Tulis Abrojal

“ When I looked at the dead face of my husband, so calm, and profoundly at peace with everything, I said ‘My love, my dear love, heart of my heart and soul of my soul, love of my youth and companion of my spirit forevermore, I thank God that the hard things of the world can hurt you no more.’ The cruelest pang poverty has given me was seeing him bear humiliation and insult in silence, with heavenly patience. Poverty for oneself is bad enough, but when we see those we love suffer because of it, we know exquisite anguish. ”

“ Cartice walked home on air. The long lane of her misery was turning. A chance to work had come to her, and that meant a means of climbing out of the slough of despond. Idleness is the prelude to decay, an invitation to destruction. Enforced idleness, when the spirit longs for activity, and yet finds itself hedged in, helpless, cut off from opportunity, is the death of hope, the very day of doom for the soul. Now that was all over. The ladder that leads out of despondency and on to the best the world has to give was before her, her feet already on its first round. ”

“ Not for her ran rivers, whose flowing waters lapped and swirled and wooed world-weary hearts. Did she believe that silence, nothingness, insensate dust alone were at the end of our journey here, there; blessed be the rivers! But she knew—knew beyond doubt that no river can extinguish the spark of divinity we call consciousness.
After all, why should she fear? No one stands absolutely alone. There is no separateness, no differentiation. Back of each, eternal Being mirrors itself forever; and that which we see is as nothing compared to that which we see not. ”

“ The mask which Cartice Doring then put on was so impenetrable that it repelled any meddling with or probing into what lay beneath. It was her shield against that most merciless of all weapons, the human eye, and she wore it for many and many a day and could not cast it off.
Every heart, however self-sufficient its outward bearing, craves sympathy, that precious and potent power which holds the universe together, yet so little faith have we in the compassion of our fellows that nothing in hours of anguish is so dreaded as their gaze. ”

“ She heard voices calling to her from another world—a world whose people sought continually and vainly to attain a condition they knew only in name, and which they called Happiness. All believed in the existence of this condition and gave chase to it, each in his own way, but none found it. Often hearing the voices of these unhappy people and seeing them in visions, this woman longed to go and help them. The longing disturbed the harmony of life in all her world, until it was decreed that she must leave it and go to that other whose vibrations of anguish had shaken the spheres. ”

“ Life is an endless chain. To me now the mere fact of living after death seems a very small thing—but one little link in the endless chain. Dazzling heights rise before us as the soul goes on up the steps of knowledge, where inexhaustible joys are laid up for us. Nothing counts but knowledge—knowledge of the law. Now I understand that eternal life is to know God. It takes eternal life to know him.
“When you act from the outlook of love, you will never go wrong; for truth is born of love. ”

“ With no love between husband and wife, could they be expected to love their children? Can a mother be expected to love the child who comes unwelcome to her arms? Can a father love children in whom he sees the features and traits of the woman to whom he is hopelessly bound and yet hates? We were all victims of violated law, so who was to blame? Ignorance! Ignorance, which is responsible for all the evil and all the suffering under the sun. In fact ignorance is evil, and evil is ignorance, nothing more nor less. You know Shakspeare says there is no darkness but ignorance. ”

“ Were I found in the arms of a man, receiving and answering his kisses, it would be because I loved him intensely, devotedly; and I will not judge you by a lower standard than I wish to be judged. Marriage must mean marriage in the highest and truest sense of the word, or nothing. Now that I know you do not love me, I shall not blame you, for love is not a matter of the will. You shall go free.”
“Hang it all, Cartice,” said Doring, now thoroughly frightened, “you are not going to be melodramatic about a bit of fooling like that, are you?” ”

“ I surrounded myself with imaginary friends whom I loved and who loved me—charming, agreeable, superior people—men and women, not children. The misery that prevailed in our home had taken my childhood from me before I knew I possessed it. I early learned the solemn truth that ‘each soul in what is most itself, in what is deepest and nearest, lives alone, and that there is more loneliness in life than there is communion.’ I, too, like my little sister, suffered from a strange homesickness of the spirit, a longing for sympathetic association, for companionship, in short. ”

“ To succeed in the world’s opinion is often to fail in the exacting eye of conscience. Perhaps the only permanent success is failure. The joy, the glory and the reward are in the doing, not in the result. The fateful question for all of us will be, not, “Hast thou won?” but “Hast thou striven?”
The things we call pain and pleasure she knew to be illusions, mere thought pictures painted on the canvas of our consciousness, by ignorance—ignorance of our true being and the true purpose of existence. ”

