream? And all that we do and have done to us, enjoy and suffer, think and dream, hope and aspire, make to that end, and are necessary and therefore good.
Memories came to her from a remote past, that antedated her birth—or so it seemed, for their origin was not within her earthly experiences. Yet surely they were memories, for one and all met with recognition. Faces she had loved came and smiled their sympathy and fondness. Familiar voices spoke to her—voices whose heavenly sweetness mortal ear hath not heard. Snatches of songs, celestial in their thrilling melody, floated by. Scenes restful and beautiful unrolled themselves for a moment and were gone. But it was the inner eyes which saw and the inner ears that heard.
Yes, she knew them all, for they were her people, her very own people, of whom she was always dreaming, and for whom she was always searching. They had come to comfort her. See, all smiled, not one wept, and their words and songs were joyous.
“My own people! My dear people, I shall yet find you,—I am finding you,” she said, glancing at the Butterfly’s pretty face, with its crown of sunshiny hair on the pillow, and thinking of Prescott, with his head like carven granite and eyes of fire; and others, with some of whom she had clasped hands but once, yet knew them as her own.
But what of the new-made narrow mound in the cemetery? It presented itself at the end of every life, mutely asking an explanation of its existence. This was the wall against which the race of man has ever beaten the wings of inquiry. There it always stands, unresponsive and forbidding, the grim silence, like the shores that shut in the sea, saying, “Thus far shalt thou come and no farther.”
Yet above and beyond the awe and wonder that filled her soul, was that curious sense of the unreality of death which had come when Prescott went away and still remained.
CHAPTER XI.
A LITTLE BOARD BRIDGES THE GREAT GULF.
Even here the soul of man is a member of the immaterial world; present and future, life and death, make one continuous whole in the order of spiritual nature.—Kant.
Cartice Doring was one of those blessed beings who intermeddle not with the affairs of another. She asked no questions and was free from the vulgar vice of curiosity. She listened with sympathetic interest to all confidences that came to her, but solicited none. This made her a charming and lovable friend. Speaking once of the pernicious habit some well-meaning but ill-taught persons have of asking where you were born, if your parents are living, what religion you adhere to and the thousand other catechetical shots which compose their list of topics of conversation, she said: