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[Illustration: PAUL FABER.]




PAUL FABER, SURGEON

BY GEORGE MACDONALD




1900




CONTENTS.

CHAP.

      I. THE LANE
     II. THE MINISTER'S DOOR
    III. THE MANOR HOUSE
     IV. THE RECTORY
      V. THE ROAD TO OWLKIRK
     VI. THE COTTAGE
    VII. THE PULPIT
   VIII. THE MANOR HOUSE DINING-ROOM
     IX. THE RECTORY DRAWING-ROOM
      X. MR. DRAKE'S ARBOR
     XI. THE CHAMBER AT THE COTTAGE
    XII. THE MINISTER'S GARDEN
   XIII. THE HEATH AT NESTLEY
    XIV. THE GARDEN AT OWLKIRK
     XV. THE PARLOR AT OWLKIRK
    XVI. THE BUTCHER'S SHOP
   XVII. THE PARLOR AGAIN
  XVIII. THE PARK AT NESTLEY
    XIX. THE RECTORY
     XX. AT THE PIANO
    XXI. THE PASTOR'S STUDY
   XXII. TWO MINDS
  XXIII. THE MINISTER'S BEDROOM
   XXIV. JULIET'S CHAMBER
    XXV. OSTERFIELD PARK
   XXVI. THE SURGERY DOOR
  XXVII. THE GROANS OF THE INARTICULATE
 XXVIII. COW-LANE CHAPEL
   XXIX. THE DOCTOR'S HOUSE
    XXX. THE PONY-CARRIAGE
   XXXI. A CONSCIENCE
  XXXII. THE OLD HOUSE AT GLASTON
 XXXIII. PAUL FABER'S DRESSING-ROOM
  XXXIV. THE BOTTOMLESS POOL
   XXXV. A HEART
  XXXVI. TWO MORE MINDS
 XXXVII. THE DOCTOR'S STUDY
XXXVIII. THE MIND OF JULIET
  XXXIX. ANOTHER MIND
     XL. A DESOLATION
    XLI. THE OLD GARDEN
   XLII. THE POTTERY
  XLIII. THE GATE-LODGE
   XLIV. THE CORNER OF THE BUTCHER'S SHOP
    XLV. HERE AND THERE
   XLVI. THE MINISTER'S STUDY
  XLVII. THE BLOWING OF THE WIND
 XLVIII. THE BORDER-LAND
   XLIX. EMPTY HOUSES
      L. FALLOW FIELDS
     LI. THE NEW OLD HOUSE
    LII. THE LEVEL OF THE LYTHE
   LIII. MY LADY'S CHAMBER
    LIV. NOWHERE AND EVERYWHERE




TO

W.C.T.

TUUM EST.

  Clear-windowed temple of the God of grace,
  From the loud wind to me a hiding-place!
  Thee gird broad lands with genial motions rife,
  But in thee dwells, high-throned, the Life of life
  Thy test no stagnant moat half-filled with mud,
  But living waters witnessing in flood!
  Thy priestess, beauty-clad, and gospel-shod,
  A fellow laborer in the earth with God!
  Good will art thou, and goodness all thy arts--
  Doves to their windows, and to thee fly hearts!
  Take of the corn in thy dear shelter grown,
  Which else the storm had all too rudely blown;
  When to a higher temple thou shalt mount,
  Thy earthly gifts in heavenly friends shall count;
  Let these first-fruits enter thy lofty door,
  And golden lie upon thy golden floor.

G.M.D.

PORTO FINO, _December_, 1878.




PAUL FABER.




CHAPTER I.

THE LANE.


The rector sat on the box of his carriage, driving his horses toward his
church, the grand old abbey-church of Glaston. His wife was inside, and
an old woman--he had stopped on the road to take her up--sat with her
basket on the foot-board behind. His coachman sat beside him; he never
took the reins when his master was there. Mr. Bevis drove like a
gentleman, in an easy, informal, yet thoroughly business-like way. His
horses were black--large, well-bred, and well-fed, but neither young nor
showy, and the harness was just the least bit shabby. Indeed, the entire
turnout, including his own hat and the coachman's, offered the beholder
that aspect of indifference to show, which, by the suggestion of a
nodding acquaintance with poverty, gave it the right clerical air of
being not of this world. Mrs. Bevis had her basket on the seat before
her, containing, beneath an upper stratum of flowers, some of the first
rhubarb of the season and a pound or two of fresh butter for a poor
relation in the town.

The rector was a man about sixty, with keen gray eyes, a good-humored
mouth, a nose whose enlargement had not of late gone in the direction of
its original design, and a face more than inclining to the rubicund,
suggestive of good living as well as open air. Altogether he had the
look of a man who knew what he was about, and was on tolerable terms
with himself, and on still better with his neighbor. The heart under his
ribs was larger even than indicated by the benevolence of his
countenance and the humor hovering over his mouth. Upon the countenance
of his wife rested a placidity sinking almost into fatuity. Its features
were rather indications than completions, but there was a consciousness
of comfort about the mouth, and the eyes were alive.

They were passing at a good speed through a varying country--now a
thicket of hazel, now great patches of furze upon open common, and anon
well-kept farm-hedges, and clumps of pine, the remnants of ancient
forest, when, halfway through a lane so narrow that the rector felt
every yard toward the other end a gain, his horses started, threw up
their heads, and looked for a moment wild as youth. Just in front of
them, in the air, over a high hedge, scarce touching the topmost twigs
with his hoofs, appeared a great red horse. Down he came into the road,
bringing with him a rather tall, certainly handsome, and even at first
sight, attractive rider. A dark brown mustache upon a somewhat smooth
sunburned face, and a stern settling of the strong yet delicately
finished features gave him a military look; but the sparkle of his blue
eyes contradicted his otherwise cold expression. He drew up close to the
hedge to make room for the carriage, but as he neared him Mr. Bevis
slackened his speed, and during the following talk they were moving
gently along with just room for the rider to keep clear of the off fore
wheel.

"Heigh, Faber," said the clergyman, "you'll break your neck some day!
You should think of your patients, man. That wasn't a jump for any man
in his senses to take."

"It is but fair to give my patients a chance now and then," returned the
surgeon, who never met the rector but there was a merry passage between
them.

"Upon my word," said Mr. Bevis, "when you came over the hedge there, I
took you for Death in the Revelations, that had tired out his own and
changed horses with t'other one."

As he spoke, he glanced back with a queer look, for he found himself
guilty of a little irreverence, and his conscience sat behind him in the
person of his wife. But that conscience was a very easy one, being
almost as incapable of seeing a joke as of refusing a request.

"--How many have you bagged this week?" concluded the rector.

"I haven't counted up yet," answered the surgeon. "--_You_'ve got one
behind, I see," he added, signing with his whip over his shoulder.

"Poor old thing!" said the rector, as if excusing himself, "she's got a
heavy basket, and we all need a lift sometimes--eh, doctor?--into the
world and out again, at all events."

There was more of the reflective in this utterance than the parson was
in the habit of displaying; but he liked the doctor, and, although as
well as every one else he knew him to be no friend to the church, or to
Christianity, or even to religious belief of any sort, his liking,
coupled with a vague sense of duty, had urged him to this most
unassuming attempt to cast the friendly arm of faith around the
unbeliever.

"I plead guilty to the former," answered Faber, "but somehow I have
never practiced the euthanasia. The instincts of my profession, I
suppose are against it. Besides, that ought to be your business."

"Not altogether," said the rector, with a kindly look from his box,
which, however, only fell on the top of the doctor's hat.

Faber seemed to feel the influence of it notwithstanding, for he
returned,

"If all clergymen were as liberal as you, Mr. Bevis, there would be more
danger of some of us giving in."

The word _liberal_ seemed to rouse the rector to the fact that his
coachman sat on the box, yet another conscience, beside him. _Sub divo_
one must not be _too_ liberal. There was a freedom that came out better
over a bottle of wine than over the backs of horses. With a word he
quickened the pace of his cleric steeds, and the doctor was dropped
parallel with the carriage window. There, catching sight of Mrs. Bevis,
of whose possible presence he had not thought once, he paid his
compliments, and made his apologies, then trotted his gaunt Ruber again
beside the wheel, and resumed talk, but not the same talk, with the
rector. For a few minutes it turned upon the state of this and that
ailing parishioner; for, while the rector left all the duties of public
service to his curate, he ministered to the ailing and poor upon and
immediately around his own little property, which was in that corner of
his parish furthest from the town; but ere long, as all talk was sure to
do between the parson and any body who owned but a donkey, it veered
round in a certain direction.

"You don't seem to feed that horse of yours upon beans, Faber," he said.

"I don't seem, I grant," returned the doctor; "but you should see him
feed! He eats enough for two, but he _can't_ make fat: all goes to
muscle and pluck."

"Well, I must allow the less fat he has to carry the better, if you're
in the way of heaving him over such hedges on to the hard road. In my
best days I should never have faced a jump like that in cold blood,"
said the rector.

"I've got no little belongings of wife or child to make a prudent man of
me, you see," returned the surgeon. "At worst it's but a knock on the
head and a longish snooze."

The rector fancied he felt his wife's shudder shake the carriage, but
the sensation was of his own producing. The careless defiant words
wrought in him an unaccountable kind of terror: it seemed almost as if
they had rushed of themselves from his own lips.

"Take care, my dear sir," he said solemnly. "There may be something to
believe, though you don't believe it."

"I must take the chance," replied Faber. "I will do my best to make
calamity of long life, by keeping the rheumatic and epileptic and
phthisical alive, while I know how. Where nothing _can_ be known, I
prefer not to intrude."

A pause followed. At length said the rector,

"You are so good a fellow, Faber, I wish you were better. When will you
come and dine with me?"

"Soon, I hope," answered the surgeon, "but I am too busy at present. For
all her sweet ways and looks, the spring is not friendly to man, and my
work is to wage war with nature."

A second pause followed. The rector would gladly have said something,
but nothing would come.

"By the by," he said at length, "I thought I saw you pass the gate--let
me see--on Monday: why did you not look in?"

"I hadn't a moment's time. I was sent for to a patient in the village."

"Yes, I know; I heard of that. I wish you would give me your impression
of the lady. She is a stranger here.--John, that gate is swinging across
the road. Get down and shut it.--Who and what is she?"

"That I should be glad to learn from you. All I know is that she is a
lady. There can not be two opinions as to that."

"They tell me she is a beauty," said the parson.

The doctor nodded his head emphatically.

"Haven't you seen her?" he said.

"Scarcely--only her back. She walks well. Do you know nothing about her?
Who has she with her?"

"Nobody."

"Then Mrs. Bevis shall call upon her."

"I think at present she had better not. Mrs. Puckridge is a good old
soul, and pays her every attention."

"What is the matter with her? Nothing infectious?"

"Oh, no! She has caught a chill. I was afraid of pneumonia yesterday."

"Then she is better?"

"I confess I am a little anxious about her. But I ought not to be
dawdling like this, with half my patients to see. I must bid you good
morning.--Good morning, Mrs. Bevis."

As he spoke, Faber drew rein, and let the carriage pass; then turned his
horse's head to the other side of the way, scrambled up the steep bank
to the field above, and galloped toward Glaston, whose great church rose
high in sight. Over hedge and ditch he rode straight for its tower.

"The young fool!" said the rector, looking after him admiringly, and
pulling up his horses that he might more conveniently see him ride.

"Jolly old fellow!" said the surgeon at his second jump. "I wonder how
much he believes now of all the rot! Enough to humbug himself with--not
a hair more. He has no passion for humbugging other people. There's that
curate of his now believes every thing, and would humbug the whole world
if he could! How any man can come to fool himself so thoroughly as that
man does, is a mystery to me!--I wonder what the rector's driving into
Glaston for on a Saturday."

Paul Faber was a man who had espoused the cause of science with all the
energy of a suppressed poetic nature. He had such a horror of all kinds
of intellectual deception or mistake, that he would rather run the risk
of rejecting any number of truths than of accepting one error. In this
spirit he had concluded that, as no immediate communication had ever
reached his eye, or ear, or hand from any creator of men, he had no
ground for believing in the existence of such a creator; while a
thousand unfitnesses evident in the world, rendered the existence of one
perfectly wise and good and powerful, absolutely impossible. If one said
to him that he believed thousands of things he had never himself known,
he answered he did so upon testimony. If one rejoined that here too we
have testimony, he replied it was not credible testimony, but founded on
such experiences as he was justified in considering imaginary, seeing
they were like none he had ever had himself. When he was asked whether,
while he yet believed there was such a being as his mother told him of,
he had ever set himself to act upon that belief, he asserted himself
fortunate in the omission of what might have riveted on him the fetters
of a degrading faith. For years he had turned his face toward all
speculation favoring the non-existence of a creating Will, his back
toward all tending to show that such a one might be. Argument on the
latter side he set down as born of prejudice, and appealing to weakness;
on the other, as springing from courage, and appealing to honesty. He
had never put it to himself which would be the worse deception--to
believe there was a God when there was none; or to believe there was no
God when there was one.

He had, however, a large share of the lower but equally indispensable
half of religion--that, namely, which has respect to one's fellows. Not
a man in Glaston was readier, by day or by night, to run to the help of
another, and that not merely in his professional capacity, but as a
neighbor, whatever the sort of help was needed.

Thomas Wingfold, the curate, had a great respect for him. Having himself
passed through many phases of serious, and therefore painful doubt, he
was not as much shocked by the surgeon's unbelief as some whose real
faith was even less than Faber's; but he seldom laid himself out to
answer his objections. He sought rather, but as yet apparently in vain,
to cause the roots of those very objections to strike into, and thus
disclose to the man himself, the deeper strata of his being. This might
indeed at first only render him the more earnest in his denials, but at
length it would probably rouse in him that spiritual nature to which
alone such questions really belong, and which alone is capable of coping
with them. The first notable result, however, of the surgeon's
intercourse with the curate was, that, whereas he had till then kept his
opinions to himself in the presence of those who did not sympathize with
them, he now uttered his disbelief with such plainness as I have shown
him using toward the rector. This did not come of aggravated antagonism,
but of admiration of the curate's openness in the presentment of truths
which must be unacceptable to the majority of his congregation.

There had arisen therefore betwixt the doctor and the curate a certain
sort of intimacy, which had at length come to the rector's ears. He had,
no doubt, before this heard many complaints against the latter, but he
had laughed them aside. No theologian himself, he had found the
questions hitherto raised in respect of Wingfold's teaching, altogether
beyond the pale of his interest. He could not comprehend why people
should not content themselves with being good Christians, minding their
own affairs, going to church, and so feeling safe for the next world.
What did opinion matter as long as they were good Christians? He did not
exactly know what he believed himself, but he hoped he was none the less
of a Christian for that! Was it not enough to hold fast whatever lay in
the apostles', the Nicene, and the Athanasian creed, without splitting
metaphysical hairs with your neighbor? But was it decent that his curate
should be hand and glove with one who denied the existence of God? He
did not for a moment doubt the faith of Wingfold; but a man must have
some respect for appearances: appearances were facts as well as
realities were facts. An honest man must not keep company with a thief,
if he would escape the judgment of being of thievish kind. Something
must be done; probably something said would be enough, and the rector
was now on his way to say it.




CHAPTER II.

THE MINISTER'S DOOR.


Every body knew Mr. Faber, whether he rode Ruber or Niger--Rubber and
Nigger, his groom called them--and many were the greetings that met him
as he passed along Pine Street, for, despite the brand of his atheism,
he was popular. The few ladies out shopping bowed graciously, for both
his manners and person were pleasing, and his professional attentions
were unexceptionable. When he dropped into a quick walk, to let Ruber
cool a little ere he reached his stall, he was several times accosted
and detained. The last who addressed him was Mr. Drew, the principal
draper of the town. He had been standing for some time in his shop-door,
but as Faber was about to turn the corner, he stepped out on the
pavement, and the doctor checked his horse in the gutter.

"I wish you would look in upon Mr. Drake, sir," he said. "I am quite
uneasy about him. Indeed I am sure he must be in a bad way, though he
won't allow it. He's not an easy man to do any thing for, but just you
let me know what _can_ be done for him--and we'll contrive. A _nod_, you
know, doctor, etc."

"I don't well see how I can," returned Faber. "To call now without being
sent for, when I never called before!--No, Mr. Drew, I don't think I
could."

It was a lovely spring noon. The rain that had fallen heavily during the
night lay in flashing pools that filled the street with suns. Here and
there were little gardens before the houses, and the bushes in them were
hung with bright drops, so bright that the rain seemed to have fallen
from the sun himself, not from the clouds.

"Why, goodness gracious!" cried the draper, "here's your excuse come
direct!"

Under the very nose of the doctor's great horse stood a little
woman-child, staring straight up at the huge red head above her. Now
Ruber was not quite gentle, and it was with some dismay that his master,
although the animal showed no offense at the glowering little thing,
pulled him back a step or two with the curb, the thought darting through
him how easily with one pash of his mighty hoof the horse could
annihilate a mirrored universe.

"Where from?" he asked, by what he would himself have called a
half-conscious cerebration.

"From somewhere they say you don't believe in, doctor," answered the
draper. "It's little Amanda, the minister's own darling--Naughty little
dear!" he continued, his round good-humored face wrinkled all over with
smiles, as he caught up the truant, "what ever do you mean by splashing
through every gutter between home and here, making a little drab of
yourself? Why your frock is as wet as a dish-clout!--_and_ your shoes!
My gracious!"

The little one answered only by patting his cheeks, which in shape much
resembled her own, with her little fat puds, as if she had been beating
a drum, while Faber looked down amused and interested.

"Here, doctor!" the draper went on, "you take the little mischief on the
saddle before you, and carry her home: that will be your excuse."

As he spoke he held up the child to him. Faber took her, and sitting as
far back in the saddle as he could, set her upon the pommel. She
screwed up her eyes, and grinned with delight, spreading her mouth wide,
and showing an incredible number of daintiest little teeth. When Ruber
began to move she shrieked in her ecstasy.

Holding his horse to a walk, the doctor crossed the main street and went
down a side one toward the river, whence again he entered a narrow lane.
There with the handle of his whip he managed to ring the door-bell of a
little old-fashioned house which rose immediately from the lane without
even a footpath between. The door was opened by a lady-like young
woman, with smooth soft brown hair, a white forehead, and serious,
rather troubled eyes.

"Aunty! aunty!" cried the child, "Ducky 'iding!"

Miss Drake looked a little surprised. The doctor lifted his hat. She
gravely returned his greeting and stretched up her arms to take the
child. But she drew back, nestling against Faber.

"Amanda! come, dear," said Miss Drake. "How kind of Dr. Faber to bring
you home! I'm afraid you've been a naughty child again--running out into
the street."

"Such a g'eat 'ide!" cried Amanda, heedless of reproof. "A yeal
'ossy--big! big!"

She spread her arms wide, in indication of the vastness of the upbearing
body whereon she sat. But still she leaned back against the doctor, and
he awaited the result in amused silence. Again her aunt raised her hands
to take her.

"Mo' 'yide!" cried the child, looking up backward, to find Faber's eyes.

But her aunt caught her by the feet, and amid struggling and laughter
drew her down, and held her in her arms.

"I hope your father is pretty well, Miss Drake," said the doctor,
wasting no time in needless explanation.

"Ducky," said the girl, setting down the child, "go and tell grandpapa
how kind Dr. Faber has been to you. Tell him he is at the door." Then
turning to Faber, "I am sorry to say he does not seem at all well," she
answered him. "He has had a good deal of annoyance lately, and at his
age that sort of thing tells."

As she spoke she looked up at the doctor, full in his face, but with a
curious quaver in her eyes. Nor was it any wonder she should look at him
strangely, for she felt toward him very strangely: to her he was as it
were the apostle of a kakangel, the prophet of a doctrine that was
evil, yet perhaps was a truth. Terrible doubts had for some time been
assailing her--doubts which she could in part trace to him, and as he
sat there on Ruber, he looked like a beautiful evil angel, who _knew_
there was no God--an evil angel whom the curate, by his bold speech, had
raised, and could not banish.

The surgeon had scarcely begun a reply, when the old minister made his
appearance. He was a tall, well-built man, with strong features, rather
handsome than otherwise; but his hat hung on his occiput, gave his head
a look of weakness and oddity that by nature did not belong to it, while
baggy, ill-made clothes and big shoes manifested a reaction from the
over-trimness of earlier years. He greeted the doctor with a severe
smile.

"I am much obliged to you, Mr. Faber," he said, "for bringing me home my
little runaway. Where did you find her?"

"Under my horse's head, like the temple between the paws of the Sphinx,"
answered Faber, speaking a parable without knowing it.

"She is a fearless little damsel," said the minister, in a husky voice
that had once rung clear as a bell over crowded congregations--"too
fearless at times. But the very ignorance of danger seems the panoply of
childhood. And indeed who knows in the midst of what evils we all walk
that never touch us!"

"A Solon of platitudes!" said the doctor to himself.

"She has been in the river once, and almost twice," Mr. Drake went on.
"--I shall have to tie you with a string, pussie! Come away from the
horse. What if he should take to stroking you? I am afraid you would
find his hands both hard and heavy."

"How do you stand this trying spring weather, Mr. Drake? I don't hear
the best accounts of you," said the surgeon, drawing Ruber a pace back
from the door.

"I am as well as at my age I can perhaps expect to be," answered the
minister. "I am getting old--and--and--we all have our troubles, and, I
trust, our God also, to set them right for us," he added, with a
suggesting look in the face of the doctor.

"By Jove!" said Faber to himself, "the spring weather has roused the
worshiping instinct! The clergy are awake to-day! I had better look out,
or it will soon be too hot for me."

"I can't look you in the face, doctor," resumed the old man after a
pause, "and believe what people say of you. It can't be that you don't
even believe there _is_ a God?"

Faber would rather have said nothing; but his integrity he must keep
fast hold of, or perish in his own esteem.

"If there be one," he replied, "I only state a fact when I say He has
never given me ground sufficient to think so. You say yourselves He has
favorites to whom He reveals Himself: I am not one of them, and must
therefore of necessity be an unbeliever."

"But think, Mr. Faber--if there should be a God, what an insult it is to
deny Him existence."

"I can't see it," returned the surgeon, suppressing a laugh. "If there
be such a one, would He not have me speak the truth? Anyhow, what great
matter can it be to Him that one should say he has never seen Him, and
can't therefore believe He is to be seen? A god should be above that
sort of pride."

The minister was too much shocked to find any answer beyond a sad
reproving shake of the head. But he felt almost as if the hearing of
such irreverence without withering retort, made him a party to the sin
against the Holy Ghost. Was he not now conferring with one of the
generals of the army of Antichrist? Ought he not to turn his back upon
him, and walk into the house? But a surge of concern for the frank young
fellow who sat so strong and alive upon the great horse, broke over his
heart, and he looked up at him pitifully.

Faber mistook the cause and object of his evident emotion.

"Come now, Mr. Drake, be frank with me," he said. "You are out of
health; let me know what is the matter. Though I'm not religious, I'm
not a humbug, and only speak the truth when I say I should be glad to
serve you. A man must be neighborly, or what is there left of him? Even
you will allow that our duty to our neighbor is half the law, and there
is some help in medicine, though I confess it is no science yet, and we
are but dabblers."

"But," said Mr. Drake, "I don't choose to accept the help of one who
looks upon all who think with me as a set of humbugs, and regards those
who deny every thing as the only honest men."

"By Jove! sir, I take you for an honest man, or I should never trouble
my head about you. What I say of such as you is, that, having inherited
a lot of humbug, you don't know it for such, and do the best you can
with it."

"If such is your opinion of me--and I have no right to complain of it in
my own person--I should just like to ask you one question about
another," said Mr. Drake: "Do you in your heart believe that Jesus
Christ was an impostor?"

"I believe, if the story about him be true, that he was a well-meaning
man, enormously self-deceived."

"Your judgment seems to me enormously illogical. That any ordinarily
good man should so deceive himself, appears to my mind altogether
impossible and incredible."

"Ah! but he was an extraordinarily good man."

"Therefore the more likely to think too much of himself?"

"Why not? I see the same thing in his followers all about me."

"Doubtless the servant shall be as his master," said the minister, and
closed his mouth, resolved to speak no more. But his conscience woke,
and goaded him with the truth that had come from the mouth of its
enemy--the reproach his disciples brought upon their master, for, in the
judgment of the world, the master is as his disciples.

"You Christians," the doctor went on, "seem to me to make yourselves,
most unnecessarily, the slaves of a fancied ideal. I have no such ideal
to contemplate; yet I am not aware that you do better by each other than
I am ready to do for any man. I can't pretend to love every body, but I
do my best for those I can help. Mr. Drake, I would gladly serve you."

The old man said nothing. His mood was stormy. Would he accept life
itself from the hand of him who denied his Master?--seek to the powers
of darkness for cure?--kneel to Antichrist for favor, as if he and not
Jesus were lord of life and death? Would _he_ pray a man to whom the
Bible was no better than a book of ballads, to come betwixt him and the
evils of growing age and disappointment, to lighten for him the
grasshopper, and stay the mourners as they went about his streets! He
had half turned, and was on the point of walking silent into the house,
when he bethought himself of the impression it would make on the
unbeliever, if he were thus to meet the offer of his kindness. Half
turned, he stood hesitating.

"I have a passion for therapeutics," persisted the doctor; "and if I
can do any thing to ease the yoke upon the shoulders of my fellows--"

Mr. Drake did not hear the end of the sentence: he heard instead,
somewhere in his soul, a voice saying, "My yoke is easy, and my burden
is light." He _could_ not let Faber help him.

"Doctor, you have the great gift of a kind heart," he began, still half
turned from him.

"My heart is like other people's," interrupted Faber. "If a man wants
help, and I've got it, what more natural than that we should come
together?"

There was in the doctor an opposition to every thing that had if it were
but the odor of religion about it, which might well have suggested doubt
of his own doubt, and weakness buttressing itself with assertion But the
case was not so. What untruth there was in him was of another and more
subtle kind. Neither must it be supposed that he was a propagandist, a
proselytizer. Say nothing, and the doctor said nothing. Fire but a
saloon pistol, however, and off went a great gun in answer--with no
bravado, for the doctor was a gentleman.

"Mr. Faber," said the minister, now turning toward him, and looking him
full in the face, "if you had a friend whom you loved with all your
heart, would you be under obligation to a man who counted your
friendship a folly?"

"The cases are not parallel. Say the man merely did not believe your
friend was alive, and there could be no insult to either."

"If the denial of his being in life, opened the door to the greatest
wrongs that could be done him--and if that denial seemed to me to have
its source in some element of moral antagonism to him--_could_ I
accept--I put it to yourself, Mr. Faber--_could_ I accept assistance
from that man? Do not take it ill. You prize honesty; so do I: ten times
rather would I cease to live than accept life at the hand of an enemy to
my Lord and Master."

"I am very sorry, Mr. Drake," said the doctor; "but from your point of
view I suppose you are right. Good morning."

He turned Ruber from the minister's door, went off quickly, and entered
his own stable-yard just as the rector's carriage appeared at the
further end of the street.




CHAPTER III.

THE MANOR HOUSE.


Mr. Bevis drove up to the inn, threw the reins to his coachman, got
down, and helped his wife out of the carriage. Then they parted, she to
take her gift of flowers and butter to her poor relation, he to call
upon Mrs. Ramshorn.

That lady, being, as every body knew, the widow of a dean, considered
herself the chief ecclesiastical authority in Glaston. Her acknowledged
friends would, if pressed, have found themselves compelled to admit that
her theology was both scanty and confused, that her influence was not of
the most elevating nature, and that those who doubted her personal piety
might have something to say in excuse of their uncharitableness; but she
spoke in the might of the matrimonial nimbus around her head, and her
claims were undisputed in Glaston. There was a propriety, springing from
quite another source, however, in the rector's turning his footsteps
first toward the Manor House, where she resided. For his curate, whom
his business in Glaston that Saturday concerned, had, some nine or ten
months before, married Mrs. Ramshorn's niece, Helen Lingard by name, who
for many years had lived with her aunt, adding, if not to the comforts
of the housekeeping, for Mrs. Ramshorn was plentifully enough provided
for the remnant of her abode in this world, yet considerably to the
style of her menage. Therefore, when all of a sudden, as it seemed, the
girl calmly insisted on marrying the curate, a man obnoxious to every
fiber of her aunt's ecclesiastical nature, and transferring to him, with
a most unrighteous scorn of marriage-settlements, the entire property
inherited from her father and brother, the disappointment of Mrs.
Ramshorn in her niece was equaled only by her disgust at the object of
her choice.

With a firm, dignified step, as if he measured the distance, the rector
paced the pavement between the inn and the Manor House. He knew of no
cause for the veiling of an eyelash before human being. It was true he
had closed his eyes to certain faults in the man of good estate and old
name who had done him the honor of requesting the hand of his one
child, and, leaving her to judge for herself, had not given her the
knowledge which might have led her to another conclusion; it had
satisfied him that the man's wild oats were sown: after the crop he made
no inquiry. It was also true that he had not mentioned a certain vice in
the last horse he sold; but then he hoped the severe measures taken had
cured him. He was aware that at times he took a few glasses of port more
than he would have judged it proper to carry to the pulpit or the
communion table, for those he counted the presence of his Maker; but
there was a time for every thing. He was conscious to himself, I repeat,
of nothing to cause him shame, and in the tramp of his boots there was
certainly no self-abasement. It was true he performed next to none of
the duties of the rectorship--but then neither did he turn any of its
income to his own uses; part he paid his curate, and the rest he laid
out on the church, which might easily have consumed six times the amount
in desirable, if not absolutely needful repairs. What further question
could be made of the matter? the church had her work done, and one of
her most precious buildings preserved from ruin to the bargain. How
indignant he would have been at the suggestion that he was after all
only an idolater, worshiping what he called _The Church_, instead of the
Lord Christ, the heart-inhabiting, world-ruling king of heaven! But he
was a very good sort of idolater, and some of the Christian graces had
filtered through the roofs of the temple upon him--eminently those of
hospitality and general humanity--even uprightness so far as his light
extended; so that he did less to obstruct the religion he thought he
furthered, than some men who preach it as on the house-tops.

It was from policy, not from confidence in Mrs. Ramshorn, that he went
to her first. He liked his curate, and every one knew she hated him. If,
of any thing he did, two interpretations were possible--one good, and
one bad, there was no room for a doubt as to which she would adopt and
publish. Not even to herself, however, did she allow that one chief
cause of her hatred was, that, having all her life been used to a pair
of horses, she had now to put up with only a brougham.

To the brass knocker on her door, the rector applied himself, and sent a
confident announcement of his presence through the house. Almost
instantly the long-faced butler, half undertaker, half parish-clerk,
opened the door; and seeing the rector, drew it wide to the wall,
inviting him to step into the library, as he had no doubt Mrs. Ramshorn
would be at home to _him_. Nor was it long ere she appeared, in rather
youthful morning dress, and gave him a hearty welcome; after which, by
no very wide spirals of descent, the talk swooped presently upon the
curate.

"The fact is," at length said the memorial shadow of the dean deceased,
"Mr. Wingfold is not a gentleman. It grieves me to say so of the husband
of my niece, who has been to me as my own child, but the truth must be
spoken. It may be difficult to keep such men out of holy orders, but if
ever the benefices of the church come to be freely bestowed upon them,
that moment the death-bell of religion is rung in England. My late
husband said so. While such men keep to barns and conventicles we can
despise them, but when they creep into the fold, then there is just
cause for alarm. The longer I live, the better I see my poor husband was
right."

"I should scarcely have thought such a man as you describe could have
captivated Helen," said the rector with a smile.

"Depend upon it she perceives her mistake well enough by this time,"
returned Mrs. Ramshorn. "A lady born and bred _must_ make the discovery
before a week is over. But poor Helen always was headstrong! And in this
out-of-the-world place she saw so little of gentlemen!"

The rector could not help thinking birth and breeding must go for little
indeed, if nothing less than marriage could reveal to a lady that a man
was not a gentleman.

"Nobody knows," continued Mrs. Ramshorn, "who or what his father--not to
say his grandfather, was! But would you believe it! when I asked her
_who_ the man was, having a right to information concerning the person
she was about to connect with the family, she told me she had never
thought of inquiring. I pressed it upon her as a duty she owed to
society; she told me she was content with the man himself, and was not
going to ask him about his family. She would wait till they were
married! Actually, on my word as a lady, she said so, Mr. Bevis! What
could I do? She was of age, and independent fortune. And as to
gratitude, I know the ways of the world too well to look for that."

"We old ones"--Mrs. Ramshorn bridled a little: she was only
fifty-seven!--"have had our turn, and theirs is come," said the rector
rather inconsequently.

"And a pretty mess they are like to make of it!--what with infidelity
and blasphemy--I must say it--blasphemy!--Really you must do something,
Mr. Bevis. Things have arrived at such a pass that, I give you my word,
reflections not a few are made upon the rector for committing his flock
to the care of such a wolf--a fox _I_ call him."

"To-morrow I shall hear him preach," said the parson.

"Then I sincerely trust no one will give him warning of your intention:
he is so clever, he would throw dust in any body's eyes."

The rector laughed. He had no overweening estimate of his own abilities,
but he did pride himself a little on his common sense.

"But," the lady went on, "in a place like this, where every body talks,
I fear the chance is small against his hearing of your arrival. Anyhow I
would not have you trust to one sermon. He will say just the opposite
the next. He contradicts himself incredibly. Even in the same sermon I
have heard him say things diametrically opposite."

"He can not have gone so far as to advocate the real presence: a rumor
of that has reached me," said the rector.

"There it is!" cried Mrs. Ramshorn. "If you had asked me, I should have
said he insisted the holy eucharist meant neither more nor less than any
other meal to which some said a grace. The man has not an atom of
consistency in his nature. He will say and unsay as fast as one sentence
can follow the other, and if you tax him with it, he will support both
sides: at least, that is my experience with him. I speak as I find him."

"What then would you have me do?" said the rector. "The straightforward
way would doubtless be to go to him."

"You would, I fear, gain nothing by that. He is so specious! The only
safe way is to dismiss him without giving a reason. Otherwise, he will
certainly prove you in the wrong. Don't take my word. Get the opinion of
your church-wardens. Every body knows he has made an atheist of poor
Faber. It is sadder than I have words to say. He _was_ such a
gentlemanly fellow!"

The rector took his departure, and made a series of calls upon those he
judged the most influential of the congregation. He did not think to ask
for what they were influential, or why he should go to them rather than
the people of the alms-house. What he heard embarrassed him not a
little. His friends spoke highly of Wingfold, his enemies otherwise: the
character of his friends his judge did not attempt to weigh with that of
his enemies, neither did he attempt to discover why these were his
enemies and those his friends. No more did he make the observation,
that, while his enemies differed in the things they said against him,
his friends agreed in those they said for him; the fact being, that
those who did as he roused their conscience to see they ought, more or
less understood the man and his aims; while those who would not submit
to the authority he brought to bear upon them, and yet tried to measure
and explain him after the standards of their own being and endeavors,
failed ludicrously. The church-wardens told him that, ever since he
came, the curate had done nothing but set the congregation by the ears;
and that he could not fail to receive as a weighty charge. But they told
him also that some of the principal dissenters declared him to be a
fountain of life in the place--and that seemed to him to involve the
worst accusation of all. For, without going so far as to hold, or even
say without meaning it, that dissenters ought to be burned, Mr. Bevis
regarded it as one of the first of merits, that a man should be a _good
churchman_.




CHAPTER IV.

THE RECTORY.


The curate had been in the study all the morning. Three times had his
wife softly turned the handle of his door, but finding it locked, had
re-turned the handle yet more softly, and departed noiselessly. Next
time she knocked--and he came to her pale-eyed, but his face almost
luminous, and a smile hovering about his lips: she knew then that either
a battle had been fought amongst the hills, and he had won, or a
thought-storm had been raging, through which at length had descended the
meek-eyed Peace. She looked in his face for a moment with silent
reverence, then offered her lips, took him by the hand, and, without a
word, led him down the stair to their mid-day meal. When that was over,
she made him lie down, and taking a novel, read him asleep. She woke him
to an early tea--not, however, after it, to return to his study: in the
drawing-room, beside his wife, he always got the germ of his
discourse--his germon, he called it--ready for its growth in the pulpit.
Now he lay on the couch, now rose and stood, now walked about the room,
now threw himself again on the couch; while, all the time his wife
played softly on her piano, extemporizing and interweaving, with an
invention, taste, and expression, of which before her marriage she had
been quite incapable.

The text in his mind was, "_Ye can not serve God and Mammon_." But not
once did he speak to his wife about it. He did not even tell her what
his text was. Long ago he had given her to understand that he could not
part with her as one of his congregation--could not therefore take her
into his sermon before he met her in her hearing phase in church, with
the rows of pews and faces betwixt him and her, making her once more one
of his flock, the same into whose heart he had so often agonized to pour
the words of rousing, of strength, of consolation.

On the Saturday, except his wife saw good reason, she would let no one
trouble him, and almost the sole reason she counted good was trouble: if
a person was troubled, then he might trouble. His friends knew this, and
seldom came near him on a Saturday. But that evening, Mr. Drew, the
draper, who, although a dissenter, was one of the curate's warmest
friends, called late, when, he thought in his way of looking at sermons,
that for the morrow must be now finished, and laid aside like a parcel
for delivery the next morning. Helen went to him. He told her the rector
was in the town, had called upon not a few of his parishioners, and
doubtless was going to church in the morning.

"Thank you, Mr. Drew. I perfectly understand your kindness," said Mrs.
Wingfold, "but I shall not tell my husband to-night."

"Excuse the liberty, ma'am, but--but--do you think it well for a wife to
hide things from her husband?"

Helen laughed merrily.

"Assuredly not, as a rule," she replied. "But suppose I knew he would be
vexed with me if I told him some particular thing? Suppose I know now
that, when I do tell him on Monday, he will say to me, 'Thank you, wife.
I am glad you kept that from me till I had done my work,'--what then?"

"All right _then_," answered the draper.

You see, Mr. Drew, we think married people should be so sure of each
other that each should not only be content, but should prefer not to
know what the other thinks it better not to tell. If my husband
overheard any one calling me names, I don't think he would tell me. He
knows, as well as I do, that I am not yet good enough to behave better
to any one for knowing she hates and reviles me. It would be but to
propagate the evil, and for my part too, I would rather not be told."

"I quite understand you, ma'am," answered the draper.

"I know you do," returned Helen, with emphasis.

Mr. Drew blushed to the top of his white forehead, while the lower part
of his face, which in its forms was insignificant, blossomed into a
smile as radiant as that of an infant. He knew Mrs. Wingfold was aware
of the fact, known only to two or three beside in the town, that the
lady, who for the last few months had been lodging in his house, was his
own wife, who had forsaken him twenty years before. The man who during
that time had passed for her husband, had been otherwise dishonest as
well, and had fled the country; she and her daughter, brought to
absolute want, were received into his house by her forsaken husband;
there they occupied the same chamber, the mother ordered every thing,
and the daughter did not know that she paid for nothing. If the ways of
transgressors are hard, those of a righteous man are not always easy.
When Mr. Drew would now and then stop suddenly in the street, take off
his hat and wipe his forehead, little people thought the round smiling
face had such a secret behind it. Had they surmised a skeleton in his
house, they would as little have suspected it masked in the handsome,
well-dressed woman of little over forty, who, with her pretty daughter
so tossy and airy, occupied his first floor, and was supposed to pay him
handsomely for it.

The curate slept soundly, and woke in the morning eager to utter what he
had.




CHAPTER V.

THE ROAD TO OWLKIRK.


Paul Faber fared otherwise. Hardly was he in bed before he was called
out of it again. A messenger had come from Mrs. Puckridge to say that
Miss Meredith was worse, and if the doctor did not start at once, she
would be dead before he reached Owlkirk. He sent orders to his groom to
saddle Niger and bring him round instantly, and hurried on his clothes,
vexed that he had taken Ruber both in the morning and afternoon, and
could not have him now. But Niger was a good horse also: if he was but
two-thirds of Ruber's size, he was but one-third of his age, and saw
better at night. On the other hand he was less easily seen, but the
midnight there was so still and deserted, that that was of small
consequence. In a few minutes they were out together in a lane as dark
as pitch, compelled now to keep to the roads, for there was not light
enough to see the pocket-compass by which the surgeon sometimes steered
across country.

Could we learn what waking-dreams haunted the boyhood of a man, we
should have a rare help toward understanding the character he has
developed. Those of the young Faber were, almost exclusively, of playing
the prince of help and deliverance among women and men. Like most boys
that dream, he dreamed himself rich and powerful, but the wealth and
power were for the good of his fellow-creatures. If it must be confessed
that he lingered most over the thanks and admiration he set to haunt his
dream-steps, and hover about his dream-person, it must be remembered
that he was the only real person in the dreams, and that he regarded
lovingly the mere shadows of his fellow-men. His dreams were not of
strength and destruction, but of influence and life. Even his revenges
never-reached further than the making of his enemies ashamed.

It was the spirit of help, then, that had urged him into the profession
he followed. He had found much dirt about the door of it, and had not
been able to cross the threshold without some cleaving to his garments.
He is a high-souled youth indeed, in whom the low regards and corrupt
knowledge of his superiors will fail utterly of degrading influence; he
must be one stronger than Faber who can listen to scoffing materialism
from the lips of authority and experience, and not come to look upon
humanity and life with a less reverent regard. What man can learn to
look upon the dying as so much matter about to be rekneaded and
remodeled into a fresh mass of feverous joys, futile aspirations, and
stinging chagrins, without a self-contempt from which there is no
shelter but the poor hope that we may be a little better than we appear
to ourselves. But Faber escaped the worst. He did not learn to look on
humanity without respect, or to meet the stare of appealing eyes from
man or animal, without genuine response--without sympathy. He never
joined in any jest over suffering, not to say betted on the chance of
the man who lay panting under the terrors of an impending operation. Can
one be capable of such things, and not have sunk deep indeed in the
putrid pit of decomposing humanity? It is true that before he began to
practice, Faber had come to regard man as a body and not an embodiment,
the highest in him as dependent on his physical organization--as indeed
but the aroma, as it were, of its blossom the brain, therefore subject
to _all_ the vicissitudes of the human plant from which it rises; but he
had been touched to issues too fine to be absolutely interpenetrated and
inslaved by the reaction of accepted theories. His poetic nature, like
the indwelling fire of the world, was ever ready to play havoc with
induration and constriction, and the same moment when degrading
influences ceased to operate, the delicacy of his feeling began to
revive. Even at its lowest, this delicacy preserved him from much into
which vulgar natures plunge; it kept alive the memory of a lovely
mother; and fed the flame of that wondering, worshiping reverence for
women which is the saviour of men until the Truth Himself saves both. A
few years of worthy labor in his profession had done much to develop
him, and his character for uprightness, benevolence, and skill, with the
people of Glaston and its neighborhood, where he had been ministering
only about a year, was already of the highest. Even now, when, in a
fever of honesty, he declared there _could_ be no God in such an
ill-ordered world, so full was his heart of the human half of religion,
that he could not stand by the bedside of dying man or woman, without
lamenting that there was no consolation--that stern truth would allow
him to cast no feeblest glamour of hope upon the departing shadow. His
was a nobler nature than theirs who, believing no more than he, are
satisfied with the assurance that at the heart of the evils of the world
lie laws unchangeable.

The main weak point in him was, that, while he was indeed
tender-hearted, and did no kindnesses to be seen of men, he did them to
be seen of himself: he saw him who did them all the time. The boy was in
the man; doing his deeds he sought, not the approbation merely, but the
admiration of his own consciousness. I am afraid to say this was
_wrong_, but it was poor and childish, crippled his walk, and obstructed
his higher development. He liked to _know_ himself a benefactor. Such a
man may well be of noble nature, but he is a mere dabbler in nobility.
Faber delighted in the thought that, having repudiated all motives of
personal interest involved in religious belief, all that regard for the
future, with its rewards and punishments, which, in his ignorance,
genuine or willful, of essential Christianity, he took for its main
potence, he ministered to his neighbor, doing to him as he would have
him do to himself, hopeless of any divine recognition, of any betterness
beyond the grave, in a fashion at least as noble as that of the most
devoted of Christians. It did not occur to him to ask if he loved him as
well--if his care about him was equal to his satisfaction in himself.
Neither did he reflect that the devotion he admired in himself had been
brought to the birth in him through others, in whom it was first
generated by a fast belief in an unselfish, loving, self-devoting God.
Had he inquired he might have discovered that this belief had carried
some men immeasurably further in the help of their fellows, than he had
yet gone. Indeed he might, I think, have found instances of men of faith
spending their lives for their fellows, whose defective theology or
diseased humility would not allow them to hope their own salvation.
Inquiry might have given him ground for fearing that with the love of
the _imagined_ God, the love of the indubitable man would decay and
vanish. But such as Faber was, he was both loved and honored by all whom
he had ever attended; and, with his fine tastes, his genial nature, his
quiet conscience, his good health, his enjoyment of life, his knowledge
and love of his profession, his activity, his tender heart--especially
to women and children, his keen intellect, and his devising though not
embodying imagination, if any man could get on without a God, Faber was
that man. He was now trying it, and as yet the trial had cost him no
effort: he seemed to himself to be doing very well indeed. And why
should he not do as well as the thousands, who counting themselves
religious people, get through the business of the hour, the day, the
week, the year, without one reference in any thing they do or abstain
from doing, to the will of God, or the words of Christ? If he was more
helpful to his fellows than they, he fared better; for actions in
themselves good, however imperfect the motives that give rise to them,
react blissfully upon character and nature. It is better to be an
atheist who does the will of God, than a so-called Christian who does
not. The atheist will not be dismissed because he said _Lord, Lord,_ and
did not obey. The thing that God loves is the only lovely thing, and he
who does it, does well, and is upon the way to discover that he does it
very badly. When he comes to do it as the will of the perfect Good, then
is he on the road to do it perfectly--that is, from love of its own
inherent self-constituted goodness, born in the heart of the Perfect.
The doing of things from duty is but a stage on the road to the kingdom
of truth and love. Not the less must the stage be journeyed; every path
diverging from it is "the flowery way that leads to the broad gate and
the great fire."

It was with more than his usual zeal of helpfulness that Faber was now
riding toward Owlkirk, to revisit his new patient. Could he have
mistaken the symptoms of her attack?




CHAPTER VI.

THE COTTAGE.


Mrs. Puckridge was anxiously awaiting the doctor's arrival. She stood by
the bedside of her lodger, miserable in her ignorance and consequent
helplessness. The lady tossed and moaned, but for very pain could
neither toss nor moan much, and breathed--panted, rather--very quick.
Her color was white more than pale, and now and then she shivered from
head to foot, but her eyes burned. Mrs. Puckridge kept bringing her hot
flannels, and stood talking between the changes.

"I wish the doctor would come!--Them doctors!--I hope to goodness Dr.
Faber wasn't out when the boy got to Glaston. Every body in this mortal
universe always is out when he's wanted: that's _my_ experience. You
ain't so old as me, miss. And Dr. Faber, you see, miss, he be such a
favorite as _have_ to go out to his dinner not unfrequent. They may have
to send miles to fetch him."

She talked in the vain hope of distracting the poor lady's attention
from her suffering.

It was a little up stairs cottage-room, the corners betwixt the ceiling
and the walls cut off by the slope of the roof. So dark was the night,
that, when Mrs. Puckridge carried the candle out of the room, the
unshaded dormer window did not show itself even by a bluish glimmer. But
light and dark were alike to her who lay in the little tent-bed, in the
midst of whose white curtains, white coverlid, and white pillows, her
large eyes, black as human eyes could ever be, were like wells of
darkness throwing out flashes of strange light. Her hair too was dark,
brown-black, of great plenty, and so fine that it seemed to go off in a
mist on the whiteness. It had been her custom to throw it over the back
of her bed, but in this old-fashioned one that was impossible, and it
lay, in loveliest confusion, scattered here and there over pillow and
coverlid, as if the wind had been tossing it all a long night at his
will. Some of it had strayed more than half way to the foot of the bed.
Her face, distorted almost though it was with distress, showed yet a
regularity of feature rarely to be seen in combination with such evident
power of expression. Suffering had not yet flattened the delicate
roundness of her cheek, or sharpened the angles of her chin. In her
whiteness, and her constrained, pang-thwarted motions from side to side,
she looked like a form of marble in the agonies of coming to life at the
prayer of some Pygmalion. In throwing out her arms, she had flung back
the bedclothes, and her daintily embroidered night-gown revealed a
rather large, grand throat, of the same rare whiteness. Her hands were
perfect--every finger and every nail--

  Those fine[1] nimble brethren small,
  Armed with pearl-shell helmets all.

[Footnote 1: _Joshua Sylvester._ I suspect the word ought to be _five_,
not _fine_, as my copy (1613) has it.]

When Mrs. Puckridge came into the room, she always set her candle on
the sill of the storm-window: it was there, happily, when the doctor
drew near the village, and it guided him to the cottage-gate. He
fastened Niger to the gate, crossed the little garden, gently lifted the
door-latch, and ascended the stair. He found the door of the chamber
open, signed to Mrs. Puckridge to be still, softly approached the bed,
and stood gazing in silence on the sufferer, who lay at the moment
apparently unconscious. But suddenly, as if she had become aware of a
presence, she flashed wide her great eyes, and the pitiful entreaty that
came into them when she saw him, went straight to his heart. Faber felt
more for the sufferings of some of the lower animals than for certain of
his patients; but children and women he would serve like a slave. The
dumb appeal of her eyes almost unmanned him.

"I am sorry to see you so ill," he said, as he took her wrist. "You are
in pain: where?"

Her other hand moved toward her side in reply. Every thing indicated
pleurisy--such that there was no longer room for gentle measures. She
must be relieved at once: he must open a vein. In the changed practice
of later days, it had seldom fallen to the lot of Faber to perform the
very simple operation of venesection, but that had little to do with the
trembling of the hands which annoyed him with himself, when he proceeded
to undo a sleeve of his patient's nightdress. Finding no button, he took
a pair of scissors from his pocket, cut ruthlessly through linen and
lace, and rolled back the sleeve. It disclosed an arm the sight of which
would have made a sculptor rejoice as over some marbles of old Greece. I
can not describe it, and if I could, for very love and reverence I would
rather let it alone. Faber felt his heart rise in his throat at the
necessity of breaking that exquisite surface with even such an
insignificant breach and blemish as the shining steel betwixt his
forefinger and thumb must occasion. But a slight tremble of the hand he
held acknowledged the intruding sharpness, and then the red parabola
rose from the golden bowl. He stroked the lovely arm to help its flow,
and soon the girl once more opened her eyes and looked at him. Already
her breathing was easier. But presently her eyes began to glaze with
approaching faintness, and he put his thumb on the wound. She smiled and
closed them. He bound up her arm, laid it gently by her side, gave her
something to drink, and sat down. He sat until he saw her sunk in a
quiet, gentle sleep: ease had dethroned pain, and order had begun to
dawn out of threatened chaos.

"Thank God!" he said, involuntarily, and stood up: what all that meant,
God only knows.

After various directions to Mrs. Puckridge, to which she seemed to
attend, but which, being as simple as necessary, I fear she forgot the
moment they were uttered, the doctor mounted, and rode away. The
darkness was gone, for the moon was rising, but when the road compelled
him to face her, she blinded him nearly as much. Slowly she rose through
a sky freckled with wavelets of cloud, and as she crept up amongst them
she brought them all out, in bluish, pearly, and opaline gray. Then,
suddenly almost, as it seemed, she left them, and walked up aloft,
drawing a thin veil around her as she ascended. All was so soft, so
sleepy, so vague, it seemed to Paul as he rode slowly along, himself
almost asleep, as if the Night had lost the blood he had caused to flow,
and the sweet exhaustion that followed had from the lady's brain
wandered out over Nature herself, as she sank, a lovelier Katadyomene,
into the hushed sea of pain-won repose.

Was he in love with her? I do not know. I could tell, if I knew what
being in love is. I think no two loves were ever the same since the
creation of the world. I know that something had passed from her eyes to
his--but what? He may have been in love with her already; but ere long
my reader may be more sure than I that he was not. The Maker of men
alone understands His awful mystery between the man and the woman. But
without it, frightful indeed as are some of its results, assuredly the
world He has made would burst its binding rings and fly asunder in
shards, leaving His spirit nothing to enter, no time to work His lovely
will.

It must be to any man a terrible thing to find himself in wild pain,
with no God of whom to entreat that his soul may not faint within him;
but to a man who can think as well as feel, it were a more terrible
thing still, to find himself afloat on the tide of a lovely passion,
with no God to whom to cry, accountable to Himself for that which He has
made. Will any man who has ever cast more than a glance into the
mysteries of his being, dare think himself sufficient to the ruling of
his nature? And if he rule it not, what shall he be but the sport of the
demons that will ride its tempests, that will rouse and torment its
ocean? What help then is there? What high-hearted man would consent to
be possessed and sweetly ruled by the loveliest of angels? Truly it were
but a daintier madness. Come thou, holy Love, father of my spirit,
nearer to the unknown deeper me than my consciousness is to its known
self, possess me utterly, for thou art more me than I am myself. Rule
thou. Then first I rule. Shadow me from the too radiant splendors of thy
own creative thought. Folded in thy calm, I shall love, and not die. And
ye, women, be the daughters of Him from whose heart came your mothers;
be the saviours of men, and neither their torment nor their prey!




CHAPTER VII.

THE PULPIT.


Before morning it rained hard again; but it cleared at sunrise, and the
first day of the week found the world new-washed. Glaston slept longer
than usual, however, for all the shine, and in the mounting sun looked
dead and deserted. There were no gay shop-windows to reflect his beams,
or fill them with rainbow colors. There were no carriages or carts, and
only, for a few moments, one rider. That was Paul Faber again, on Ruber
now, aglow in the morning. There were no children playing yet about the
streets or lanes; but the cries of some came at intervals from unseen
chambers, as the Sunday soap stung their eyes, or the Sunday comb tore
their matted locks.

As Faber rode out of his stable-yard, Wingfold took his hat from its
peg, to walk through his churchyard. He lived almost in the churchyard,
for, happily, since his marriage the rectory had lost its tenants, and
Mr. Bevis had allowed him to occupy it, in lieu of part of his salary.
It was not yet church-time by hours, but he had a custom of going every
Sunday morning, in the fine weather, quite early, to sit for an hour or
two alone in the pulpit, amidst the absolute solitude and silence of the
great church. It was a door, he said, through which a man who could not
go to Horeb, might enter and find the power that dwells on mountain-tops
and in desert places.

He went slowly through the churchyard, breathing deep breaths of the
delicious spring-morning air. Rain-drops were sparkling all over the
grassy graves, and in the hollows of the stones they had gathered in
pools. The eyes of the death-heads were full of water, as if weeping at
the defeat of their master. Every now and then a soft little wind awoke,
like a throb of the spirit of life, and shook together the scattered
drops upon the trees, and then down came diamond showers on the grass
and daisies of the mounds, and fed the green moss in the letters of the
epitaphs. Over all the sun was shining, as if everywhere and forever
spring was the order of things. And is it not so? Is not the idea of the
creation an eternal spring ever trembling on the verge of summer? It
seemed so to the curate, who was not given to sad, still less to
sentimental moralizing over the graves. From such moods his heart
recoiled. To him they were weak and mawkish, and in him they would have
been treacherous. No grave was to him the place where a friend was
lying; it was but a cenotaph--the place where the Lord had lain.

"Let those possessed with demons haunt the tombs," he said, as he sat
down in the pulpit; "for me, I will turn my back upon them with the
risen Christ. Yes, friend, I hear you! I know what you say! You have
more affection than I? you can not forsake the last resting-place of the
beloved? Well, you may have more feeling than I; there is no gauge by
which I can tell, and if there were, it would be useless: we are as God
made us.--No, I will not say that: I will say rather, I am as God is
making me, and I shall one day be as He has made me. Meantime I know
that He will have me love my enemy tenfold more than now I love my
friend. Thou believest that the malefactor--ah, there was faith now! Of
two men dying together in agony and shame, the one beseeches of the
other the grace of a king! Thou believest, I say--at least thou
professest to believe that the malefactor was that very day with Jesus
in Paradise, and yet thou broodest over thy friend's grave, gathering
thy thoughts about the pitiful garment he left behind him, and letting
himself drift away into the unknown, forsaken of all but thy vaguest,
most shapeless thinkings! Tell me not thou fearest to enter there whence
has issued no revealing. It is God who gives thee thy mirror of
imagination, and if thou keep it clean, it will give thee back no shadow
but of the truth. Never a cry of love went forth from human heart but
it found some heavenly chord to fold it in. Be sure thy friend inhabits
a day not out of harmony with this morning of earthly spring, with this
sunlight, those rain-drops, that sweet wind that flows so softly over
his grave."

It was the first sprouting of a _germon_. He covered it up and left it:
he had something else to talk to his people about this morning.

While he sat thus in the pulpit, his wife was praying for him ere she
rose. She had not learned to love him in the vestibule of society, that
court of the Gentiles, but in the chamber of torture and the clouded
adytum of her own spiritual temple. For there a dark vapor had hid the
deity enthroned, until the words of His servant melted the gloom. Then
she saw that what she had taken for her own innermost chamber of awful
void, was the dwelling-place of the most high, most lovely, only One,
and through its windows she beheld a cosmos dawning out of chaos.
Therefore the wife walked beside the husband in the strength of a common
faith in absolute Good; and not seldom did the fire which the torch of
his prophecy had kindled upon her altar, kindle again that torch, when
some bitter wind of evil words, or mephitis of human perversity, or
thunder-rain of foiled charity, had extinguished it. She loved every
hair upon his head, but loved his well-being infinitely more than his
mortal life. A wrinkle on his forehead would cause her a pang, yet would
she a thousand times rather have seen him dead than known him guilty of
one of many things done openly by not a few of his profession.

And now, as one sometimes wonders what he shall dream to-night, she sat
wondering what new thing, or what old thing fresher and more alive than
the new, would this day flow from his heart into hers. The following is
the substance of what, a few hours after, she did hear from him. His
rector, sitting between Mrs. Bevis and Mrs. Ramshorn, heard it also. The
radiance of truth shone from Wingfold's face as he spoke, and those of
the congregation who turned away from his words were those whose lives
ran counter to the spirit of them. Whatever he uttered grew out of a
whole world of thought, but it grew before them--that is, he always
thought afresh in the presence of the people, and spoke extempore.

"'_Ye can not serve God and mammon_.'

"Who said this? The Lord by whose name ye are called, in whose name
this house was built, and who will at last judge every one of us. And
yet how many of you are, and have been for years, trying your very
hardest to do the thing your Master tells you is impossible! Thou man!
Thou woman! I appeal to thine own conscience whether thou art not
striving to serve God and mammon.

"But stay! am I right?--It can not be. For surely if a man strove hard
to serve God and mammon, he would presently discover the thing was
impossible. It is not easy to serve God, and it is easy to serve mammon;
if one strove to serve God, the hard thing, along with serving mammon,
the easy thing, the incompatibility of the two endeavors must appear.
The fact is there is no strife in you. With ease you serve mammon every
day and hour of your lives, and for God, you do not even ask yourselves
the question whether you are serving Him or no. Yet some of you are at
this very moment indignant that I call you servers of mammon. Those of
you who know that God knows you are His servants, know also that I do
not mean you; therefore, those who are indignant at being called the
servants of mammon, are so because they are indeed such. As I say these
words I do not lift my eyes, not that I am afraid to look you in the
face, as uttering an offensive thing, but that I would have your own
souls your accusers.

"Let us consider for a moment the God you do not serve, and then for a
moment the mammon you do serve. The God you do not serve is the Father
of Lights, the Source of love, the Maker of man and woman, the Head of
the great family, the Father of fatherhood and motherhood; the
Life-giver who would die to preserve His children, but would rather slay
them than they should live the servants of evil; the God who can neither
think nor do nor endure any thing mean or unfair; the God of poetry and
music and every marvel; the God of the mountain tops, and the rivers
that run from the snows of death, to make the earth joyous with life;
the God of the valley and the wheat-field, the God who has set love
betwixt youth and maiden; the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the perfect; the God whom Christ knew, with whom Christ was satisfied,
of whom He declared that to know Him was eternal life. The mammon you do
serve is not a mere negation, but a positive Death. His temple is a
darkness, a black hollow, ever hungry, in the heart of man, who tumbles
into it every thing that should make life noble and lovely. To all who
serve him he makes it seem that his alone is the reasonable service.
His wages are death, but he calls them life, and they believe him. I
will tell you some of the marks of his service--a few of the badges of
his household--for he has no visible temple; no man bends the knee to
him; it is only his soul, his manhood, that the worshiper casts in the
dust before him. If a man talks of the main chance, meaning thereby that
of making money, or of number one, meaning thereby self, except indeed
he honestly jest, he is a servant of mammon. If, when thou makest a
bargain, thou thinkest _only_ of thyself and thy gain, though art a
servant of mammon. The eager looks of those that would get money, the
troubled looks of those who have lost it, worst of all the gloating
looks of them that have it, these are sure signs of the service of
mammon. If in the church thou sayest to the rich man, 'Sit here in a
good place,' and to the poor man, 'Stand there,' thou art a
mammon-server. If thou favorest the company of those whom men call
well-to-do, when they are only well-to-eat, well-to-drink, or
well-to-show, and declinest that of the simple and the meek, then in thy
deepest consciousness know that thou servest mammon, not God. If thy
hope of well-being in time to come, rests upon thy houses, or lands, or
business, or money in store, and not upon the living God, be thou
friendly and kind with the overflowings of thy possessions, or a churl
whom no man loves, thou art equally a server of mammon. If the loss of
thy goods would take from thee the joy of thy life; if it would tear thy
heart that the men thou hadst feasted should hold forth to thee the two
fingers instead of the whole hand; nay, if thy thought of to-morrow
makes thee quail before the duty of to-day, if thou broodest over the
evil that is not come, and turnest from the God who is with thee in the
life of the hour, thou servest mammon; he holds thee in his chain; thou
art his ape, whom he leads about the world for the mockery of his
fellow-devils. If with thy word, yea, even with thy judgment, thou
confessest that God is the only good, yet livest as if He had sent thee
into the world to make thyself rich before thou die; if it will add one
feeblest pang to the pains of thy death, to think that thou must leave
thy fair house, thy ancestral trees, thy horses, thy shop, thy books,
behind thee, then art thou a servant of mammon, and far truer to thy
master than he will prove to thee. Ah, slave! the moment the breath is
out of the body, lo, he has already deserted thee! and of all in which
thou didst rejoice, all that gave thee such power over thy fellows,
there is not left so much as a spike of thistle-down for the wind to
waft from thy sight. For all thou hast had, there is nothing to show.
Where is the friendship in which thou mightst have invested thy money,
in place of burying it in the maw of mammon? Troops of the dead might
now be coming to greet thee with love and service, hadst thou made thee
friends with thy money; but, alas! to thee it was not money, but mammon,
for thou didst love it--not for the righteousness and salvation thou by
its means mightst work in the earth, but for the honor it brought thee
among men, for the pleasures and immunities it purchased. Some of you
are saying in your hearts, 'Preach to thyself, and practice thine own
preaching;'--and you say well. And so I mean to do, lest having preached
to others I should be myself a cast-away--drowned with some of you in
the same pond of filth. God has put money in my power through the gift
of one whom you know. I shall endeavor to be a faithful steward of that
which God through her has committed to me in trust. Hear me, friends--to
none of you am I the less a friend that I tell you truths you would hide
from your own souls: money is not mammon; it is God's invention; it is
good and the gift of God. But for money and the need of it, there would
not be half the friendship in the world. It is powerful for good when
divinely used. Give it plenty of air, and it is sweet as the hawthorn;
shut it up, and it cankers and breeds worms. Like all the best gifts of
God, like the air and the water, it must have motion and change and
shakings asunder; like the earth itself, like the heart and mind of man,
it must be broken and turned, not heaped together and neglected. It is
an angel of mercy, whose wings are full of balm and dews and
refreshings; but when you lay hold of him, pluck his pinions, pen him in
a yard, and fall down and worship him--then, with the blessed vengeance
of his master, he deals plague and confusion and terror, to stay the
idolatry. If I misuse or waste or hoard the divine thing, I pray my
Master to see to it--my God to punish me. Any fire rather than be given
over to the mean idol! And now I will make an offer to my townsfolk in
the face of this congregation--that, whoever will, at the end of three
years, bring me his books, to him also will I lay open mine, that he
will see how I have sought to make friends of the mammon of
unrighteousness. Of the mammon-server I expect to be judged according
to the light that is in him, and that light I know to be darkness.

"Friend, be not a slave. Be wary. Look not on the gold when it is yellow
in thy purse. Hoard not. In God's name, spend--spend on. Take heed how
thou spendest, but take heed that thou spend. Be thou as the sun in
heaven; let thy gold be thy rays, thy angels of love and life and
deliverance. Be thou a candle of the Lord to spread His light through
the world. If hitherto, in any fashion of faithlessness, thou hast
radiated darkness into the universe, humble thyself, and arise and
shine.

"But if thou art poor, then look not on thy purse when it is empty. He
who desires more than God wills him to have, is also a servant of
mammon, for he trusts in what God has made, and not in God Himself. He
who laments what God has taken from him, he is a servant of mammon. He
who for care can not pray, is a servant of mammon. There are men in this
town who love and trust their horses more than the God that made them
and their horses too. None the less confidently will they give judgment
on the doctrine of God. But the opinion of no man who does not render
back his soul to the living God and live in Him, is, in religion, worth
the splinter of a straw. Friends, cast your idol into the furnace; melt
your mammon down, coin him up, make God's money of him, and send him
coursing. Make of him cups to carry the gift of God, the water of life,
through the world--in lovely justice to the oppressed, in healthful
labor to them whom no man hath hired, in rest to the weary who have
borne the burden and heat of the day, in joy to the heavy-hearted, in
laughter to the dull-spirited. Let them all be glad with reason, and
merry without revel. Ah! what gifts in music, in drama, in the tale, in
the picture, in the spectacle, in books and models, in flowers and
friendly feasting, what true gifts might not the mammon of
unrighteousness, changed back into the money of God, give to men and
women, bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh! How would you not spend
your money for the Lord, if He needed it at your hand! He does need it;
for he that spends it upon the least of his fellows, spends it upon his
Lord. To hold fast upon God with one hand, and open wide the other to
your neighbor--that is religion; that is the law and the prophets, and
the true way to all better things that are yet to come.--Lord, defend us
from Mammon. Hold Thy temple against his foul invasion. Purify our
money with Thy air, and Thy sun, that it may be our slave, and Thou our
Master. Amen."

The moment his sermon was ended, the curate always set himself to forget
it. This for three reasons: first, he was so dissatisfied with it, that
to think of it was painful--and the more, that many things he might have
said, and many better ways of saying what he had said, would constantly
present themselves. Second, it was useless to brood over what could not
be bettered; and, third, it was hurtful, inasmuch as it prevented the
growth of new, hopeful, invigorating thought, and took from his
strength, and the quality of his following endeavor. A man's labors must
pass like the sunrises and sunsets of the world. The next thing, not the
last, must be his care. When he reached home, he would therefore use
means to this end of diversion, and not unfrequently would write verses.
Here are those he wrote that afternoon.

  LET YOUR LIGHT SO SHINE.

  Sometimes, O Lord, thou lightest in my head
    A lamp that well might Pharos all the lands;
  Anon the light will neither burn nor spread
    Shrouded in danger gray the beacon stands.

  A Pharos? Oh, dull brain! Oh, poor quenched lamp,
    Under a bushel, with an earthy smell!
  Moldering it lies, in rust and eating damp,
    While the slow oil keeps oozing from its cell!

  For me it were enough to be a flower
    Knowing its root in thee was somewhere hid--
  To blossom at the far appointed hour,
    And fold in sleep when thou, my Nature, bid.

  But hear my brethren crying in the dark!
    Light up my lamp that it may shine abroad.
  Fain would I cry--See, brothers! sisters, mark!
    This is the shining of light's father, God.




CHAPTER VIII.

THE MANOR HOUSE DINING-ROOM.


The rector never took his eyes off the preacher, but the preacher never
saw him. The reason was that he dared not let his eyes wander in the
direction of Mrs. Ramshorn; he was not yet so near perfection but that
the sight of her supercilious, unbelieving face, was a reviving cordial
to the old Adam, whom he was so anxious to poison with love and prayer.
Church over, the rector walked in silence, between the two ladies, to
the Manor House. He courted no greetings from the sheep of his neglected
flock as he went, and returned those offered with a constrained
solemnity. The moment they stood in the hall together, and before the
servant who had opened the door to them had quite disappeared, Mrs.
Ramshorn, to the indignant consternation of Mrs. Bevis, who was utterly
forgotten by both in the colloquy that ensued, turned sharp on the
rector, and said,

"There! what do you say to your curate now?"

"He _is_ enough to set the whole parish by the ears," he answered.

"I told you so, Mr. Bevis!"

"Only it does not follow that therefore he is in the wrong. Our Lord
Himself came not to send peace on earth but a sword."

"Irreverence ill becomes a beneficed clergyman, Mr. Bevis," said Mrs.
Ramshorn--who very consistently regarded any practical reference to our
Lord as irrelevant, thence naturally as irreverent.

"And, by Jove!" added the rector, heedless of her remark, and tumbling
back into an old college-habit, "I fear he is in the right; and if he
is, it will go hard with you and me at the last day, Mrs. Ramshorn."

"Do you mean to say you are going to let that man turn every thing
topsy-turvy, and the congregation out of the church, John Bevis?"

"I never saw such a congregation in it before, Mrs. Ramshorn."

"It's little better than a low-bred conventicle now, and what it will
come to, if things go on like this, God knows."

"That ought to be a comfort," said the rector. "But I hardly know yet
where I am. The fellow has knocked the wind out of me with his
personalities, and I haven't got my breath yet. Have you a bottle of
sherry open?"

Mrs. Ramshorn led the way to the dining-room, where the early Sunday
dinner was already laid, and the decanters stood on the sideboard. The
rector poured himself out a large glass of sherry, and drank it off in
three mouthfuls.

"Such buffoonery! such coarseness! such vulgarity! such indelicacy!"
cried Mrs. Ramshorn, while the parson was still occupied with the
sherry. "Not content with talking about himself in the pulpit, he must
even talk about his wife! What's he or his wife in the house of God?
When his gown is on, a clergyman is neither Mr. This nor Mr. That any
longer, but a priest of the Church of England, as by law established. My
poor Helen! She has thrown herself away upon a charlatan! And what will
become of her money in the hands of a man with such leveling notions, I
dread to think."

"He said something about buying friends with it," said the rector.

"Bribery and corruption must come natural to a fellow who could preach a
sermon like that after marrying money!"

"Why, my good madam, would you have a man turn his back on a girl
because she has a purse in her pocket?"

"But to pretend to despise it! And then, worst of all! I don't know
whether the indelicacy or the profanity was the greater!--when I think
of it now, I can scarcely believe I really heard it!--to offer to show
his books to every inquisitive fool itching to know _my_ niece's
fortune! Well, she shan't see a penny of mine--that I'm determined on."

"You need not be uneasy about the books, Mrs. Ramshorn. You remember the
condition annexed?"

"Stuff and hypocrisy! He's played his game well! But time will show."

Mr. Bevis checked his answer. He was beginning to get disgusted with the
old cat, as he called her to himself.

He too had made a good speculation in the hymeneo-money-market,
otherwise he could hardly have afforded to give up the exercise of his
profession. Mrs. Bevis had brought him the nice little property at
Owlkirk, where, if he worshiped mammon--and after his curate's sermon he
was not at all sure he did not--he worshiped him in a very moderate and
gentlemanly fashion. Every body liked the rector, and two or three
loved him a little. If it would be a stretch of the truth to call a man
a Christian who never yet in his life had consciously done a thing
because it was commanded by Christ, he was not therefore a godless man;
while, through the age-long process of spiritual infiltration, he had
received and retained much that was Christian.

The ladies went to take off their bonnets, and their departure was a
relief to the rector. He helped himself to another glass of sherry, and
seated himself in the great easy chair formerly approved of the dean,
long promoted. But what are easy chairs to uneasy men? Dinner, however,
was at hand, and that would make a diversion in favor of less
disquieting thought.

Mrs. Ramshorn, also, was uncomfortable--too much so to be relieved by
taking off her bonnet. She felt, with no little soreness, that the
rector was not with her in her depreciation of Wingfold. She did her
best to play the hostess, but the rector, while enjoying his dinner
despite discomfort in the inward parts, was in a mood of silence
altogether new both to himself and his companions. Mrs. Bevis, however,
talked away in a soft, continuous murmur. She was a good-natured, gentle
soul, without whose sort the world would be harder for many. She did not
contribute much to its positive enjoyment, but for my part, I can not
help being grateful even to a cat that will condescend to purr to me.
But she had not much mollifying influence on her hostess, who snarled,
and judged, and condemned, nor seemed to enjoy her dinner the less. When
it was over, the ladies went to the drawing-room; and the rector,
finding his company unpleasant, drank but a week-day's allowance of
wine, and went to have a look at his horses.

They neighed a welcome the moment his boot struck the stones of the
yard, for they loved their master with all the love their strong, timid,
patient hearts were as yet capable of. Satisfied that they were
comfortable, for he found them busy with a large feed of oats and chaff
and Indian corn, he threw his arm over the back of his favorite, and
stood, leaning against her for minutes, half dreaming, half thinking. As
long as they were busy, their munching and grinding soothed him--held
him at least in quiescent mood; the moment it ceased, he seemed to
himself to wake up out of a dream. In that dream, however, he had been
more awake than any hour for long years, and had heard and seen many
things. He patted his mare lovingly, then, with a faint sense of
rebuked injustice, went into the horse's stall, and patted and stroked
him as he had never done before.

He went into the inn, and asked for a cup of tea. He would have had a
sleep on Mrs. Pinks's sofa, as was his custom in his study--little
study, alas, went on there!--but he had a call to make, and must rouse
himself, and that was partly why he had sought the inn. For Mrs.
Ramshorn's household was so well ordered that nothing was to be had out
of the usual routine. It was like an American country inn, where, if you
arrive after supper, you will most likely have to starve till next
morning. Her servants, in fact, were her masters, and she dared not go
into her own kitchen for a jug of hot water. Possibly it was her
dethronement in her own house that made her, with a futile clutching
after lost respect, so anxious to rule in the abbey church. As it was,
although John Bevis and she had known each other long, and in some poor
sense intimately, he would never in her house have dared ask for a cup
of tea except it were on the table. But here was the ease of his inn,
where the landlady herself was proud to get him what he wanted. She made
the tea from her own caddy; and when he had drunk three cups of it,
washed his red face, and re-tied his white neck-cloth, he set out to
make his call.




CHAPTER IX.

THE RECTORY DRAWING-ROOM.


The call was upon his curate. It was years since he had entered the
rectory. The people who last occupied it, he had scarcely known, and
even during its preparation for Wingfold he had not gone near the place.
Yet of that house had been his dream as he stood in his mare's stall,
and it was with a strange feeling he now approached it. Friends
generally took the pleasanter way to the garden door, opening on the
churchyard, but Mr. Bevis went round by the lane to the more public
entrance.

All his years with his first wife had been spent in that house. She was
delicate when he married her, and soon grew sickly and suffering. One
after another her children died as babies. At last came one who lived,
and then the mother began to die. She was one of those lowly women who
apply the severity born of their creed to themselves, and spend only the
love born of the indwelling Spirit upon their neighbors. She was rather
melancholy, but hoped as much as she could, and when she could not hope
did not stand still, but walked on in the dark. I think when the sun
rises upon them, some people will be astonished to find how far they
have got in the dark.

Her husband, without verifying for himself one of the things it was his
business to teach others, was yet held in some sort of communion with
sacred things by his love for his suffering wife, and his admiration of
her goodness and gentleness. He had looked up to her, though several
years younger than himself, with something of the same reverence with
which he had regarded his mother, a women with an element of greatness
in her. It was not possible he should ever have adopted her views, or in
any active manner allied himself with the school whose doctrines she
accepted as the logical embodiment of the gospel, but there was in him
all the time a vague something that was not far from the kingdom of
heaven. Some of his wife's friends looked upon him as a wolf in the
sheepfold; he was no wolf, he was only a hireling. Any neighborhood
might have been the better for having such a man as he for the parson of
the parish--only, for one commissioned to be in the world as he was in
the world!--why he knew more about the will of God as to a horse's legs,
than as to the heart of a man. As he drew near the house, the older and
tenderer time came to meet him, and the spirit of his suffering,
ministering wife seemed to overshadow him. Two tears grew half-way into
his eyes:--they were a little bloodshot, but kind, true eyes. He was not
sorry he had married again, for he and his wife were at peace with each
other, but he had found that the same part of his mind would not serve
to think of the two: they belonged to different zones of his unexplored
world. For one thing, his present wife looked up to him with perfect
admiration, and he, knowing his own poverty, rather looked down upon her
in consequence, though in a loving, gentle, and gentlemanlike way.

He was shown into the same room, looking out on the churchyard, where in
the first months of his married life, he sat and heard his wife sing her
few songs, accompanying them on the little piano he had saved hard to
buy for her, until she made him love them. It had lasted only through
those few months; after her first baby died, she rarely sang. But all
the colors and forms of the room were different, and that made it easier
to check the lump rising in his throat. It was the faith of his curate
that had thus set his wife before him, although the two would hardly
have agreed in any confession narrower than the Apostles' creed.

When Wingfold entered the room, the rector rose, went halfway to meet
him, and shook hands with him heartily. They seated themselves, and a
short silence followed. But the rector knew it was his part to speak.

"I was in church this morning," he said, with a half-humorous glance
right into the clear gray eyes of his curate.

"So my wife tells me," returned Wingfold with a smile.

"You didn't know it then?" rejoined the rector, with now an almost
quizzical glance, in which hovered a little doubt. "I thought you were
preaching at me all the time."

"God forbid!" said the curate; "I was not aware of your presence. I did
not even know you were in the town yesterday."

"You must have had some one in your mind's eye. No man could speak as
you did this morning, who addressed mere abstract humanity."

"I will not say that individuals did not come up before me; how can a
man help it where he knows every body in his congregation more or less?
But I give you my word, sir, I never thought of you."

"Then you might have done so with the greatest propriety," returned the
rector. "My conscience sided with you all the time. You found me out.
I've got a bit of the muscle they call a heart left in me yet, though it
_has_ got rather leathery.--But what do they mean when they say you are
setting the parish by the ears?"

"I don't know, sir. I have heard of no quarreling. I have made some
enemies, but they are not very dangerous, and I hope not very bitter
ones; and I have made many more friends, I am sure."

"What they tell me is, that your congregation is divided--that they take
sides for and against you, which is a most undesirable thing, surely!"

"It is indeed; and yet it may be a thing that, for a time, can not be
helped. Was there ever a man with the cure of souls, concerning whom
there has not been more or less of such division? But, if you will have
patience with me, sir, I am bold to say, believing in the force and
final victory of the truth, there will be more unity by and by."

"I don't doubt it. But come now!--you are a thoroughly good
fellow--that, a blind horse could see in the dimmits--and I'm
accountable for the parish--couldn't you draw it a little milder, you
know? couldn't you make it just a little less peculiar--only the way of
putting it, I mean--so that it should look a little more like what they
have been used to? I'm only suggesting the thing, you know--dictating
nothing, on my soul, Mr. Wingfold. I am sure that, whatever you do, you
will act according to your own conscience, otherwise I should not
venture to say a word, lest I should lead you wrong."

"If you will allow me," said the curate, "I will tell you my whole
story; and then if you should wish it, I will resign my curacy, without
saying a word more than that my rector thinks it better. Neither in
private shall I make a single remark in a different spirit."

"Let me hear," said the rector.

"Then if you will please take this chair, that I may know that I am not
wearying you bodily at least."

The rector did as he was requested, laid his head back, crossed his
legs, and folded his hands over his worn waist-coat: he was not one of
the neat order of parsons; he had a not unwholesome disregard of his
outermost man, and did not know when he was shabby. Without an atom of
pomposity or air rectorial, he settled himself to listen.

Condensing as much as he could, Wingfold told him how through great
doubt, and dismal trouble of mind, he had come to hope in God, and to
see that there was no choice for a man but to give himself, heart, and
soul, and body, to the love, and will, and care of the Being who had
made him. He could no longer, he said, regard his profession as any
thing less than a call to use every means and energy at his command for
the rousing of men and women from that spiritual sleep and moral
carelessness in which he had himself been so lately sunk.

"I don't want to give up my curacy," he concluded. "Still less do I want
to leave Glaston, for there are here some whom I teach and some who
teach me. In all that has given ground for complaint, I have seemed to
myself to be but following the dictates of common sense; if you think me
wrong, I have no justification to offer. We both love God,----"

"How do you know that?" interrupted the rector. "I wish you could make
me sure of that."

"I do, I know I do," said the curate earnestly. "I can say no more."

"My dear fellow, I haven't the merest shadow of a doubt of it," returned
the rector, smiling. "What I wished was, that you could make me sure _I_
do."

"Pardon me, my dear sir, but, judging from sore experience, if I could I
would rather make you doubt it; the doubt, even if an utter mistake,
would in the end be so much more profitable than any present
conviction."

"You have your wish, then, Wingfold: I doubt it very much," replied the
rector. "I must go home and think about it all. You shall hear from me
in a day or two."

As he spoke Mr. Bevis rose, and stood for a moment like a man greatly
urged to stretch his arms and legs. An air of uneasiness pervaded his
whole appearance.

"Will you not stop and take tea with us?" said the curate. "My wife will
be disappointed if you do not. You have been good to her for twenty
years, she says."

"She makes an old man of me," returned the rector musingly. "I remember
her such a tiny thing in a white frock and curls. Tell her what we have
been talking about, and beg her to excuse me. I _must_ go home."

He took his hat from the table, shook hands with Wingfold, and walked
back to the inn. There he found his horses bedded, and the hostler away.
His coachman was gone too, nobody knew whither.

To sleep at the inn would have given pointed offense, but he would
rather have done so than go back to the Manor House to hear his curate
abused. With the help of the barmaid, he put the horses to the carriage
himself, and to the astonishment of Mrs. Ramshorn and his wife, drew up
at the door of the Manor House.

Expostulation on the part of the former was vain. The latter made none:
it was much the same to Mrs. Bevis where she was, so long as she was
with her husband. Indeed few things were more pleasant to her than
sitting in the carriage alone, contemplating the back of Mr. Bevis on
the box, and the motion of his elbows as he drove. Mrs. Ramshorn
received their adieux very stiffly, and never after mentioned the rector
without adding the epithet, "poor man!"

Mrs. Bevis enjoyed the drive; Mr. Bevis did not. The doubt was growing
stronger and stronger all the way, that he had not behaved like a
gentleman in his relation to the head of the church. He had naturally,
as I have already shown, a fine, honorable, boyish if not childlike
nature; and the eyes of his mind were not so dim with good living as one
might have feared from the look of those in his head: in the glass of
loyalty he now saw himself a defaulter; in the scales of honor he
weighed and found himself wanting. Of true discipleship was not now the
question: he had not behaved like an honorable gentleman to Jesus
Christ. It was only in a spasm of terror St. Peter had denied him: John
Bevis had for nigh forty years been taking his pay, and for the last
thirty at least had done nothing in return. Either Jesus Christ did not
care, and then what was the church?--what the whole system of things
called Christianity?--or he did care, and what then was John Bevis in
the eyes of his Master? When they reached home, he went neither to the
stable nor the study, but, without even lighting a cigar, walked out on
the neighboring heath, where he found the universe rather gray about
him. When he returned he tried to behave as usual, but his wife saw that
he scarcely ate at supper, and left half of his brandy and water. She
set it down to the annoyance the curate had caused him, and wisely
forbore troubling him with questions.




CHAPTER X.

MR. DRAKE'S ARBOR.


While the curate was preaching that same Sunday morning, in the cool
cavernous church, with its great lights overhead, Walter Drake--the old
minister, he was now called by his disloyal congregation--sat in a
little arbor looking out on the river that flowed through the town to
the sea. Green grass went down from where he sat to the very water's
brink. It was a spot the old man loved, for there his best thoughts came
to him. There was in him a good deal of the stuff of which poets are
made, and since trouble overtook him, the river had more and more
gathered to itself the aspect of that in the Pilgrim's Progress; and
often, as he sat thus almost on its edge, he fancied himself waiting
the welcome summoms to go home. It was a tidal river, with many changes.
Now it flowed with a full, calm current, conquering the tide, like life
sweeping death with it down into the bosom of the eternal. Now it seemed
to stand still, as if aghast at the inroad of the awful thing; and then
the minister would bethink himself that it was the tide of the eternal
rising in the narrow earthly channel: men, he said to himself, called it
_death_, because they did not know what it was, or the loveliness of its
quickening energy. It fails on their sense by the might of its grand
excess, and they call it by the name of its opposite. A weary and rather
disappointed pilgrim, he thus comforted himself as he sat.

There a great salmon rose and fell, gleaming like a bolt of silver in
the sun! There a little waterbeetle scurried along after some invisible
prey. The blue smoke of his pipe melted in the Sabbath air. The softened
sounds of a singing congregation came across gardens and hedges to his
ear. They sang with more energy than grace, and, not for the first time,
he felt they did. Were they indeed singing to the Lord, he asked
himself, or only to the idol Custom? A silence came: the young man in
the pulpit was giving out his text, and the faces that had turned
themselves up to Walter Drake as flowers to the sun, were now all
turning to the face of him they had chosen in his stead, "to minister to
them in holy things." He took his pipe from his mouth, and sat
motionless, with his eyes fixed on the ground.

But why was he not at chapel himself? Could it be that he yielded to
temptation, actually preferring his clay pipe and the long glide of the
river, to the worship, and the hymns and the sermon? Had there not been
a time when he judged that man careless of the truth who did not go to
the chapel, and that man little better who went to the church? Yet there
he sat on a Sunday morning, the church on one side of him and the chapel
on the other, smoking his pipe! His daughter was at the chapel; she had
taken Ducky with her; the dog lay in the porch waiting for them; the cat
thought too much of herself to make friends with her master; he had
forgotten his New Testament on the study table; and now he had let his
pipe out.

He was not well, it is true, but he was well enough to have gone. Was he
too proud to be taught where he had been a teacher? or was it that the
youth in his place taught there doctrines which neither they nor their
fathers had known? It could not surely be from resentment that they had
super-annuated him in the prime of his old age, with a pared third of
his late salary, which nothing but honesty in respect to the small
moneys he owed could have prevented him from refusing!

In truth it was impossible the old minister should have any great esteem
for the flashy youth, proud of his small Latin and less Greek, a mere
unit of the hundreds whom the devil of ambition drives to preaching; one
who, whether the doctrines he taught were in the New Testament or not,
certainly never found them there, being but the merest disciple of a
disciple of a disciple, and fervid in words of which he perceived scarce
a glimmer of the divine purport. At the same time, he might have seen
points of resemblance between his own early history and that of the
callow chirper of divinity now holding forth from his pulpit, which
might have tended to mollify his judgment with sympathy.

His people had behaved ill to him, and he could not say he was free from
resentment or pride, but he did make for them what excuse lay in the
fact that the congregation had been dwindling ever since the curate at
the abbey-church began to speak in such a strange outspoken fashion.
There now was a right sort of man! he said to himself. No attempted
oratory with him! no prepared surprises! no playhouse tricks! no studied
graces in wafture of hands and upheaved eyes! And yet at moments when he
became possessed with his object rather than subject, every inch of him
seemed alive. He was odd--very odd; perhaps he was crazy--but at least
he was honest. He had heard him himself, and judged him well worth
helping to what was better, for, alas! notwithstanding the vigor of his
preaching, he did not appear to have himself discovered as yet the
treasure hid in the field. He was, nevertheless, incomparably the
superior of the young man whom, expecting him to _draw_, the deacons of
his church, with the members behind them, had substituted for himself,
who had for more than fifteen years ministered to them the bread of
life.

Bread!--Yes, I think it might honestly be called bread that Walter Drake
had ministered. It had not been free from chalk or potatoes: bits of
shell and peel might have been found in it, with an occasional bit of
dirt, and a hair or two; yes, even a little alum, and that is _bad_,
because it tends to destroy, not satisfy the hunger. There was sawdust
in it, and parchment-dust, and lumber-dust; it was ill salted, badly
baked, sad; sometimes it was blue-moldy, and sometimes even maggoty; but
the mass of it was honest flour, and those who did not recoil from the
look of it, or recognize the presence of the variety of foreign matter,
could live upon it, in a sense, up to a certain pitch of life. But a
great deal of it was not of his baking at all--he had been merely the
distributor--crumbling down other bakers' loaves and making them up
again in his own shapes. In his declining years, however, he had been
really beginning to learn the business. Only, in his congregation were
many who not merely preferred bad bread of certain kinds, but were
incapable of digesting any of high quality.

He would have gone to chapel that morning had the young man been such as
he could respect. Neither his doctrine, nor the behavior of the church
to himself, would have kept him away. Had he followed his inclination he
would have gone to the church, only that would have looked spiteful. His
late congregation would easily excuse his non-attendance with them; they
would even pitifully explain to each other why he could not appear just
yet; but to go to church would be in their eyes unpardonable--a
declaration of a war of revenge.

There was, however, a reason besides, why Mr. Drake could not go to
church that morning, and if not a more serious, it was a much more
painful one. Some short time before he had any ground to suspect that
his congregation was faltering in its loyalty to him, his daughter had
discovered that the chapel butcher, when he sent a piece of meat,
invariably charged for a few ounces beyond the weight delivered. Now Mr.
Drake was a man of such honesty that all kinds of cheating, down to the
most respectable, were abominable to him; that the man was a professor
of religion made his conduct unpardonable in his eyes, and that he was
one of his own congregation rendered it insupportable. Having taken
pains to satisfy himself of the fact, he declined to deal with him any
further, and did not spare to tell him why. The man was far too
dishonest to profit by the rebuke save in circumspection and cunning,
was revengeful in proportion to the justice of the accusation, and of
course brought his influence, which was not small, to bear upon the
votes of the church-members in respect of the pastorate.

Had there been another butcher in connection with the chapel, Mr. Drake
would have turned to him, but as there was not, and they could not go
without meat, he had to betake himself to the principal butcher in the
place, who was a member of the Church of England. Soon after his
troubles commenced, and before many weeks were over he saw plainly
enough that he must either resign altogether, and go out into the great
world of dissent in search of some pastorless flock that might vote him
their crook, to be guided by him whither they wanted to go, and whither
most of them believed they knew the way as well as he, or accept the
pittance offered him. This would be to retire from the forefront of the
battle, and take an undistinguished place in the crowd of mere
camp-followers; but, for the sake of honesty, as I have already
explained, and with the hope that it might be only for a brief season,
he had chosen the latter half of the alternative. And truly it was a
great relief not to have to grind out of his poor, weary, groaning mill
the two inevitable weekly sermons--labor sufficient to darken the face
of nature to the conscientious man. For his people thought themselves
intellectual, and certainly were critical. Mere edification in holiness
was not enough for them. A large infusion of some polemic element was
necessary to make the meat savory and such as their souls loved. Their
ambition was not to grow in grace, but in social influence and
regard--to glorify their dissent, not the communion of saints. Upon the
chief corner-stone they would build their stubble of paltry religionism;
they would set up their ragged tent in the midst of the eternal temple,
careless how it blocked up window and stair.

Now last week Mr. Drake had requested his new butcher to send his
bill--with some little anxiety, because of the sudden limitation of his
income; but when he saw it he was filled with horror. Amounting only to
a very few pounds, causes had come together to make it a large one in
comparison with the figures he was accustomed to see. Always feeding
some of his flock, he had at this time two sickly, nursing mothers who
drew their mortal life from his kitchen; and, besides, the doctor had,
some time ago, ordered a larger amount of animal food for the little
Amanda. In fine, the sum at the bottom of that long slip of paper, with
the wood-cut of a prize ox at the top of it, small as he would have
thought it at one period of his history, was greater than he could
imagine how to pay; and if he went to church, it would be to feel the
eye of the butcher and not that of the curate upon him all the time. It
was a dismay, a horror to him to have an account rendered which he could
not settle, and especially from his new butcher, after he had so
severely rebuked the old one. Where was the mighty difference in honesty
between himself and the offender? the one claimed for meat he had not
sold, the other ordered that for which he could not pay! Would not Mr.
Jones imagine he had left his fellow-butcher and come to him because he
had run up a large bill for which he was unable to write a check? This
was that over which the spirit of the man now brooded by far the most
painfully; this it was that made him leave his New Testament in the
study, let his pipe out, and look almost lovingly upon the fast-flowing
river, because it was a symbol of death.

He had chosen preaching as a profession, just as so many take
orders--with this difference from a large proportion of such, that he
had striven powerfully to convince himself that he trusted in the merits
of the Redeemer. Had he not in this met with tolerable success, he would
not have yielded to the wish of his friends and left his father's shop
in his native country-town for a dissenting college in the neighborhood
of London. There he worked well, and became a good scholar, learning to
read in the true sense of the word, that is, to try the spirits as he
read. His character, so called, was sound, and his conscience, if not
sensitive, was firm and regnant. But he was injured both spiritually and
morally by some of the instructions there given. For one of the objects
held up as duties before him, was to become capable of rendering himself
_acceptable_ to a congregation.

Most of the students were but too ready to regard, or at least to treat
this object as the first and foremost of duties. The master-duty of
devotion to Christ, and obedience to every word that proceeded out of
His mouth, was very much treated as a thing understood, requiring little
enforcement; while, the main thing demanded of them being sermons in
some sense their own--honey culled at least by their own bees, and not
bought in jars, much was said about the plan and composition of sermons,
about style and elocution, and action--all plainly and confessedly, with
a view to pulpit-_success_--the lowest of all low successes, and the
most worldly.

These instructions Walter Drake accepted as the wisdom of the holy
serpent--devoted large attention to composition, labored to form his
style on the _best models_, and before beginning to write a sermon,
always heated the furnace of production with fuel from some exciting or
suggestive author: it would be more correct to say, fed the mill of
composition from some such source; one consequence of all which was,
that when at last, after many years, he did begin to develop some
individuality, he could not, and never did shake himself free of those
weary models; his thoughts, appearing in clothes which were not made for
them, wore always a certain stiffness and unreality which did not by
nature belong to them, blunting the impressions which his earnestness
and sincerity did notwithstanding make.

Determined to _succeed_, he cultivated eloquence also--what he supposed
eloquence, that is, being, of course, merely elocution, to attain the
right gestures belonging to which he looked far more frequently into his
landlady's mirror, than for his spiritual action into the law of
liberty. He had his reward in the success he sought. But I must make
haste, for the story of worldly success is always a mean tale. In a few
years, and for not a few after, he was a popular preacher in one of the
suburbs of London--a good deal sought after, and greatly lauded. He
lived in comfort, indulged indeed in some amount of show; married a
widow with a large life-annuity, which between them they spent entirely,
and that not altogether in making friends with everlasting habitations;
in a word, gazed out on the social landscape far oftener than lifted his
eyes to the hills.

After some ten or twelve years, a change began. They had three children;
the two boys, healthy and beautiful, took scarlatina and died; the poor,
sickly girl wailed on. His wife, who had always been more devoted to her
children than her husband, pined, and died also. Her money went, if not
with her, yet away from him. His spirits began to fail him, and his
small, puny, peaking daughter did not comfort him much. He was capable
of true, but not yet of pure love; at present his love was capricious.
Little Dora--a small Dorothy indeed in his estimation--had always been a
better child than either of her brothers, but he loved them the more
that others admired them, and her the less that others pitied her: he
did try to love her, for there was a large element of justice in his
nature. This, but for his being so much occupied with _making himself
acceptable_ to his congregation, would have given him a leadership in
the rising rebellion against a theology which crushed the hearts of men
by attributing injustice to their God. As it was, he lay at anchor, and
let the tide rush past him.

Further change followed--gradual, but rapid. His congregation began to
discover that he was not the man he had been. They complained of lack of
variety in his preaching; said he took it too easy; did not study his
sermons sufficiently; often spoke extempore, which was a poor compliment
to _them_; did not visit with impartiality, and indeed had all along
favored the carriage people. There was a party in the church which had
not been cordial to him from the first; partly from his fault, partly
from theirs, he had always made them feel they were of the lower grade;
and from an increase of shops in the neighborhood, this party was now
gathering head. Their leaders went so far at length as to hint at a
necessity for explanation in regard to the accounts of certain charities
administered by the pastor. In these, unhappily, _lacunae_ were patent.
In his troubles the pastor had grown careless. But it was altogether to
his own loss, for not merely had the money been spent with a rigidity of
uprightness, such as few indeed of his accusers exercised in their
business affairs, but he had in his disbursements exceeded the
contribution committed to his charge. Confident, however, in his
position, and much occupied with other thoughts, he had taken no care to
set down the particulars of his expenditure, and his enemies did not
fail to hint a connection between this fact and the loss of his wife's
annuity. Worst of all, doubts of his orthodoxy began to be expressed by
the more ignorant, and harbored without examination by the less
ignorant.

All at once he became aware of the general disloyalty of his flock, and
immediately resigned. Scarcely had he done so when he was invited to
Glaston, and received with open arms. There he would heal his wounds,
and spend the rest of his days in peace. "He caught a slip or two" in
descending, but soon began to find the valley of humiliation that
wholesome place which all true pilgrims have ever declared it.
Comparative retirement, some sense of lost labor, some suspicion of the
worth of the ends for which he had spent his strength, a waking desire
after the God in whom he had vaguely believed all the time he was
letting the dust of paltry accident inflame his eyes, blistering and
deadening his touch with the efflorescent crusts and agaric tumors upon
the dry bones of theology, gilding the vane of his chapel instead of
cleansing its porch and its floor--these all favored the birth in his
mind of the question, whether he had ever entered in at the straight
gate himself, or had not merely been standing by its side calling to
others to enter in. Was it even as well as this with him? Had he not
been more intent on gathering a wretched flock within the rough,
wool-stealing, wind-sifting, beggarly hurdles of his church, than on
housing true men and women safe in the fold of the true Shepherd?
Feeding troughs for the sheep there might be many in the fields, and
they might or might not be presided over by servants of the true
Shepherd, but the fold they were not! He grew humble before the Master,
and the Master began to lord it lovingly over him. He sought His
presence, and found Him; began to think less of books and rabbis, yea
even, for the time, of Paul and Apollos and Cephas, and to pore and
ponder over the living tale of the New Covenant; began to feel that the
Lord meant what He said, and that His apostles also meant what He said;
forgot Calvin a good deal, outgrew the influences of Jonathan Edwards,
and began to understand Jesus Christ.

Few sights can be lovelier than that of a man who, having rushed up the
staircase of fame in his youth--what matter whether the fame of a paltry
world, or a paltry sect of that world!--comes slowly, gently, graciously
down in his old age, content to lose that which he never had, and
careful only to be honest at last. It had not been so with Walter Drake.
He had to come down first to begin to get the good of it, but once down,
it was not long ere he began to go up a very different stair indeed. A
change took place in him which turned all aims, all efforts, all
victories of the world, into the merest, most poverty-stricken trifling.
He had been a tarrer and smearer, a marker and shearer of sheep, rather
than a pastor; but now he recognized the rod and leaned on the staff of
the true Shepherd Who feeds both shepherds and sheep. Hearty were the
thanks he offered that he had been staid in his worse than foolish
career.

Since then, he had got into a hollow in the valley, and at this moment,
as he sat in his summer-house, was looking from a verge abrupt into what
seemed a bottomless gulf of humiliation. For his handsome London house,
he had little better than a cottage, in which his study was not a
quarter of the size of the one he had left; he had sold two-thirds of
his books; for three men and four women servants, he had but one old
woman and his own daughter to do the work of the house; for all
quadrupedal menie, he had but a nondescript canine and a contemptuous
feline foundling; from a devoted congregation of comparatively educated
people, he had sunk to one in which there was not a person of higher
standing than a tradesman, and that congregation had now rejected him as
not up to their mark, turning him off to do his best with fifty pounds a
year. He had himself heard the cheating butcher remark in the open
street that it was quite enough, and more than ever his Master had. But
all these things were as nothing in his eyes beside his inability to pay
Mr. Jones's bill. He had outgrown his former self, but this kind of
misery it would be but deeper degradation to outgrow. All before this
had been but humiliation; this was shame. Now first he knew what poverty
was! Had God forgotten him? That could not be! that which could forget
could not be God. Did he not care then that such things should befall
his creatures? Were they but trifles in his eyes? He ceased thinking,
gave way to the feeling that God dealt hardly with him, and sat stupidly
indulging a sense of grievance--with self-pity, than which there is
scarce one more childish or enfeebling in the whole circle of the
emotions. Was this what God had brought him nearer to Himself for? was
this the end of a ministry in which he had, in some measure at least,
denied himself and served God and his fellow? He could bear any thing
but shame! That too could he have borne had he not been a teacher of
religion--one whose failure must brand him a hypocrite. How mean it
would sound--what a reproach to _the cause_, that the congregational
minister had run up a bill with a church-butcher which he was unable to
pay! It was the shame--the shame he could not bear! Ought he to have
been subjected to it?

A humbler and better mood slowly dawned with unconscious change, and he
began to ponder with himself wherein he had been misusing the money
given him: either he had been misusing it, or God had not given him
enough, seeing it would not reach the end of his needs; but he could
think only of the poor he had fed, and the child he had adopted, and
surely God would overlook those points of extravagance. Still, if he had
not the means, he had not the right to do such things. It might not in
itself be wrong, but in respect of him it was as dishonest as if he had
spent the money on himself--not to mention that it was a thwarting of
the counsel of God, who, if He had meant them to be so aided, would have
sent him the money to spend upon them honestly. His one excuse was that
he could not have foreseen how soon his income was going to shrink to a
third. In future he would withhold his hand. But surely he might keep
the child? Nay, having once taken her in charge, he must keep the child.
It was a comfort, there could be no doubt about that. God had money
enough, and certainly He would enable him to do that! Only, why then did
He bring him to such poverty?

So round in his mill he went, round and round again, and back to the old
evil mood. Either there was no God, or he was a hard-used man, whom his
Master did not mind bringing to shame before his enemies! He could not
tell which would triumph the more--the church-butcher over dissent, or
the chapel-butcher over the church-butcher, and the pastor who had
rebuked him for dishonesty! His very soul was disquieted within him. He
rose at last with a tear trickling down his cheek, and walked to and fro
in his garden.

Things went on nevertheless as if all was right with the world. The
Lythe flowed to the sea, and the silver-mailed salmon leaped into the
more limpid air. The sun shone gracious over all his kingdom, and his
little praisers were loud in every bush. The primroses, earth-born suns,
were shining about in every border. The sound of the great organ came
from the grand old church, and the sound of many voices from the humble
chapel. Only, where was the heart of it all?




CHAPTER XI.

THE CHAMBER AT THE COTTAGE.


Meanwhile Faber was making a round, with the village of Owlkirk for the
end of it. Ere he was half-way thither, his groom was tearing after him
upon Niger, with a message from Mrs. Puckridge, which, however, did not
overtake him. He opened the cottage-door, and walked up stairs,
expecting to find his patient weak, but in the fairest of ways to
recover speedily. What was his horror to see her landlady weeping and
wringing her hands over the bed, and find the lady lying motionless,
with bloodless lips and distended nostrils--to all appearance dead!
Pillows, sheets, blankets, looked one mass of red. The bandage had
shifted while she slept, and all night her blood had softly flowed. Hers
was one of those peculiar organizations in which, from some cause but
dimly conjectured as yet, the blood once set flowing will flow on to
death, and even the tiniest wound is hard to stanch. Was the lovely
creature gone? In her wrists could discern no pulse. He folded back the
bed-clothes, and laid his ear to her heart. His whole soul listened.
Yes; there was certainly the faintest flutter. He watched a moment: yes;
he could see just the faintest tremor of the diaphragm.

"Run," he cried, "--for God's sake run and bring me a jug of hot water,
and two or three basins. There is just a chance yet! If you make haste,
we may save her. Bring me a syringe. If you haven't one, run from house
to house till you get one. Her life depends on it." By this time he was
shouting after the hurrying landlady.

In a minute or two she returned.

"Have you got the syringe?" he cried, the moment he heard her step.

To his great relief she had. He told her to wash it out thoroughly with
the hot water, unscrew the top, and take out the piston. While giving
his directions, he unbound the arm, enlarged the wound in the vein
longitudinally, and re-bound the arm tight below the elbow, then quickly
opened a vein of his own, and held the syringe to catch the spout that
followed. When it was full, he replaced the piston, telling Mrs.
Puckridge to put her thumb on his wound, turned the point of the syringe
up and drove a little out to get rid of the air, then, with the help of
a probe, inserted the nozzle into the wound, and gently forced in the
blood. That done, he placed his own thumbs on the two wounds, and made
the woman wash out the syringe in clean hot water. Then he filled it as
before, and again forced its contents into the lady's arm. This process
he went through repeatedly. Then, listening, he found her heart beating
quite perceptibly, though irregularly. Her breath was faintly coming and
going. Several times more he repeated the strange dose, then ceased, and
was occupied in binding up her arm, when she gave a great shuddering
sigh. By the time he had finished, the pulse was perceptible at her
wrist. Last of all he bound up his own wound, from which had escaped a
good deal beyond what he had used. While thus occupied, he turned sick,
and lay down on the floor. Presently, however, he grew able to crawl
from the room, and got into the garden at the back of the house, where
he walked softly to the little rude arbor at the end of it, and sat down
as if in a dream. But in the dream his soul felt wondrously awake. He
had been tasting death from the same cup with the beautiful woman who
lay there, coming alive with his life. A terrible weight was heaved from
his bosom. If she had died, he would have felt, all his life long, that
he had sent one of the loveliest of Nature's living dreams back to the
darkness and the worm, long years before her time, and with the foam of
the cup of life yet on her lips. Then a horror seized him at the
presumptuousness of the liberty he had taken. What if the beautiful
creature would rather have died than have the blood of a man, one she
neither loved nor knew, in her veins, and coursing through her very
heart! She must never know it.

"I am very grateful," he said to himself; then smiled and wondered to
whom he was grateful.

"How the old stamps and colors come out in the brain when one least
expects it!" he said. "What I meant was, _How glad I am!_"

Honest as he was, he did not feel called upon to examine whether _glad_
was really the word to represent the feeling which the thought of what
he had escaped, and of the creature he had saved from death, had sent up
into his consciousness. Glad he was indeed! but was there not mingled
with his gladness a touch of something else, very slight, yet potent
enough to make him mean _grateful_ when the word broke from him? and if
there was such a something, where did it come from? Perhaps if he had
caught and held the feeling, and submitted it to such a searching
scrutiny as he was capable of giving it, he might have doubted whether
any mother-instilled superstition ever struck root so deep as the depth
from which that seemed at least to come. I merely suggest it. The
feeling was a faint and poor one, and I do not care to reason from it. I
would not willingly waste upon small arguments, when I see more and more
clearly that our paltriest faults and dishonesties need one and the same
enormous cure.

But indeed never had Faber less time to examine himself than now, had
he been so inclined. With that big wound in it, he would as soon have
left a shell in the lady's chamber with the fuse lighted, as her arm to
itself. He did not leave the village all day. He went to see another
patient in it, and one on its outskirts, but he had his dinner at the
little inn where he put up Ruber, and all night long he sat by the
bedside of his patient. There the lovely white face, blind like a statue
that never had eyes, and the perfect arm, which now and then, with a
restless, uneasy, feeble toss, she would fling over the counterpane, the
arm he had to watch as the very gate of death, grew into his heart. He
dreaded the moment when she would open her eyes, and his might no longer
wander at will over her countenance. Again and again in the night he put
a hand under her head, and held a cooling draught to her lips; but not
even when she drank did her eyes open: like a child too weak to trust
itself, therefore free of all anxiety and fear, she took whatever came,
questioning nothing. He sat at the foot of the bed, where, with the
slightest movement, he could, through the opening of the curtains, see
her perfectly.

By some change of position, he had unknowingly drawn one of them back a
little from between her and him, as he sat thinking about her. The
candle shone full upon his face, but the other curtain was between the
candle and his patient. Suddenly she opened her eyes.

A dream had been with her, and she did not yet know that it was gone.
She could hardly be said to _know_ any thing. Fever from loss of blood;
uneasiness, perhaps, from the presence in her system of elements
elsewhere fashioned and strangely foreign to its economy; the remnants
of sleep and of the dream; the bewilderment of sudden awaking--all had
combined to paralyze her judgment, and give her imagination full career.
When she opened her eyes, she saw a beautiful face, and nothing else,
and it seemed to her itself the source of the light by which she saw it.
Her dream had been one of great trouble; and when she beheld the shining
countenance, she thought it was the face of the Saviour: he was looking
down upon her heart, which he held in his hand, and reading all that was
written there. The tears rushed to her eyes, and the next moment Faber
saw two fountains of light and weeping in the face which had been but as
of loveliest marble. The curtain fell between them, and the lady thought
the vision had vanished. The doctor came softly through the dusk to her
bedside. He felt her pulse, looked to the bandage on her arm, gave her
something to drink, and left the room. Presently Mrs. Puckridge brought
her some beef tea.




CHAPTER XII.

THE MINISTER'S GARDEN.


Up and down the garden paced the pastor, stung by the gadflies of debt.
If he were in London he could sell his watch and seals; he had a ring
somewhere, too--an antique, worth what now seemed a good deal; but his
wife had given him both. Besides, it would cost so much to go to London,
and he had no money. Mr. Drew, doubtless, would lend him what he wanted,
but he could not bring himself to ask him. If he parted with them in
Glaston, they would be put in the watchmaker's window, and that would be
a scandal--with the Baptists making head in the very next street! For,
notwithstanding the heartless way in which the Congregationalists had
treated him, theirs was the cause of scriptural Christianity, and it
made him shudder to think of bringing the smallest discredit upon the
denomination. The church-butcher was indeed a worse terror to him than
Apollyon had been to Christian, for it seemed to his faithlessness that
not even the weapon of All-prayer was equal to his discomfiture; nothing
could render him harmless but the payment of his bill. He began to look
back with something like horror upon the sermons he had preached on
honesty; for how would his inability to pay his debts appear in the eyes
of those who had heard them? Oh! why had he not paid for every thing as
they had it? Then when the time came that he could not pay, they would
only have had to go without, whereas now, there was the bill louring at
the back of the want!

When Miss Drake returned from the chapel, she found her father leaning
on the sun-dial, where she had left him. To all appearance he had not
moved. He knew her step but did not stir.

"Father!" she said.

"It is a hard thing, my child," he responded, still without moving,
"when the valley of Humiliation comes next the river Death, and no land
of Beulah between! I had my good things in my youth, and now I have my
evil things."

She laid her hand on his shoulder lovingly, tenderly, worshipfully, but
did not speak.

"As you see me now, my Dorothy, my God's-gift, you would hardly believe
your father was once a young and popular preacher, ha, ha! Fool that I
was! I thought they prized my preaching, and loved me for what I taught
them. I thought I was somebody! With shame I confess it! Who were they,
or what was their judgment, to fool me in my own concerning myself!
Their praise was indeed a fit rock for me to build my shame upon."

"But, father dear, what is even a sin when it is repented of?"

"A shame forever, my child. Our Lord did not cast out even an apostle
for his conceit and self-sufficiency, but he let him fall."

"He has not let you fall, father?" said Dorothy, with tearful eyes.

"He is bringing my gray hairs with sorrow and shame to the grave, my
child."

"Why, father!" cried the girl, shocked, as she well might be, at his
words, "what have I done to make you say that?"

"Done, my darling! _you_ done? You have done nothing but righteousness
ever since you could do any thing! You have been like a mother to your
old father. It is that bill! that horrid butcher's bill!"

Dorothy burst out laughing through her dismay, and wept and laughed
together for more than a minute ere she could recover herself.

"Father! you dear father! you're too good to live! Why, there are forks
and spoons enough in the house to pay that paltry bill!--not to mention
the cream-jug which is, and the teapot which we thought was silver,
because Lady Sykes gave it us. Why didn't you tell me what was troubling
you, father dear?"

"I can't bear--I never _could_ bear to owe money. I asked the man for
his bill some time ago. I could have paid it then, though it wouldn't
have left me a pound. The moment I looked at it, I felt as if the Lord
had forsaken me. It is easy for you to bear; you are not the one
accountable. I am. And if the pawnbroker or the silver-smith does stand
between me and absolute dishonesty, yet to find myself in such a
miserable condition, with next to nothing between us and the workhouse,
may well make me doubt whether I have been a true servant of the Lord,
for surely such shall never be ashamed! During these last days the enemy
has even dared to tempt me with the question, whether after all, these
unbelievers may not be right, and the God that ruleth in the earth a
mere projection of what the conscience and heart bribe the imagination
to construct for them!"

"I wouldn't think that before I was driven to it, father," said Dorothy,
scarcely knowing what she said, for his doubt shot a poisoned arrow of
despair into the very heart of her heart.

He, never doubting the security of his child's faith, had no slightest
suspicion into what a sore spot his words had carried torture. He did
not know that the genius of doubt--shall I call him angel or demon?--had
knocked at her door, had called through her window; that words dropped
by Faber, indicating that science was against all idea of a God, and the
confidence of their tone, had conjured up in her bosom hollow fears,
faint dismays, and stinging questions. Ready to trust, and incapable of
arrogance, it was hard for her to imagine how a man like Mr. Faber,
upright and kind and self-denying, could say such things if he did not
_know_ them true. The very word _science_ appeared to carry an awful
authority. She did not understand that it was only because science had
never come closer to Him than the mere sight of the fringe of the
outermost folds of the tabernacle of His presence, that her worshipers
dared assert there was no God. She did not perceive that nothing ever
science could find, could possibly be the God of men; that science is
only the human reflex of truth, and that truth itself can not be
measured by what of it is reflected from the mirror of the
understanding. She did not see that no incapacity of science to find
God, even touched the matter of honest men's belief that He made His
dwelling with the humble and contrite. Nothing she had learned from her
father either provided her with reply, or gave hope of finding argument
of discomfiture; nothing of all that went on at chapel or church seemed
to have any thing to do with the questions that presented themselves.

Such a rough shaking of so-called faith, has been of endless service to
many, chiefly by exposing the insecurity of all foundations of belief,
save that which is discovered in digging with the spade of obedience.
Well indeed is it for all honest souls to be thus shaken, who have been
building upon doctrines concerning Christ, upon faith, upon experiences,
upon any thing but Christ Himself, as revealed by Himself and His spirit
to all who obey Him, and so revealing the Father--a doctrine just as
foolish as the rest to men like Faber, but the power of God and the
wisdom of God to such who know themselves lifted out of darkness and an
ever-present sense of something wrong--if it be only into twilight and
hope.

Dorothy was a gift of God, and the trouble that gnawed at her heart she
would not let out to gnaw at her father's.

"There's Ducky come to call us to dinner," she said, and rising, went to
meet her.

"Dinner!" groaned Mr. Drake, and would have remained where he was. But
for Dorothy's sake he rose and followed her, feeling almost like a
repentant thief who had stolen the meal.




CHAPTER XIII.

THE HEATH AT NESTLEY.


On the Monday morning, Mr. Bevis's groom came to the rectory with a note
for the curate, begging him and Mrs. Wingfold to dine at Nestley the
same day if possible.

"I know," the rector wrote, "Monday is, or ought to be, an idle day with
you, and I write instead of my wife, because I want to see you on
business. I would have come to you, had I not had reasons for wishing to
see you here rather than at Glaston. The earlier you can come and the
longer you can stay the better, but you shall go as soon after an early
dinner as you please. You are a bee and I am a drone. God bless you.

JOHN BEVIS."

The curate took the note to his wife. Things were at once arranged, an
answer of ready obedience committed to the groom, and Helen's
pony-carriage ordered out.

The curate called every thing Helen's. He had a great contempt for the
spirit of men who marry rich wives and then lord it over their money, as
if they had done a fine thing in getting hold of it, and the wife had
been but keeping it from its rightful owner. They do not know what a
confession their whole bearing is, that, but for their wives' money,
they would be but the merest, poorest nobodies. So small are they that
even that suffices to make them feel big! But Helen did not like it,
especially when he would ask her if he might have this or that, or do so
and so. Any common man who heard him would have thought him afraid of
his wife; but a large-hearted woman would at once have understood, as
did Helen, that it all came of his fine sense of truth, and reality, and
obligation. Still Helen would have had him forget all such matters in
connection with her. They were one beyond obligation. She had given him
herself, and what were bank-notes after that? But he thought of her
always as an angel who had taken him in, to comfort, and bless, and
cherish him with love, that he might the better do the work of his God
and hers; therefore his obligation to her was his glory.

"Your ponies go splendidly to-day, Helen," he said, as admiringly he
watched how her hands on the reins seemed to mold their movements.

They were the tiniest, daintiest things, of the smallest ever seen in
harness, but with all the ways of big horses, therefore amusing in their
very grace. They were the delight of the children of Glaston and the
villages round.

"Why _will_ you call them _my_ ponies, Thomas?" returned his wife, just
sufficiently vexed to find it easy to pretend to be cross. "I don't see
what good I have got by marrying you, if every thing is to be mine all
the same!"

"Don't be unreasonable, my Helen!" said the curate, looking into the
lovely eyes whose colors seemed a little blown about in their rings.
"Don't you see it is my way of feeling to myself how much, and with what
a halo about them, they are mine? If I had bought them with my own
money, I should hardly care for them. Thank God, they are _not_ mine
that way, or in any way like that way. _You_ are mine, my life, and they
are yours--mine therefore because they are about you like your clothes
or your watch. They are mine as your handkerchief and your gloves are
mine--through worshiping love. Listen to reason. If a thing is yours it
is ten times more mine than if I had bought it, for, just because it is
yours, I am able to possess it as the meek, and not the land-owners,
inherit the earth. It makes _having_ such a deep and high--indeed a
perfect thing! I take pleasure without an atom of shame in every rich
thing you have brought me. Do you think, if you died, and I carried your
watch, I should ever cease to feel the watch was yours? Just so they are
your ponies; and if you don't like me to say so, you can contradict me
every time, you know, all the same."

"I know people will think I am like the lady we heard of the other day,
who told her husband the sideboard was hers, not his. Thomas, I _hate_
to look like the rich one, when all that makes life worth living for, or
fit to be lived, was and is given me by you."

"No, no, no, my darling! don't say that; you terrify me. I was but the
postman that brought you the good news."

"Well! and what else with me and the ponies and the money and all that?
Did I make the ponies? Or did I even earn the money that bought them? It
is only the money my father and brother have done with. Don't make me
look as if I did not behave like a lady to my own husband, Thomas."

"Well, my beautiful, I'll make up for all my wrongs by ordering you
about as if I were the Marquis of Saluzzo, and you the patient Grisel."

"I wish you would. You don't order me about half enough."

"I'll try to do better. You shall see."

Nestley was a lovely place, and the house was old enough to be quite
respectable--one of those houses with a history and a growth, which are
getting rarer every day as the ugly temples of mammon usurp their
places. It was dusky, cool, and somber--a little shabby, indeed, which
fell in harmoniously with its peculiar charm, and indeed added to it. A
lawn, not immaculate of the sweet fault of daisies, sank slowly to a
babbling little tributary of the Lythe, and beyond were fern-covered
slopes, and heather, and furze, and pine-woods. The rector was a
sensible Englishman, who objected to have things done after the taste of
his gardener instead of his own. He loved grass like a village poet, and
would have no flower-beds cut in his lawn. Neither would he have any
flowers planted in the summer to be taken up again before the winter. He
would have no cockney gardening about his place, he said. Perhaps that
was partly why he never employed any but his old cottagers about the
grounds; and the result was that for half the show he had twice the
loveliness. His ambition was to have every possible English garden
flower.

As soon as his visitors arrived, he and his curate went away together,
and Mrs. Wingfold was shown into the drawing-room, where was Mrs. Bevis
with her knitting. A greater contrast than that of the two ladies then
seated together in the long, low, dusky room, it were not easy to
imagine. I am greatly puzzled to think what conscious good in life Mrs.
Bevis enjoyed--just as I am puzzled to understand the eagerness with
which horses, not hungry, and evidently in full enjoyment of the sun and
air and easy exercise, will yet hurry to their stable the moment their
heads are turned in the direction of them. Is it that they have no hope
in the unknown, and then alone, in all the vicissitudes of their day,
know their destination? Would but some good kind widow, of the same type
with Mrs. Bevis, without children, tell me wherefore she is unwilling to
die! She has no special friend to whom she unbosoms herself--indeed, so
far as any one knows, she has never had any thing of which to unbosom
herself. She has no pet--dog or cat or monkey or macaw, and has never
been seen to hug a child. She never reads poetry--I doubt if she knows
more than the first line of _How doth_. She reads neither novels nor
history, and looks at the newspaper as if the type were fly-spots. Yet
there she sits smiling! Why! oh! why? Probably she does not know. Never
did question, not to say doubt, cause those soft, square-ended fingers
to move one atom less measuredly in the construction of Mrs. Bevis's
muffetee, the sole knittable thing her nature seemed capable of. Never
was sock seen on her needles; the turning of the heel was too much for
her. That she had her virtues, however, was plain from the fact that her
servants staid with her years and years; and I can, beside, from
observation set down a few of them. She never asked her husband what he
would have for dinner. When he was ready to go out with her, she was
always ready too. She never gave one true reason, and kept back a
truer--possibly there was not room for two thoughts at once in her
brain. She never screwed down a dependent; never kept small tradespeople
waiting for their money; never refused a reasonable request. In fact,
she was a stuffed bag of virtues; the bag was of no great size, but
neither were the virtues insignificant. There are dozens of sorts of
people I should feel a far stronger objection to living with; but what
puzzles me is how she contrives to live with herself, never questioning
the comfort of the arrangement, or desiring that it should one day come
to an end. Surely she must be deep, and know some secret!

For the other lady, Helen Lingard that was, she had since her marriage
altered considerably in the right direction. She used to be a little
dry, a little stiff, and a little stately. To the last I should be far
from objecting, were it not that her stateliness was of the mechanical
sort, belonging to the spine, and not to a soul uplift. Now it had left
her spine and settled in a soul that scorned the low and loved the
lowly. Her step was lighter, her voice more flexible, her laugh much
merrier and more frequent, for now her heart was gay. Her husband
praised God when he heard her laugh; the laugh suggested the praise, for
itself rang like praises. She would pull up her ponies in the middle of
the street, and at word or sign, the carriage would be full of children.
Whoever could might scramble in till it was full. At the least rudeness,
the offender would be ordered to the pavement, and would always obey,
generally weeping. She would drive two or three times up and down the
street with her load, then turn it out, and take another, and another,
until as many as she judged fit had had a taste of the pleasure. This
she had learned from seeing a costermonger fill his cart with children,
and push behind, while the donkey in front pulled them along the street,
to the praise and glory of God.

She was overbearing in one thing, and that was submission. Once, when I
was in her husband's study, she made a remark on something he had said
or written, I forget what, for which her conscience of love immediately
smote her. She threw herself on the floor, crept under the writing table
at which he sat, and clasped his knees.

"I beg your pardon, husband," she said sorrowfully.

"Helen," he cried, laughing rather oddly, "you will make a consummate
idiot of me before you have done."

"Forgive me," she pleaded.

"I can't forgive you. How can I forgive where there is positively
nothing to be forgiven?"

"I don't care what you say; I know better; you _must_ forgive me."

"Nonsense!"

"Forgive me."

"Do get up. Don't be silly."

"Forgive me. I will lie here till you do."

"But your remark was perfectly true."

"It makes no difference. I ought not to have said it like that. Forgive
me, or I will cry."

I will tell no more of it. Perhaps it is silly of me to tell any, but it
moved me strangely.

I have said enough to show there was a contrast between the two ladies.
As to what passed in the way of talk, that, from pure incapacity, I dare
not attempt to report. I did hear them talk once, and they laughed too,
but not one salient point could I lay hold of by which afterward to
recall their conversation. Do I dislike Mrs. Bevis? Not in the smallest
degree. I could read a book I loved in her presence. That would be
impossible to me in the presence of Mrs. Ramshorn.

Mrs. Wingfold had developed a great faculty for liking people. It was
quite a fresh shoot of her nature, for she had before been rather of a
repellent disposition. I wish there were more, and amongst them some of
the best of people, similarly changed. Surely the latter would soon be,
if once they had a glimpse of how much the coming of the kingdom is
retarded by defect of courtesy. The people I mean are slow to _like_,
and until they come to _like_, they _seem_ to dislike. I have known such
whose manner was fit to imply entire disapprobation of the very
existence of those upon whom they looked for the first time. They might
then have been saying to themselves, "_I_ would never have created such
people!" Had I not known them, I could not have imagined them lovers of
God or man, though they were of both. True courtesy, that is, courtesy
born of a true heart, is a most lovely, and absolutely indispensable
grace--one that nobody but a Christian can thoroughly develop. God grant
us a "coming-on disposition," as Shakespeare calls it. Who shall tell
whose angel stands nearer to the face of the Father? Should my brother
stand lower in the social scale than I, shall I not be the more tender,
and respectful, and self-refusing toward him, that God has placed him
there who may all the time be greater than I? A year before, Helen could
hardly endure doughy Mrs. Bevis, but now she had found something to like
in her, and there was confidence and faith between them. So there they
sat, the elder lady meandering on, and Helen, who had taken care to
bring some work with her, every now and then casting a bright glance in
her face, or saying two or three words with a smile, or asking some
simple question. Mrs. Bevis talked chiefly of the supposed affairs and
undoubted illness of Miss Meredith, concerning both of which rather
strange reports had reached her.

Meantime the gentlemen were walking through the park in earnest
conversation. They crossed the little brook and climbed to the heath on
the other side. There the rector stood, and turning to his companion,
said:

"It's rather late in the day for a fellow to wake up, ain't it,
Wingfold? You see I was brought up to hate fanaticism, and that may have
blinded me to something you have seen and got a hold of. I wish I could
just see what it is, but I never was much of a theologian. Indeed I
suspect I am rather stupid in some things. But I would fain try to look
my duty in the face. It's not for me to start up and teach the people,
because I ought to have been doing it all this time: I've got nothing to
teach them. God only knows whether I haven't been breaking every one of
the commandments I used to read to them every Sunday."

"But God does know, sir," said the curate, with even more than his usual
respect in his tone, "and that is well, for otherwise we might go on
breaking them forever."

The rector gave him a sudden look, full in the face, but said nothing,
seemed to fall a thinking, and for some time was silent.

"There's one thing clear," he resumed: "I've been taking pay, and doing
no work. I used to think I was at least doing no harm--that I was merely
using one of the privileges of my position: I not only paid a curate,
but all the repair the church ever got was from me. Now, however, for
the first time, I reflect that the money was not given me for that.
Doubtless it has been all the better for my congregation, but that is
only an instance of the good God brings out of evil, and the evil is
mine still. Then, again, there's all this property my wife brought me:
what have I done with that? The kingdom of heaven has not come a
hair's-breadth nearer for my being a parson of the Church of England;
neither are the people of England a shade the better that I am one of
her land-owners. It is surely time I did something, Wingfold, my boy!"

"I think it is, sir," answered the curate.

"Then, in God's name, what am I to do?" returned the rector, almost
testily.

"Nobody can answer that question but yourself, sir," replied Wingfold.

"It's no use my trying to preach. I could not write a sermon if I took a
month to it. If it were a paper on the management of a stable, now, I
think I could write that--respectably. I know what I am about there. I
could even write one on some of the diseases of horses and bullocks--but
that's not what the church pays me for. There's one thing though--it
comes over me strong that I should like to read prayers in the old place
again. I want to pray, and I don't know how; and it seems as if I could
shove in some of my own if I had them going through my head once again.
I tell you what: we won't make any fuss about it--what's in a name?--but
from this day you shall be incumbent, and I will be curate. You shall
preach--or what you please, and I shall read the prayers or not, just as
you please. Try what you can make of me, Wingfold. Don't ask me to do
what I can't, but help me to do what I can. Look here--here's what I've
been thinking--it came to me last night as I was walking about here
after coming from Glaston:--here, in this corner of the parish, we are a
long way from church. In the village there, there is no place of worship
except a little Methodist one. There isn't one of their--local
preachers, I believe they call them--that don't preach a deal better
than I could if I tried ever so much. It's vulgar enough sometimes, they
tell me, but then they preach, and mean it. Now I might mean it, but I
shouldn't preach;--for what is it to people at work all the week to have
a man read a sermon to them? You might as well drive a nail by pushing
it in with the palm of your hand. Those men use the hammer. Ill-bred,
conceited fellows, some of them, I happen to know, but they know their
business. Now why shouldn't I build a little place here on my own
ground, and get the bishop to consecrate it? I would read prayers for
you in the abbey church in the morning, and then you would not be too
tired to come and preach here in the evening. I would read the prayers
here too, if you liked."

"I think your scheme delightful," answered the curate, after a moment's
pause. "I would only venture to suggest one improvement--that you should
not have your chapel consecrated. You will find it ever so much more
useful. It will then be dedicated to the God of the whole earth, instead
of the God of the Church of England."