“ Does any man know what the next hour will bring upon him? Every moment ahead of us is as completely wrapped in mystery as is all that lies on the other side of the grave. In both cases we can only do our best, trusting in the love that created us, and that shapes our course.
“But the loneliness of life! Who can fathom it or explain it? and what can mitigate it? Mediocrity feels it not, for its sympathizers swarm. But in the hearts of the highest it is densest and deepest. As the soul grows upward, it feels itself isolated, and the isolation has in it a poignant anguish. ”

“ Chrissalyn went to live with a friend and determined to find a way to earn her bread. The end of one path through which she had sought happiness was reached and only sadness and disappointment were there. Now she must look for others, for the endless quest goes on, clear to the grave itself and possibly beyond. When she with the last scrap of her possessions was gone and her apartments left solitary, Cartice felt a sense of desolation greater than she had known since she and the Butterfly had been friends. Life is as inexorable as death; its separations are often more cruel. ”

“ Cartice had ever been sensible of a powerful and unaccountable attraction in her friend. She had always loved to watch Chrissalyn, she knew not why, loved to be near her and never wearied of her. For others, both men and women, the Butterfly possessed the same attraction. If she wanted to ensnare the most wary masculine mortal, she had only to cast her eyes upon him and he was hers. If she wished for the good-will or friendship of a woman, a smile and a pleasant word or two were all she need give in order to gain it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The heaven, the happiness, the joy we dream of and search for, is in the unfolding, not in any fixed state at which we shall arrive, for we pause nowhere.
“‘This is not Death’s world: it is Life’s. Death has no empire anywhere.’ In time to come its very signs shall pass away. There shall be no more graves, nor marks to graves to say that the dust of any lie there. All dust is the same and all places the same; and life everlasting is the eternal heritage of all souls.”
A few days later Cartice said she saw the Butterfly near her, and that she now had most beautiful wings. ”

“ You carry with you a conviction of immortality. Your intense individuality seems like a deathless thing. It reminds me of the words of the young Greek in the drama of Ion. When his life was to be sacrificed, his beloved asks if they shall meet again. He says, ‘I have asked that dreadful question of the hills that look eternal—of the streams that flow forever—of the stars among whose fields of azure my raised spirit has walked in glory. All are dumb. But as I gaze upon thy living face, I see something in the love that lights its beauty which cannot wholly perish. ”

“ Cartice asked.
“The knowledge that love is all there is—that it fills all universes; lights all worlds; encompasses every soul, and is the life of every soul. This is as true of your world as of ours; but nearly all there refuse to believe it. Here we cannot doubt it—that is, those who have love in their own hearts cannot doubt it. Those who love not do not know it, for all is darkness to them; but that darkness disappears when they begin to love.” ”

“ Lilla returned to New York to go on with the grim business of life. Was the joy gone from her face? No; it was still there, softened, heightened and illumined by a new and holy light.
“Dear friend,” she said, as she and Cartice talked together on the evening of her return, “there are three new graves in the old cemetery at home, but they do not hold my husband and children. That which each contains is an unreality, a thing never destined to endure,—a garment which the real being wore to make itself seen by our dim eyes. ”

“ I see all that, yet I cannot rid myself of the fear that you are destined to suffer much and will need the service and sympathy of all who love you. From life I have learned a little. When great strength is given I know it will be needed. And you are stronger in character than you know. I should like to save you from suffering, but were I ever so rich and powerful, I know I could not do it. You must meet your destiny, whatever it may be. As the Scotch say, ‘must dree your weird.’ Nobody else can live your life for you, for, alas! life admits of no proxy. ”

“ In this respect the people outside of books were precisely like the people in books. They had the same ideal of happiness, chased it through the same difficulties and disasters, and would not admit that it was a phantom; would not see that Death stalked behind every joy, sat at every feast, touched elbows right and left with the victorious as well as with the defeated, and waited for everybody under the sun. They knew it, of course, but they did not want to think about it or talk about it.
And what was this spectre to which all closed their eyes because of terror? Death was death. ”

“ To see the love upon which she had founded her dearest hopes turn to ashes; to have what she once thought happiness become a burden so intolerable that it must be cast down, acknowledging disappointment, defeat and humiliation before the world, is, indeed, a bitter cup.
The coarse, the malicious, the undeveloped have sneers, jeers and taunts for this order of sufferer; but the enlightened, the truly moral bow before her reverently, not only because she has suffered, but because she stands for a great principle. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now I know that man is destined to be happy, but his happiness is of the spirit, and can only come with spiritual development, when he knows that he is spirit, lives the life of the spirit, and so becomes free from the bonds of ignorance. This is what is meant by the truth making us free. Ignorance is the only evil there is—mere blindness to the light, though the light is always shining. When you know the truth, you become the truth, and are out of the darkness of ignorance, therefore free. This is, I am told, the ultimate destiny of the whole human race. ”