CHAPTER VIII
MAN'S EXTREMITY
Rosemary approached the bed wherein lay the wreck of the girl she had often, when in the grasp of mortal mind, envied. A great wave of sympathy, not pity, swept over her, as she noted the weary eyes and the lines of dissatisfaction and despair around Carolina's mouth. With an impulse of love, she knelt at the bedside and took Carolina's little thin hand in both of hers.
"Oh, my dear Carol," she said, "I am so glad to see you. I heard of your accident while I was in California. I only got back yesterday."
"Would you have come to see me if I had not sent for you?" asked Carolina, childishly.
"I was coming to-day. Mother suggested it, and I was only too happy to put off everything of less importance and come at once."
"Your mother!" said Carolina, involuntarily. Then, as she saw Rosemary's face flush, she hastened to cover her awkward exclamation. "I did not know your mother knew me well enough to-to care!"
"Mother is very much changed since you knew her," said Rosemary, gently. "She has been healed."
Carolina did not know the nature of Mrs. Goddard's infirmity, so she forbore to ask of what. She only knew, as all the smart world knew, that Mrs. Goddard did something dreadful, and did it to excess. It was whispered that it was a case of drugs, but there were those, less kind, who hinted at a more vulgar excess, either of which would explain the dreadful scenes Mrs. Goddard had occasioned in public. Her intimates asserted that a terrible malady was at the bottom of her habits, whatever they were. At any rate, a somewhat scandalous mystery hung over Mrs. Goddard's name, although she had been at the forefront of every mad scene of pleasure the fashionable world could invent to kill time.
"You are changed, too," said Carolina, wonderingly, more and more surprised to see Rosemary Goddard-of all girls! – kneeling at her bedside, holding her hand in a warm grasp, pressing it now and then to emphasize an affection she felt shy of expressing, and talking in a gentle, altogether unknown tone of voice. In Carolina's uncompromising vocabulary she had privately stigmatized Rosemary as a snob, and rather ridiculed her exaggeration of aristocracy. But the coldness, the tired expression, the aloofness, were all gone. The weary eyes shone. The bored eyebrows were lowered. The curved lips smiled. The withdrawn hands were reached out to help. The whole attitude was radiant of sympathy and love.
Rosemary could not forbear to smile at Carolina's unconscious scrutiny.
"What has done it?" asked Carolina, abruptly.
"Christian Science," said Rosemary, frankly.
Carolina was disappointed that she did not rush on and explain. She had heard that Scientists thrust their views upon you and were instant in season, out of season. She was piqued that Rosemary did not give her the opportunity to argue and refute. Carolina wanted to be coaxed.
"The change in you is wonderful," she said at last. "I think it is always a little insulting to tell a woman how she has improved, so I will not harp on it. But I don't think I care to investigate Christian Science. It has always bored me when people have tried to explain it to me."
"You have a perfect right to leave it alone, then," said Rosemary. "Christian Science does not need you in the least."
Although her tone was perfectly sweet and kind, it was dignified, and Carolina's quickness at once comprehended the almost unbearable priggishness of her remark.
"I did not intend to be rude," she said, hurriedly. Then she hesitated as another thought struck her, and in a more timid voice she said:
"Did you mean that Christian Science does not need me as much as I need Christian Science?"
Rosemary pressed her hand as her only reply.
"Can it help me?" cried Carolina, with sudden fervour. "I am a wreck, physically and mentally. I have lost parents, fortune, home, health, and ambition. I long to die! I have even lost my God!"
"Christian Science will give you back your God," said Rosemary.
"I hate God!" said Carolina, calmly.
"I used to hate Him, too," said Rosemary. "In the old thought there was nothing else to do, for a just mind, than to hate Him. We had made an image of hate and vengeance and set it up to worship and called it God."
"We? Did we do it?"
"Of course! Who else?"
"Then it is all our fault?"
"It certainly is not God's fault," said Rosemary. "He has declared Himself to be Love Incarnate. If we have been stupid enough to endow Him with human attributes of our own distorted imagination, is He to blame?"
"He never answered a prayer of mine in all my life!" cried Carolina, passionately, looking at the ceiling as if to make sure that God heard her accusation, and as if she hoped to irritate Him into hearing future prayers.