"Why! ain't they the same?" cried the rector, half aghast, as he stopped
and faced round on the curate.

"Yes," answered Wingfold; "and all will be well when the Church of
England really recognizes the fact. Meantime its idea of God is such as
will not at all fit the God of the whole earth. And that is why she is
in bondage. Except she burst the bonds of her own selfishness, she will
burst her heart and go to pieces, as her enemies would have her. Every
piece will be alive, though, I trust, more or less."

"I don't understand you," said the rector. "What has all that to do with
the consecration of my chapel?"

"If you don't consecrate it," answered Wingfold, "it will remain a
portion of the universe, a thoroughfare for all divine influences, open
as the heavens to every wind that blows. Consecration--"

Here the curate checked himself. He was going to say--"is another word
for congestion,"--but he bethought himself what a wicked thing it would
be, for the satisfaction of speaking his mind, to disturb that of his
rector, brooding over a good work.

"But," he concluded therefore, "there will be time enough to think about
that. The scheme is a delightful one. Apart from it, however,
altogether--if you would but read prayers in your own church, it would
wonderfully strengthen my hands. Only I am afraid I should shock you
sometimes."

"I will take my chance of that. If you do, I will tell you of it. And if
I do what you don't like, you must tell me of it. I trust neither of us
will find the other incapable of understanding his neighbor's position."

They walked to the spot which the rector had already in his mind as the
most suitable for the projected chapel. It was a bit of gently rising
ground, near one of the gates, whence they could see the whole of the
little village of Owlkirk. One of the nearest cottages was that of Mrs.
Puckridge. They saw the doctor ride in at the other end of the street,
stop there, fasten his horse to the paling, and go in.




CHAPTER XIV.

THE GARDEN AT OWLKIRK.


No sooner had Faber left the cottage that same morning, than the foolish
Mrs. Puckridge proceeded to pour out to the patient, still agitated both
with her dream and her waking vision, all the terrible danger she had
been in, and the marvelous way in which the doctor had brought her back
from the threshold of death. Every drop of the little blood in her body
seemed to rush to her face, then back to her heart, leaving behind it a
look of terror. She covered her face with the sheet, and lay so long
without moving that her nurse was alarmed. When she drew the sheet back,
she found her in a faint, and it was with great difficulty she brought
her out of it. But not one word could she get from her. She did not seem
even to hear what she said. Presently she grew restless, and soon her
flushed cheek and bright eye indicated an increase of fever. When Faber
saw her, he was much disappointed, perceived at once that something had
excited her, and strongly suspected that, for all her promises, Mrs.
Puckridge had betrayed the means by which he recovered her.

He said to himself that he had had no choice, but then neither had the
lady, and the thing might be hateful to her. She might be in love, and
then how she must abominate the business, and detest him! It was
horrible to think of her knowing it. But for knowing it, she would never
be a whit the worse, for he never had a day's illness in his life and
knew of no taint in his family.

When she saw him approach her bedside, a look reminding him of the
ripple of a sudden cold gust passing with the shadow of a cloud over
still water swept across her face. She closed her eyes, and turned a
little from him. What color she had, came and went painfully. Cursing in
his heart the faithlessness of Mrs. Puckridge, he assumed his coldest,
hardest professional manner, felt her pulse with the gentlest, yet most
peremptory inquiry, gave her attendant some authoritative directions,
and left her, saying he would call again in the afternoon.

During seven days he visited her twice a day. He had good cause to be
anxious, and her recovery was very slow. Once and again appeared
threatenings of the primary complaint, while from the tardiness with
which her veins refilled, he feared for her lungs. During all these
visits, hardly a word beyond the most necessary passed between them.
After that time they were reduced to one a day. Ever as the lady grew
stronger, she seemed to become colder, and her manner grew more distant.
After a fortnight, he again reduced them to one in two days--very
unwillingly, for by that time she had come to occupy nearly as much of
his thoughts as all the rest of his patients together. She made him feel
that his visits were less than welcome to her, except for the help they
brought her, allowed him no insight into her character and ways of
thinking, behaved to him indeed with such restraint, that he could
recall no expression of her face the memory of which drew him to dwell
upon it; yet her face and form possessed him with their mere perfection.
He had to set himself sometimes to get rid of what seemed all but her
very presence, for it threatened to unfit him for the right discharge of
his duties. He was haunted with the form to which he had given a renewal
of life, as a murderer is haunted with the form of the man he has
killed. In those marvelous intervals betwixt sleep and waking, when the
soul is like a _camera obscura_, into which throng shapes unbidden, hers
had displaced all others, and came constantly--now flashing with
feverous radiance, now pale and bloodless as death itself. But ever and
always her countenance wore a look of aversion. She seemed in these
visions, to regard him as a vile necromancer, who first cast her into
the sepulcher, and then brought her back by some hellish art. She had
fascinated him. But he would not allow that he was in love with her. A
man may be fascinated and hate. A man is not necessarily in love with
the woman whose form haunts him. So said Faber to himself; and I can not
yet tell whether he was in love with her or not. I do not know where the
individuality of love commences--when love begins to be love. He must
have been a good way toward that point, however, to have thus betaken
himself to denial. He was the more interested to prove himself free,
that he feared, almost believed, there was a lover concerned, and that
was the reason she hated him so severely for what he had done.

He had long come to the conclusion that circumstances had straitened
themselves around her. Experience had given him a keen eye, and he had
noted several things about her dress. For one thing, while he had
observed that her under-clothing was peculiarly dainty, he had once or
twice caught a glimpse of such an incongruity as he was compelled to set
down to poverty. Besides, what reason in which poverty bore no part,
could a lady have for being alone in a poor country lodging, without
even a maid? Indeed, might it not be the consciousness of the
peculiarity of her position, and no dislike to him, that made her treat
him with such impenetrable politeness? Might she not well dread being
misunderstood!

She would be wanting to pay him for his attendance--and what was he to
do? He must let her pay something, or she would consider herself still
more grievously wronged by him, but how was he to take the money from
her hand? It was very hard that ephemeral creatures of the earth, born
but to die, to gleam out upon the black curtain and vanish again, might
not, for the brief time the poor yet glorious bubble swelled and
throbbed, offer and accept from each other even a few sunbeams in which
to dance! Would not the inevitable rain beat them down at night, and
"mass them into the common clay"? How then could they hurt each
other--why should they fear it--when they were all wandering home to the
black, obliterative bosom of their grandmother Night? He well knew a
certain reply to such reflection, but so he talked with himself.

He would take his leave as if she were a duchess. But he would not until
she made him feel another visit would be an intrusion.

One day Mrs. Puckridge met him at the door, looking mysterious. She
pointed with her thumb over her shoulder to indicate that the lady was
in the garden, but at the same time nudged him with her elbow, confident
that the impartment she had to make would justify the liberty, and led
the way into the little parlor.

"Please, sir, and tell me," she said, turning and closing the door,
"what I be to do. She says she's got no money to pay neither me nor the
doctor, so she give me this, and wants me to sell it. I daren't show it!
They'd say I stole it! She declares that if I mention to a living soul
where I got it, she'll never speak to me again. In course she didn't
mean you, sir, seein' as doctors an' clergymen ain't nobody--leastways
nobody to speak on--and I'm sure I beg your pardon, sir, but my meanin'
is as they ain't them as ain't to be told things. I declare I'm most
terrified to set eyes on the thing!"

She handed the doctor a little morocco case. He opened it, and saw a
ring, which was plainly of value. It was old-fashioned--a round mass of
small diamonds with a good-sized central one.

"You are quite right," he said. "The ring is far too valuable for you to
dispose of. Bring it to my house at four o'clock, and I will get rid of
it for you."

Mrs. Puckridge was greatly relieved, and ended the interview by leading
the way to the back-door. When she opened it, he saw his patient sitting
in the little arbor. She rose, and came to meet him.

"You see I am quite well now," she said, holding out her hand.

Her tone was guarded, but surely the ice was melting a little! Was she
taking courage at the near approach of her deliverance?

She stooped to pick a double daisy from the border. Prompt as he
generally was, he could say nothing: he knew what was coming next. She
spoke while still she stooped.

"When you come again," she said, "will you kindly let me know how much I
am in your debt?"

As she ended she rose and stood before him, but she looked no higher
than his shirt-studs. She was ashamed to speak of her indebtedness as an
amount that could be reckoned. The whiteness of her cheek grew warm,
which was all her complexion ever revealed of a blush. It showed plainer
in the deepened darkness of her eyes, and the tremulous increase of
light in them.

"I will," he replied, without the smallest response of confusion, for he
had recovered himself. "You will be careful!" he added. "Indeed you
must, or you will never be strong."

She answered only with a little sigh, as if weakness was such a
weariness! and looked away across the garden-hedge out into the
infinite--into more of it at least I think, than Faber recognized.

"And of all things," he went on, "wear shoes--every time you have to
step off a carpet--not mere foot-gloves like those."

"Is this a healthy place, Doctor Faber?" she asked, looking haughtier,
he thought, but plainly with a little trouble in her eyes.

"Decidedly," he answered. "And when you are able to walk on the heath
you will find the air invigorating. Only please mind what I say about
your shoes.--May I ask if you intend remaining here any time?"

"I have already remained so much longer than I intended, that I am
afraid to say. My plans are now uncertain."

"Excuse me--I know I presume--but in our profession we must venture a
little now and then--could you not have some friend with you until you
are perfectly strong again? After what you have come through, it may be
years before you are quite what you were. I don't want to frighten
you--only to make you careful."

"There is no one," she answered in a low voice, which trembled a little.

"No one--?" repeated Faber, as if waiting for the end of the sentence.
But his heart gave a great bound.

"No one to come to me. I am alone in the world. My mother died when I
was a child and my father two years ago. He was an officer. I was his
only child, and used to go about with him. I have no friends."

Her voice faltered more and more. When it ceased she seemed choking a
cry.

"Since then," she resumed, "I have been a governess. My last situation
was in Yorkshire, in a cold part of the county, and my health began to
fail me. I heard that Glaston was a warm place, and one where I should
be likely to get employment. But I was taken ill on my way there, and
forced to stop. A lady in the train told me this was such a sweet, quiet
little place, and so when we got to the station I came on here."

Again Faber could not speak. The thought of a lady like her traveling
about alone looking for work was frightful! "And they talk of a God in
the world!" he said to himself--and felt as if he never could forgive
Him.

"I have papers to show," she added quietly, as if bethinking herself
that he might be taking her for an impostor.

All the time she had never looked him in the face. She had fixed her
gaze on the far horizon, but a smile, half pitiful, half proud,
flickered about the wonderful curves of her upper lip.

"I am glad you have told me," he said. "I may be of service to you, if
you will permit me. I know a great many families about here."

"Oh, thank you!" she cried, and with an expression of dawning hope,
which made her seem more beautiful than ever, she raised her eyes and
looked him full in the face: it was the first time he had seen her eyes
lighted up, except with fever. Then she turned from him, and, apparently
lost in relief, walked toward the arbor a few steps distant. He followed
her, a little behind, for the path was narrow, his eyes fixed on her
exquisite cheek. It was but a moment, yet the very silence seemed to
become conscious. All at once she grew paler, shuddered, put her hand to
her head, and entering the arbor, sat down. Faber was alarmed. Her hand
was quite cold. She would have drawn it away, but he insisted on feeling
her pulse.

"You must come in at once," he said.

She rose, visibly trembling. He supported her into the house, made her
lie down, got a hot bottle for her feet, and covered her with shawls and
blankets.

"You are quite unfit for any exertion yet," he said, and seated himself
near her. "You must consent to be an invalid for a while. Do not be
anxious. There is no fear of your finding what you want by the time you
are able for it. I pledge myself. Keep your mind perfectly easy."

She answered him with a look that dazzled him. Her very eyelids seemed
radiant with thankfulness. The beauty that had fixed his regard was now
but a mask through which her soul was breaking, assimilating it. His
eyes sank before the look, and he felt himself catching his breath like
a drowning man. When he raised them again he saw tears streaming down
her face. He rose, and saying he would call again in the evening, left
the room.

During the rest of his round he did not find it easy to give due
attention to his other cases. His custom was to brood upon them as he
rode; but now that look and the tears that followed seemed to bewilder
him, taking from him all command of his thought.

Ere long the shadow that ever haunts the steps of the angel, Love, the
shadow whose name is Beneficence, began to reassume its earlier tyranny.
Oh, the bliss of knowing one's self the source of well-being, the stay
and protector, the comfort and life, to such a woman! of wrapping her
round in days of peace, instead of anxiety and pain and labor! But ever
the thought of her looking up to him as the source of her freedom, was
present through it all. What a glory to be the object of such looks as
he had never in his dearest dreams imagined! It made his head swim, even
in the very moment while his great Ruber, astonished at what his master
required of him that day, rose to some high thorny hedge, or stiff rail.
He was perfectly honest; the consequence he sought was only in his own
eyes--and in hers; there was nothing of vulgar patronage in the feeling;
not an atom of low purpose for self in it. The whole mental condition
was nothing worse than the blossom of the dream of his childhood--the
dream of being _the_ benefactor of his race, of being loved and
worshiped for his kindness. But the poison of the dream had grown more
active in its blossom. Since then the credit of goodness with himself
had gathered sway over his spirit; and stoical pride in goodness is a
far worse and lower thing than delight in the thanks of our fellows. He
was a mere slave to his own ideal, and that ideal was not brother to the
angel that beholds the face of the Father. Now he had taken a backward
step in time, but a forward step in his real history, for again another
than himself had a part in his dream. It would be long yet, however, ere
he learned so to love goodness as to forget its beauty. To him who _is_
good, goodness has ceased to be either object or abstraction; it is _in_
him--a thirst to give; a solemn, quiet passion to bless; a delight in
beholding well-being. Ah, how we dream and prate of love, until the holy
fire of the true divine love, the love that God kindles in a man toward
his fellows, burns the shadow of it out!

In the afternoon Mrs. Puckridge appeared with the ring. He took it, told
her to wait, and went out. In a few minutes he returned, and, to the
woman's astonishment, gave her fifty pounds in notes. He did not tell
her he had been to nobody but his own banker. The ring he laid carefully
aside, with no definite resolve concerning it, but the great hope of
somehow managing that it should return to her one day. The thought shot
across his heaven--what a lovely wedding present it would make! and the
meteor drew a long train of shining fancies after it.




CHAPTER XV.

THE PARLOR AT OWLKIRK.


When he called, as he had said, in the evening, she looked much better,
and there was even a touch of playfulness in her manner. He could not
but hope some crisis had been passed. The money she had received for the
ring had probably something to do with it. Perhaps she had not known how
valuable the ring was. Thereupon in his conscientiousness he began to
doubt whether he had given her its worth. In reality he had exceeded it
by a few pounds, as he discovered upon inquiry afterward in London.
Anyhow it did not much matter, he said to himself: he was sure to find
some way of restoring it to her.

Suddenly she looked up, and said hurriedly:

"I can never repay you, Dr. Faber. No one can do the impossible."

"You can repay me," returned Faber.

"How?" she said, looking startled.

"By never again thinking of obligation to me."

"You must not ask that of me," she rejoined. "It would not be right."

The tinge of a rose not absolutely white floated over her face and
forehead as she spoke.

"Then I shall be content," he replied, "if you will say nothing about it
until you are well settled. After that I promise to send you a bill as
long as a snipe's."

She smiled, looked up brightly, and said,

"You promise?"

"I do."

"If you don't keep your promise, I shall have to take severe measures.
Don't fancy me without money. I _could_ pay you now--at least I think
so."

It was a great good sign of her that she could talk about money plainly
as she did. It wants a thoroughbred soul to talk _just_ right about
money. Most people treat money like a bosom-sin: they follow it
earnestly, but do not talk about it at all in society.

"I only pay six shillings a week for my lodgings!" she added, with a
merry laugh.

What had become of her constraint and stateliness? Courtesy itself
seemed gone, and simple trust in its place! Was she years younger than
he had thought her? She was hemming something, which demanded her eyes,
but every now and then she cast up a glance, and they were black suns
unclouding over a white sea. Every look made a vintage in the doctor's
heart. There _could_ be no man in the case! Only again, would fifty
pounds, with the loss of a family ring, serve to account for such a
change? Might she not have heard from somebody since he saw her
yesterday? In her presence he dared not follow the thought.

Some books were lying on the table which could not well be Mrs.
Puckridge's. He took up one: it was _In Memoriam_.

"Do you like Tennyson?" she asked.

"That is a hard question to answer straight off," he replied.--He had
once liked Tennyson, else he would not have answered so.--"Had you asked
me if I liked _In Memoriam_" he went on, "I could more easily have
answered you."

"Then, don't you like _In Memoriam_?"

"No; it is weak and exaggerated."

"Ah! you don't understand it. I didn't until after my father died. Then
I began to know what it meant, and now think it the most beautiful poem
I ever read."

"You are fond of poetry, then?"

"I don't read much; but I think there is more in some poetry than in all
the prose in the world."

"That is a good deal to say."

"A good deal too much, when I think that I haven't read, I suppose,
twenty books in my life--that is, books worth calling books: I don't
mean novels and things of that kind. Yet I can not believe twenty years
of good reading would make me change my mind about _In Memoriam_.--You
don't like poetry?"

"I can't say I do--much. I like Pope and Crabbe--and--let me see--well,
I used to like Thomson. I like the men that give you things just as they
are. I do not like the poets that mix themselves up with what they see,
and then rave about Nature. I confess myself a lover of the truth beyond
all things."

"But are you sure," she returned, looking him gently but straight in
the eyes, "that, in your anxiety not to make more of things than they
are, you do not make less of them than they are?"

"There is no fear of that," returned Faber sadly, with an unconscious
shake of the head. "So long as there is youth and imagination on that
side to paint them,--"

"Excuse me: are you not begging the question? Do they paint, or do they
see what they say? Some profess to believe that the child sees more
truly than the grown man--that the latter is the one who paints,--paints
out, that is, with a coarse brush."

"You mean Wordsworth."

"Not him only."

"True; no end of poets besides. They all say it now-a-days."

"But surely, Mr. Faber, if there be a God,--"

"Ah!" interrupted the doctor, "there, _you_ beg the question. Suppose
there should be no God, what then?"

"Then, I grant you, there could be no poetry. Somebody says poetry is
the speech of hope; and certainly if there were no God, there could be
no hope."

Faber was struck with what she said, not from any feeling that there was
truth in it, but from its indication of a not illogical mind. He was on
the point of replying that certain kinds of poetry, and _In Memoriam_ in
particular, seemed to him more like the speech of a despair that had not
the courage to confess itself and die; but he saw she had not a
suspicion he spoke as he did for any thing but argument, and feared to
fray his bird by scattering his crumbs too roughly. He honestly believed
deliverance from the superstition into which he granted a fine nature
was readier to fall than a common one, the greatest gift one human being
could offer to another; but at the same time he could not bear to think
of her recoil from such utterance of his unfaith as he had now almost
got into the habit of making. He bethought himself, too, that he had
already misrepresented himself, in giving her the impression that he was
incapable of enjoying poetry of the more imaginative sort. He had indeed
in his youth been passionately fond of such verse. Then came a time in
which he turned from it with a sick dismay. Feelings and memories of
agony, which a word, a line, would rouse in him afresh, had brought him
to avoid it with an aversion seemingly deep-rooted as an instinct, and
mounting even to loathing; and when at length he cast from him the
semi-beliefs of his education, he persuaded himself that he disliked it
for its falsehood. He read his philosophy by the troubled light of wrong
and suffering, and that is not the light of the morning, but of a
burning house. Of all poems, naturally enough, he then disliked _In
Memoriam_ the most; and now it made him almost angry that Juliet
Meredith should like so much what he so much disliked. Not that he would
have a lady indifferent to poetry. That would argue a lack of poetry in
herself, and such a lady would be like a scentless rose. You could not
expect, who indeed could wish a lady to be scientific in her ways of
regarding things? Was she not the live concentration, the perfect
outcome, of the vast poetic show of Nature? In shape, in motion of body
and brain, in tone and look, in color and hair, in faithfulness to old
dolls and carelessness of hearts, was she not the sublimation, the
essence of sunsets, and fading roses, and butterflies, and snows, and
running waters, and changing clouds, and cold, shadowy moonlight? He
argued thus more now in sorrow than in anger; for what was the woman but
a bubble on the sand of the infinite soulless sea--a bubble of a hundred
lovely hues, that must shine because it could not help it, and for the
same reason break? She was not to blame. Let her shine and glow, and
sparkle, and vanish. For him, he cared for nothing but science--nothing
that did not promise one day to yield up its kernel to the seeker. To
him science stood for truth, and for truth in the inward parts stood
obedience to the laws of Nature. If he was one of a poor race, he would
rise above his fellows by being good to them in their misery; while for
himself he would confess to no misery. Let the laws of Nature
work--eyeless and heartless as the whirlwind; he would live his life, be
himself, be Nature, and depart without a murmur. No scratch on the face
of time, insignificant even as the pressure of a fern-leaf upon coal,
should tell that he had ever thought his fate hard. He would do his
endeavor and die and return to nothing--not then more dumb of complaint
than now. Such had been for years his stern philosophy, and why should
it now trouble him that a woman thought differently? Did the sound of
faith from such lips, the look of hope in such eyes, stir any thing out
of sight in his heart? Was it for a moment as if the corner of a veil
were lifted, the lower edge of a mist, and he saw something fair beyond?
Came there a little glow and flutter out of the old time? "All forget,"
he said to himself. "I too have forgotten. Why should not Nature forget?
Why should I be fooled any more? Is it not enough?"

Yet as he sat gazing, in the broad light of day, through the cottage
window, across whose panes waved the little red bells of the common
fuchsia, something that had nothing to do with science and yet _was_,
seemed to linger and hover over the little garden--something from the
very depths of loveliest folly. Was it the refrain of an old song? or
the smell of withered rose leaves? or was there indeed a kind of light
such as never was on sea or shore?