"Nor of mine, either, until I learned how to pray."
"Who discovered the new way? That Eddy woman?"
"Mrs. Eddy did."
"How, I should like to know? Why was all this given to her to know and not to some man?"
"By the way," said Rosemary, as if changing the subject, "I hear that you speak both Japanese and Russian and that you did some important interpreting at a banquet on board the Kaiser's yacht at Cowes, last spring. Did you?"
"I believe so," said Carolina, wearily.
"However did you manage to master two such awfully difficult languages?"
"I studied years to do it."
"How strange that my brother was not called upon to do that interpreting," said Rosemary, in a musing tone. "He was at that banquet, and he is a man."
Carolina opened her lips to make an incautious reply, but caught herself just in time. A gleam in Rosemary's eyes warned her.
"I see," she said, reddening. "But I must say you baited the hook skilfully."
"I had to, in order to catch you," said Rosemary.
Carolina turned her head on her pillow restlessly.
"Tell me about how you came to accept it," she said, pleadingly.
"Well, I was so abnormally miserable! I had everything in the world I wanted-apparently, yet my home was full of discord. I had only a big, beautiful house. I wanted the love of a certain man. He held aloof while all the others were at my feet. I prayed wildly to my God for help, and He mocked me. Then I grew bitter and vengeful. I vowed that I would have all that life held without God, for it seemed to me, in my vicious interpretation of Him, that every time He saw me poke my head out of my hole, He hit it-"
"Just to show that He could!" cried Carolina, almost with a scream of comprehension.
"Exactly-just to show that He could. Well, then I plunged into a madness I called gaiety, and grew more and more unhappy because I saw that each day I was putting myself further and further from the man I loved. Then, as if to fill my already full cup to overflowing, mamma grew very much worse, so much so that I wanted her to die. I really felt that she had exhausted all that materia medica could do for her, and that death was the only way to end it, both for her and for us. Then I heard of a Christian Science practitioner, named Mrs. Seixas. I went to see her, and, impossible as it may sound, in the first fifteen minutes, I had told her the whole truth, mortifying as it was. But she seemed not only to inspire confidence, but to radiate help. I felt that, although I was a perfect stranger to her, yet she wanted to help me-that she would go out of her way to do it, and that the reason she would do it was because she loved much. I took her to mamma that same day, and mamma's complete healing is so great a marvel that we never can get used to it. Our happiness is almost too much to bear."
Rosemary's eyes filled with tears which rolled down her cheeks. Carolina viewed her with an astonishment that she could ill conceal. Rosemary Goddard to be talking, nay, more, feeling like that! A question was so unmistakably in Carolina's eyes, which her tongue could not gain permission to utter, that Rosemary found herself answering it.
"Then, when God had made me worthy of a good man's love, the desire of my heart came to me, in so sweet and natural a way that it broke down the last barrier of pride and left me humbly at the foot of the cross, marvelling at God's goodness!"
Carolina drew Rosemary's face down to hers and laid her cheek against it.
There was a long silence between them. Then Carolina said, fearfully:
"My hip is broken. Can that be cured?"
"God can do anything."
"So that I needn't use crutches?"
"Most certainly. You won't even limp. You will be made perfectly whole!"
"Just as I was before?"
"Just as you were before-except these bonds."
Carolina thought a moment.
"But what do I want to get well for? I have lost Guildford!"
"Nothing can be lost in Truth!"
Rosemary felt her two hands grasped firmly, and without thinking Carolina raised herself to a sitting posture in bed without pain.
"Do you mean to tell me that there is the-that Christian Science teaches that there is any remote possibility of my getting Guildford back?"
"Guildford belongs to you, and has never been lost. It is only error which makes such a law for you. Truth emancipates everybody and everything."
"I don't believe it!" said Carolina. "I can't! It's too good to be true! I don't understand it!"
"You do understand it!" said Rosemary.
"What makes you think so?"
"Because you are sitting up in bed, and you raised yourself without pain. That is because, for a moment, your soul accepted God as Love and the source of all supply. Unconsciously your mind looked into His mind, and you saw the truth."
"I believe that I could get up!" said Carolina, in a sort of ecstasy.
"I know that you can! Give me your hand."
Rosemary helped Carolina to dress, and in half an hour Carolina was sitting, for the first time in months, in a chair by the window, with Rosemary reading and marking for her the passages in "Science and Health" which bore immediately upon her case. Carolina's mind opened under it like a flower.
"Oh, I need so much teaching!" cried Carolina. "Who will help me?"
"Did you know that my mother is a practitioner and holds classes?" asked Rosemary.
Carolina almost felt her new-found rock melting beneath her feet at this intelligence.
"No, I did not. Will she take me? And will you help?"
"We will both do all we can for you with the greatest joy."
When Rosemary left, Kate came in and Carolina explained everything to her.
Kate called Noel St. Quentin by telephone and told him that Carolina had gone insane.
The next morning Carolina awakened with the happy consciousness that something pleasant had happened. Hitherto she had gone to sleep, glad of the respite of a few hours of unconsciousness. Simply not to know-simply not to be awake and to realize her load of pain and disappointment, had been her prayer. With her definite aim in life swept away, she felt rudderless, forlorn, despairing.
But suddenly everything was changed. Her weakness vanished as if by magic. Instead of dreading to open her eyes and clarify her brain for thought her mind leaped to a lucid clearness without effort. The glow of happiness which pervaded her she could liken to nothing so much as the awakening in her hated school-days to the knowledge that to-day was Saturday!
And what had brought her healing? Only a few hours' talk from Rosemary Goddard which seemed to untangle all the knots of her existence and to wipe the mists from the window-panes, out of which she had been vainly trying to get a clear view of her life, its reason for being, and its duties. Always the question with Carolina had been "To what end?" And all the answers had been vague and unsatisfactory, until suddenly she had stumbled by reason of her infirmity upon one who could answer her vehement questions clearly and lucidly.
Emerson must have been largely of the thought when he wrote: "Put fear under thy feet!" Carolina, with her sensitive, mystic nature had been, in common with all imaginative persons, literally a slave to her fear. What could it mean, this sudden freedom, except that she had found the only true way out of bondage?
With a little assistance, she was able to dress herself and sit in a chair to wait for the promised visit of Rosemary's mother.
She had known of Mrs. Goddard for years, although she seldom appeared in public. No one spoke the name of her malady, but everyone knew of her intense suffering and of the days she spent unconscious from the effects of quieting drugs. Secretly every one expected to hear at any time of Mrs. Goddard's madness or death, and Carolina had heard no news of her except what Rosemary had said until Mrs. Goddard was announced and found her, dressed and sitting up to meet her guest, with outstretched hand and happy, smiling face. As usual Carolina's expressive countenance betrayed her.
"No wonder you look surprised, my dear," said Mrs. Goddard, kissing the girl on the cheek with warmth. "Rosemary evidently did not have time yesterday to tell you what brought us both into Science. I was cured of cancer in its worst form. Did you never know?"
"I knew you were very, very ill and suffered horribly," said Carolina, "but-"
"I know. My friends were very kind. They never gave it a name. But that was it."
"Oh, how wonderful!" cried Carolina, with shining eyes.
"Not half as wonderful as what it did for me mentally," said Mrs. Goddard. "I used to feel that I had brought my malady on myself by my way of life. I was the gayest of the gay in my youth, and in middle life I found that stimulants had such a hold on me that I was not myself unless I was drugged. I ran the gauntlet of those until I came to morphine. There I stayed, and whether the morphine came of the cancer or the cancer of the morphine I never knew. But the horror of my life I can readily recall. It came to a point when the best physicians and surgeons in New York said that there must be an operation and frankly added that no one could tell whether I would come out of it or not. Pleasant, wasn't it?"
Carolina only clasped her hands together, and Mrs. Goddard proceeded:
"Then Rosemary heard of Christian Science, and without saying a word to me, she looked up the names of one or two practitioners and called. The first one she did not care for and came away discouraged. But something told her to try again, and her second attempt led her to the door of the angel of healing who, under God, worked this cure, Mrs. Seixas. Rosemary had not talked with her ten minutes before she knew that she had been led aright. She wanted Mrs. Seixas to get into the brougham and come at once, but according to Science practice she insisted upon Rosemary's coming home and getting my consent.
"You can imagine that I was not slow to accept the hope it offered, and that same afternoon I had my first treatment. Carolina, inside of an hour the pain all left me! Child, you have suffered, so you know, you can fathom as many cannot, what that means! I promised when the pain returned to call her by telephone, instead of taking the morphine, but it never did come back! She gave me treatments from her office every hour for the rest of the day and came back after dinner that night and gave me another. That was three years ago. To-day I am a well woman. I eat whatever I please and not once has the old craving for stimulants attacked me. I am a free woman and a very happy one!"
"Oh, Mrs. Goddard," cried Carolina, "thank you so much for telling me. It helps me to know that I am being cured!"
"That you are cured."
"Yes, I must believe that."
"Pardon me-not so much believe it, as you must understand it and understand why it is so. Every orthodox Christian is ready to state glibly that God is All, but they never act as if they believed it and that is the chief difference between members of churches and Christian Scientists."
"Why does every one hate Christian Science so before they understand it?"
"Christian Science is like a large crystal bowl full of the pure water of life. Left alone it simply sparkles in the sunlight of God's smile. But if you bring to it the alkali of ignorance and the acid of prejudice, this clear water becomes the vehicle of a most energetic boiling and fizzing. But when it has assimilated the two foreign ingredients the residue sinks to the bottom harmlessly, the water clarifies itself by its reflected power, and the crystal bowl resumes its placid, sparkling aspect."
"I understand," said Carolina, "that I must have caused that commotion rather often, for I used to hate Christian Science so vigorously and I hated Mrs. Eddy so intensely that I used to rejoice at every adverse criticism of her or her work, and I used to go to the trouble (when I never would have bothered to make a scrap-book) of cutting things out of the papers, and mailing them to my friends. I deliberately put myself out in order to hate it more adequately!"
"I know," said Mrs. Goddard. "Isn't it strange, when you look back on it in the light of your new understanding and your healing?"
"Ye-es," said Carolina, dubiously, "but to be quite truthful, I am afraid I am not cured of all my prejudice yet!"
"Let it go," said Mrs. Goddard. "It will pass of itself. Don't fret about it. Now tell me about yourself. You know we do not dwell upon our ailments, mental or physical, but if you state them to me, as your physician I can work more intelligently."
"Oh," sighed Carolina, "what is there not the matter with me! Where shall I begin?"
"Let it console you to know in advance that there is a remedy in Divine Science for everything. 'Not a sparrow falleth'-you remember! The table of comfort for every woe is spread before you in the presence of your enemies. Fear neither them nor to partake freely of God's gifts. The more eagerly you come and the more you partake of the feast Divine Love spreads, the more generously God will pour out His blessings upon you."
Thus encouraged Carolina told her suspicions of the fate of Guildford and of Colonel Yancey, without, however, mentioning him by name, until, led on by Mrs. Goddard's sympathetic manner, she threw her whole soul into the recital of her own and Mrs. Winchester's loss, and of how she had hoped to restore Guildford.
Occasionally Mrs. Goddard interrupted her to ask a pertinent question. It gave Carolina a feeling of comfort to realize her new friend's mentality. Carolina, was so accustomed to knowing people of capacity and brilliant intelligence that her mind reached after such naturally.
"Guildford is not lost to you," said Mrs. Goddard, just as Rosemary had.
"It will be restored to you, and you will be able to make good Mrs. Winchester's loss. You must have harmony in your life. That is your right-your God-bestowed right. You are an heir of God's boundless affluence. It is a crime for one of God's little ones to be poor, or neglected, or sick, or forsaken. Not to believe this is to doubt His promises, which are sure, and to limit His power, which is limitless.
"We do not know the way, nor must we make laws nor dictate means. But God is even now preparing the broad highway which shall lead your feet straight to the gates of Guildford. Let Him find you humble, grateful, and ready for the blessing. Don't fret. Don't worry. Don't be anxious. 'Be still, and know that I am God!'"
For her only reply Carolina bowed her face upon her hands, and burst into an uncontrollable fit of weeping.
Mrs. Goddard made no effort to check or comfort her, except by thought. When she had finished, Mrs. Goddard nodded her head, saying:
"That did you good. Now for your physical self! Was the hip broken?"
"Yes, and set by six of the best surgeons in New York. Doctor Colfax is the most hopeful, but even he says that if ever I grow strong enough to leave off crutches, I shall limp all my life."
Mrs. Goddard smiled.
"Doctor Colfax is one of the best men I ever knew. His left hand knows not what his right hand does in the way of charity, and his whole life, instead of being devoted to amassing a fortune, is given up to the healing of mankind."
"Why, I thought Scientists did not like doctors!" cried Carolina.
"We admire their intentions. Who could fail to? Among them are some of the noblest characters I have ever known in any walk of life."
"But," cried Carolina, alarmed by this praise, "you don't believe that what he says is true? Why, Rosemary assured me-"
"And I assure you no less than Rosemary," said Mrs. Goddard, "that God is able and willing to heal all such as repent of their sins and come to Him with an humble and contrite heart. You are the best judge of whether your heart is right toward your enemies. Can you bring yourself to love this man who has defrauded you of your inheritance? If not, you have no right to expect God to restore it to you. Now think this over while I give you a treatment."
Carolina watched her in so great a surprise that she forgot to think over her grievance against Colonel Yancey. Mrs. Goddard leaned her elbow on the arm of her chair, and pressed the tips of her fingers lightly against her closed eyes as if in silent prayer. Her lovely face framed in large ripples of iron-gray hair, her gown of silvery gray, her figure still youthful in its curves, her slender, spiritual hands, her earnest voice, and tender, helpful manner, formed so beautiful an image in Carolina's mind, and she longed so ardently to model herself upon the spirit she represented, that tears welled to her eyes when she contrasted her own attitude with Mrs. Goddard's, and when she recalled herself with a start, to the subject of Colonel Yancey, she found to her surprise that his importance had so diminished that he had receded into the background of her thought, and the thing she most ardently desired was not Guildford, but to put herself right with God, her Father!
At the moment that this thought formulated in her mind, a flood of divine peace poured over her whole spirit, and for the first time the pain of her bereavement lessened, and then gently passed into nothingness.
God her Father! A God of infinite tenderness and love! One who loved her even as her own dear father had loved! One who was not responsible for all the evil which had descended upon her! One who owed her only love and protection, and a tenderness such as she had received in its highest earthly form from her father.
In vain Carolina struggled to deify God above her earthly father. She had loved him in so large and deep and broad a manner that she could only realize her new God by comparing Him to her father. And Divine Science had sent this new interpretation of God to her to take the place in her sore heart of the ever-present aching sense of her great loss.
When Mrs. Goddard ended her treatment and opened her eyes, she sat for a moment in silent contemplation of the transfigured face before her. Carolina's beauty, as she thus, for the first time, beheld the face of her Father, was almost unearthly. It was as that of the angels in heaven.
A wave of generous thanksgiving and rejoicing swept over the soul of her practitioner, for she knew that she had been permitted to be the instrument in God's hands of healing a soul which had been sick unto death. Carolina's bodily healing took second place in her thought, yet her confidence was sound that that was even now being accomplished.
When Carolina met her eyes, she smiled. She had found peace.
"Now, dear child, I want to leave with you the ninety-first Psalm. Read it with your new thought in mind, and you will realize that you never have even apprehended it before. Remember, too, that you are not alone any more. You are cradled in Divine Love, for God is both Mother and Father to His children. 'The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms!'"
Mrs. Goddard bent and kissed the girl, and Carolina, usually so reserved, laid her flowerlike face against the older woman's cheek in a silence too deep for words.
"Remember, dear, to call on me by day or night exactly as if I were Doctor Colfax, for I am your physician now. But deny your error as soon as it makes its appearance and you won't need to send for me. I will come of my own accord every day and help you in your studies. Now I must go. Rosemary and I love you already. Both Divine and human love are pouring in upon you in such a manner that you shall not be able to receive it. Good-bye and God bless you, my dear!"