Whatever it was, it was out of the midst of it the voice of the lady
seemed to come--a clear musical voice in common speech, but now veiled
and trembling, as if it brooded hearkening over the words it uttered:

  "I wrong the grave with fears untrue:
  Shall love be blamed for want of faith?
  There must be wisdom with great Death:
  The dead shall look me through and through.

  "Be near us when we climb or fall:
  Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours
  With larger other eyes than ours,
    To make allowance for us all."

She ceased, and the silence was like that which follows sweet music.

"Ah! you think of your father!" he hazarded, and hoped indeed it was her
father of whom she was thinking.

She made no answer. He turned toward her in anxiety. She was struggling
with emotion. The next instant the tears gushed into her eyes, while a
smile seemed to struggle from her lips, and spread a little way over her
face. It was inexpressibly touching.

"He was my friend," she said. "I shall never have such love again."

"All is not lost when much is lost," said the doctor, with sad comfort.
"There are spring days in winter."

"And _you_ don't like poetry!" she said, a sweet playful scorn shining
through her tears.

"I spoke but a sober truth," he returned; "--so sober that it seems but
the sadder for its truth. The struggle of life is to make the best of
things that might be worse."

She looked at him pitifully. For a moment her lips parted, then a
strange look as of sudden bodily pain crossed her face, her lips closed,
and her mouth looked as if it were locked. She shut the book which lay
upon her knee, and resumed her needlework. A shadow settled upon her
face.

"What a pity such a woman should be wasted in believing lies!" thought
the doctor. "How much better it would be if she would look things in the
face, and resolve to live as she can, doing her best and enduring her
worst, and waiting for the end! And yet, seeing color is not the thing
itself, and only in the brain whose eye looks upon it, why should I
think it better? why should she not shine in the color of her fancy? why
should she grow gray because the color is only in herself? We are but
bubbles flying from the round of Nature's mill-wheel. Our joys and
griefs are the colors that play upon the bubbles. Their throbs and
ripples and changes are our music and poetry, and their bursting is our
endless repose. Let us waver and float and shine in the sun; let us bear
pitifully and be kind; for the night cometh, and there an end."

But in the sad silence, he and the lady were perhaps drifting further
and further apart!

"I did not mean," he said, plunging into what came first, "that I could
not enjoy verse of the kind you prefer--as verse. I took the matter by
the more serious handle, because, evidently, you accepted the tone and
the scope of it. I have a weakness for honesty."

"There is something not right about you, though, Mr. Faber--if I could
find it out," said Miss Meredith. "You can not mean you enjoy any thing
you do not believe in?"

"Surely there are many things one can enjoy without believing in them?"

"On the contrary, it seems to me that enjoying a thing is only another
word for believing in it. If I thought the sweetest air on the violin
had no truth in it, I could not listen to it a moment longer."

"Of course the air has all the truth it pretends to--the truth, that is,
of the relations of sounds and of intervals--also, of course, the truth
of its relation as a whole to that creative something in the human mind
which gave birth to it."

"That is not all it pretends. It pretends that the something it gives
birth to in the human mind is also a true thing."

"Is there not then another way also, in which the violin may be said to
be true? Its tone throughout is of suffering: does it not mourn that
neither what gives rise to it, nor what it gives rise to, is any thing
but a lovely vapor--the phantom of an existence not to be lived, only to
be dreamed? Does it not mourn that a man, though necessarily in harmony
with the laws under which he lives, yet can not be sufficiently
conscious of that harmony to keep him from straining after his dream?"

"Ah!" said Miss Meredith, "then there is strife in the kingdom, and it
can not stand!"

"There is strife in the kingdom, and it can not stand," said the doctor,
with mingled assent and assertion. "Hence it is forever falling."

"But it is forever renewed," she objected.

"With what renewal?" rejoined Faber. "What return is there from the jaws
of death? The individual is gone. A new consciousness is not a renewal
of consciousness."

She looked at him keenly.

"It is hard, is it not?" she said.

"I will not deny that in certain moods it looks so," he answered.

She did not perceive his drift, and was feeling after it.

"Surely," she said, "the thing that ought to be, is the thing that must
be."

"How can we tell that?" he returned. "What do we see like it in nature?
Whatever lives and thrives--animal or vegetable--or human--it is all
one--every thing that lives and thrives, is forever living and thriving
on the loss, the defeat, the death of another. There is no unity save
absolutely by means of destruction. Destruction is indeed the very
center and framework of the sole existing unity. I will not, therefore,
as some do, call Nature cruel: what right have I to complain? Nature can
not help it. She is no more to blame for bringing me forth, than I am to
blame for being brought forth. Ought is merely the reflex of like. We
call ourselves the highest in Nature--and probably we are, being the
apparent result of the whole--whence, naturally, having risen, we seek
to rise, we feel after something we fancy higher. For as to the system
in which we live, we are so ignorant that we can but blunderingly feel
our way in it; and if we knew all its laws, we could neither order nor
control, save by a poor subservience. We are the slaves of our
circumstance, therefore betake ourselves to dreams of what _ought to
be_."

Miss Meredith was silent for a time.

"I can not see how to answer you," she said at length. "But you do not
disturb my hope of seeing my father again. We have a sure word of
prophecy."

Faber suppressed the smile of courteous contempt that was ready to break
forth, and she went on:

"It would ill become me to doubt to-day, as you will grant when I tell
you a wonderful fact. This morning I had not money enough to buy myself
the pair of strong shoes you told me I must wear. I had nothing left but
a few trinkets of my mother's--one of them a ring I thought worth about
ten pounds. I gave it to my landlady to sell for me, hoping she would
get five for it. She brought me fifty, and I am rich!"

Her last words trembled with triumph. He had himself been building her
up in her foolish faith! But he took consolation in thinking how easily
with a word he could any moment destroy that buttress of her phantom
house. It was he, the unbeliever, and no God in or out of her Bible,
that had helped her! It did not occur to him that she might after all
see in him only a reed blown of a divine wind.

"I am glad to hear of your good fortune," he answered. "I can not say I
see how it bears on the argument. You had in your possession more than
you knew."

"Does the length of its roots alter the kind of the plant?" she asked.
"Do we not know in all nature and history that God likes to see things
grow? That must be the best way. It may be the only right way. If that
ring was given to my mother against the time when the last child of her
race should find herself otherwise helpless, would the fact that the
provision was made so early turn the result into a mere chance meeting
of necessity and subsidy? Am I bound to call every good thing I receive
a chance, except an angel come down visibly out of the blue sky and give
it to me? That would be to believe in a God who could not work His will
by His own laws. Here I am, free and hopeful--all I needed. Every thing
was dark and troubled yesterday; the sun is up to-day."

"There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads
on to fortune," said the doctor.

"I begin to fear you mean what you say, Mr. Faber. I hoped it was only
for argument's sake," returned Miss Meredith.

She did not raise her eyes from her work this time. Faber saw that she
was distressed if not hurt, and that her soul had closed its lips to
him. He sprang to his feet, and stood bending before her.

"Miss Meredith," he said, "forgive me. I have offended you."

"You have not offended me," she said quietly.

"Hurt you then, which is worse."

"How should I have got through," she said, as if to herself, and dropped
her hands with her work on her knees, "if I had not believed there was
One caring for me all the time, even when I was most alone!"

"Do you never lose that faith?" asked the doctor.

"Yes; many and many a time. But it always comes back."

"Comes and goes with your health."

"No--is strongest sometimes when I am furthest from well."

"When you are most feverish," said the doctor. "What a fool I am to go
on contradicting her!" he added to himself.

"I think I know you better than you imagine, Mr. Faber," said Miss
Meredith, after just a moment's pause. "You are one of those men who
like to represent themselves worse than they are. I at least am bound to
think better of you than you would have me. One who lives as you do for
other people, can not be so far from the truth as your words."

Faber honestly repudiated the praise, for he felt it more than he
deserved. He did try to do well by his neighbor, but was aware of no
such devotion as it implied. Of late he had found his work bore him not
a little--especially when riding away from Owlkirk. The praise,
notwithstanding, sounded sweet from her lips, was sweeter still from her
eyes, and from the warmer white of her cheek, which had begun to resume
its soft roundness.

"Ah!" thought the doctor, as he rode slowly home, "were it not for
sickness, age, and death, this world of ours would be no bad place to
live in. Surely mine is the most needful and the noblest of
callings!--to fight for youth, and health, and love; against age, and
sickness, and decay! to fight death to the last, even knowing he must
have the best of it in the end! to set law against law, and do what
poor thing may be done to reconcile the inexorable with the desirable!
Who knows--if law be blind, and I am a man that can see--for at the
last, and only at the last do eyes come in the head of Nature--who knows
but I may find out amongst the blind laws to which I am the eyes, that
blind law which lies nearest the root of life!--Ah, what a dreamer I
should have been, had I lived in the time when great dreams were
possible! Beyond a doubt I should have sat brooding over the elixir of
life, cooking and mixing, heating and cooling, watching for the flash in
the goblet. We know so much now, that the range of hope is sadly
limited! A thousand dark ways of what seemed blissful possibility are
now closed to us, because there the light now shines, and shows naught
but despair. Yet why should the thing be absurd? Can any one tell _why_
this organism we call man should not go on working forever? Why should
it not, since its law is change and renewal, go on changing and renewing
forever? Why should it get tired? Why should its law work more feeble,
its relations hold less firmly, after a hundred years, than after ten?
Why should it grow and grow, then sink and sink? No one knows a reason.
Then why should it be absurd to seek what shall encounter the unknown
cause, and encountering reveal it? Might science be brought to the pitch
that such a woman should live to all the ages, how many common lives
might not well be spared to such an end! How many noble ones would not
willingly cease for such a consummation--dying that life should be lord,
and death no longer king!"

Plainly Faber's materialism sprang from no defect in the region of the
imagination; but I find myself unable to determine how much honesty, and
how much pride and the desire to be satisfied with himself, had
relatively to do with it. I would not be understood to imply that he had
an unusual amount of pride; and I am sure he was less easily satisfied
with himself than most are. Most people will make excuses for themselves
which they would neither make nor accept for their neighbor; their own
failures and follies trouble them little: Faber was of another sort. As
ready as any other man to discover what could be said on his side, he
was not so ready to adopt it. He required a good deal of himself. But
then he unconsciously compared himself with his acquaintances, and made
what he knew of them the gauge, if not the measure, of what he required
of himself.

It were unintelligible how a man should prefer being the slave of blind
helpless Law to being the child of living Wisdom, should believe in the
absolute Nothing rather than in the perfect Will, were it not that he
does not, can not see the Wisdom or the Will, except he draw nigh
thereto.

I shall be answered:

"We do not prefer. We mourn the change which yet we can not resist. We
would gladly have the God of our former faith, were it possible any
longer to believe in Him."

I answer again:

"Are you sure of what you say? Do you in reality mourn over your lost
faith? For my part, I would rather disbelieve with you, than have what
you have lost. For I would rather have no God than the God whom you
suppose me to believe in, and whom therefore I take to be the God in
whom you imagine you believed in the days of your ignorance. That those
were days of ignorance, I do not doubt; but are these the days of your
knowledge? The time will come when you will see deeper into your own
hearts than now, and will be humbled, like not a few other men, by what
you behold."




CHAPTER XVI.

THE BUTCHER'S SHOP.


About four years previous to the time of which I am now writing, and
while yet Mr. Drake was in high repute among the people of Cowlane
chapel, he went to London to visit an old friend, a woman of great
practical benevolence, exercised chiefly toward orphans. Just then her
thoughts and feelings were largely occupied with a lovely little girl,
the chain of whose history had been severed at the last link, and lost
utterly.

A poor woman in Southwark had of her own motion, partly from love to
children and compassion for both them and their mothers, partly to earn
her own bread with pleasure, established a sort of _crèche_ in her two
rooms, where mothers who had work from home could bring their children
in the morning, and leave them till night. The child had been committed
to her charge day after day for some weeks. One morning, when she
brought her, the mother seemed out of health, and did not appear at
night to take her home. The next day the woman heard she was in the
small-pox-hospital. For a week or so, the money to pay for the child
came almost regularly, in postage-stamps, then ceased altogether, and
the woman heard nothing either from or of the mother. After a fortnight
she contrived to go to the hospital to inquire after her. No one
corresponding to her description was in the place. The name was a common
one, and several patients bearing it had lately died and been buried,
while others had recovered and were gone. Her inquiries in the
neighborhood had no better success: no one knew her, and she did not
even discover where she had lived. She could not bear the thought of
taking the child to the work-house, and kept her for six or eight weeks,
but she had a sickly son, a grown lad, to support, and in dread lest she
should be compelled to give her up to the parish, had applied for
counsel to the lady I have mentioned. When Mr. Drake arrived, she had
for some time been searching about in vain to find a nest for her.

Since his boys had been taken from him, and the unprized girl left
behind had grown so precious, Mr. Drake had learned to love children as
the little ones of God. He had no doubt, like many people, a dread of
children with unknown antecedents: who could tell what root of
bitterness, beyond the common inheritance, might spring up in them? But
all that was known of this one's mother was unusually favorable; and
when his friend took him to see the child, his heart yearned after her.
He took her home to Dorothy, and she had grown up such as we have seen
her, a wild, roguish, sweet, forgetful, but not disobedient child--very
dear to both the Drakes, who called her their duckling.

As we have seen, however, Mr. Drake had in his adversity grown fearful
and faint-hearted, and had begun to doubt whether he had a right to keep
her. And of course he had not, if it was to be at the expense of his
tradespeople. But he was of an impetuous nature, and would not give even
God time to do the thing that needed time to be done well. He saw a
crisis was at hand. Perhaps, however, God saw a spiritual, where he saw
a temporal crisis.

Dorothy had a small sum, saved by her mother, so invested as to bring
her about twenty pounds a year, and of the last payment she had two
pounds in hand. Her father had nothing, and quarter-day was two months
off. This was the common knowledge of their affairs at which they
arrived as they sat at breakfast on the Monday morning, after the
saddest Sunday either of them had ever spent. They had just risen from
the table, and the old woman was removing the cloth, when a knock came
to the lane-door, and she went to open it, leaving the room-door ajar,
whereby the minister caught a glimpse of a blue apron, and feeling
himself turning sick, sat down again. Lisbeth re-entered with a rather
greasy-looking note, which was of course from the butcher, and Mr.
Drake's hand trembled as he opened it. Mr. Jones wrote that he would not
have troubled him, had he not asked for his bill; but, if it was quite
convenient, he would be glad to have the amount by the end of the week,
as he had a heavy payment to make the following Monday. Mr. Drake handed
the note to his daughter, rose hastily, and left the room. Dorothy threw
it down half-read, and followed him. He was opening the door, his hat in
his hand.

"Where are you going in such a hurry, father dear?" she said. "Wait a
moment and I'll go with you."

"My child, there is not a moment to lose!" he replied excitedly.

"I did not read all the letter," she returned; "but I think he does not
want the money till the end of the week."

"And what better shall we be then?" he rejoined, almost angrily. "The
man looks to me, and where will he find himself on Monday? Let us be as
honest at least as we can."

"But we may be able to borrow it--or--who knows what might happen?"

"There it is, my dear! Who knows what? We can be sure of nothing in this
world."

"And what in the next, father?"

The minister was silent. If God was anywhere, he was here as much as
there! That was not the matter in hand, however. He owed the money, and
was bound to let the man know that he could not pay it by the end of the
week. Without another word to Dorothy, he walked from the house, and,
like a man afraid of cowardice, went straight at the object of his
dismay. He was out of the lane and well into Pine street before he
thought to put on his hat.

From afar he saw the butcher, standing in front of his shop--a tall,
thin man in blue. His steel glittered by his side, and a red nightcap
hung its tassel among the curls of his gray hair. He was discussing,
over a small joint of mutton, some point of economic interest with a
country customer in a check-shawl. To the minister's annoyance the woman
was one of his late congregation, and he would gladly have passed the
shop, had he had the courage. When he came near, the butcher turned from
the woman, and said, taking his nightcap by the tassel in rudimentary
obeisance.

"At your service, sir."

His courtesy added to Mr. Drake's confusion: it was plain the man
imagined he had brought him his money! Times were indeed changed since
his wife used to drive out in her brougham to pay the bills! Was this
what a man had for working in the vineyard the better part of a
lifetime? The property he did not heed. That had been the portion of the
messengers of heaven from the first. But the shame!--what was he to do
with that? Who ever heard of St. Paul not being able to pay a butcher's
bill! No doubt St. Paul was a mighty general, and he but a poor
subaltern, but in the service there was no respect of persons. On the
other hand, who ever heard of St. Paul having any bills to pay!--or for
that matter, indeed, of his marrying a rich wife, and getting into
expensive habits through popularity! Who ever heard of his being
dependent on a congregation! He accepted help sometimes, but had always
his goats'-hair and his tent-making to fall back upon!--Only, after all,
was the Lord never a hard master? Had he not let it come to this?

Much more of the sort went through his mind in a flash. The country
woman had again drawn the attention of the butcher with a parting word.

"You don't want a chicken to-day--do you, Mr. Drake?" she said, as she
turned to go.

"No, thank you, Mrs. Thomson. How is your husband?"

"Better, I thank you sir. Good morning, sir."

"Mr. Jones," said the minister--and as he spoke, he stepped inside the
shop, removed his hat, and wiped his forehead, "I come to you with
shame. I have not money enough to pay your bill. Indeed I can not even
pay a portion of it till next quarter-day."

"Don't mention it, Mr. Drake, sir."

"But your bill on Monday, Mr. Jones!"

"Oh! never mind that. I shall do very well, I dare say. I have a many as
owes me a good deal more than you do, sir, and I'm much obliged to you
for letting of me know at once. You see, sir, if you hadn't--"

"Yes, I know: I asked for it! I am the sorrier I can't pay it after all.
It is quite disgraceful, but I simply can't help it."

"Disgraceful, sir!" exclaimed Mr. Jones, almost as if hurt: "I wish they
thought as you do as has ten times the reason, sir!"

"But I have a request to make," the pastor went on, heedless of the
butcher's remark, and pulling out a large and handsome gold watch:
"Would you oblige me by taking this watch in security until I do pay
you? It is worth a great deal more than your bill. It would add much to
the obligation, if you would put it out of sight somewhere, and say
nothing about it. If I should die before paying your bill, you will be
at liberty to sell it; and what is over, after deducting interest, you
will kindly hand to my daughter."

Mr. Jones stared with open mouth. He thought the minister had lost his
senses.

"What do you make of me, sir?" he said at last. "You go for to trust me
with a watch like that, and fancy I wouldn't trust you with a little
bill that ain't been owing three months yet! You make me that I don't
know myself, sir! Never you mention the bill to me again, sir. I'll ask
for it, all in good time. Can I serve you with any thing to-day, sir?"

"No, I thank you. I must at least avoid adding to my debt."

"I hope what you do have, you'll have of me, sir. I don't mind waiting a
goodish bit for my money, but what cuts me to the heart is to see any
one as owes me money a goin' over the way, as if 'e 'adn't 'a' found my
meat good enough to serve his turn, an' that was why he do it. That does
rile me!"

"Take my word for it, Mr. Jones--all the meat we have we shall have of
you. But we must be careful. You see I am not quite so--so--"

He stopped with a sickly smile.

"Look ye here, Mr. Drake!" broke in the butcher: "you parsons ain't
proper brought up. You ain't learned to take care of yourselves. Now us
tradespeople, we're learned from the first to look arter number one, and
not on no account to forget which _is_ number one. But you parsons,
now,--you'll excuse me, sir; I don't mean no offense; you ain't brought
up to 't, an' it ain't to be expected of you--but it's a great neglect
in your eddication, sir; an' the consekence is as how us as knows better
'as to take care on you as don't know no better. I can't say I think
much o' them 'senters: they don't stick by their own; but you're a
honest man, sir, if ever there was a honest man as was again' the
church, an' ask you for that money, I never will, acause I know when you
can pay, it's pay you will. Keep your mind easy, sir: _I_ shan't come to
grief for lack o' what you owe me! Only don't you go a starving of
yourself, Mr. Drake. I don't hold with that nohow. Have a bit o' meat
when you want it, an' don't think over it twice. There!"

The minister was just able to thank his new friend and no more. He held
out his hand to him, forgetful of the grease that had so often driven
him from the pavement to the street. The butcher gave it a squeeze that
nearly shot it out of his lubricated grasp, and they parted, both better
men for the interview.

When Mr. Drake reached home, he met his daughter coming out to find him.
He took her hand, led her into the house and up to his study, and closed
the door.

"Dorothy," he said, "it is sweet to be humbled. The Spirit can bring
water from the rock, and grace from a hard heart. I mean mine, not the
butcher's. He has behaved to me as I don't see how any but a Christian
could, and that although his principles are scarcely those of one who
had given up all for the truth. He is like the son in the parable who
said, I go not, but went; while I, much I fear me, am like the other who
said, I go, sir, but went not. Alas! I have always found it hard to be
grateful; there is something in it unpalatable to the old Adam; but from
the bottom of my heart I thank Mr. Jones, and I will pray God for him
ere I open a book. Dorothy, I begin to doubt our way of
church-membership. It _may_ make the good better; but if a bad one gets
in, it certainly makes him worse. I begin to think too, that every
minister ought to be independent of his flock--I do not mean by the pay
of the state, God forbid! but by having some trade or profession, if no
fortune. Still, if I had had the money to pay that bill, I should now be
where I am glad not to be--up on my castletop, instead of down at the
gate. He has made me poor that He might send me humility, and that I
find unspeakably precious. Perhaps He will send me the money next. But
may it not be intended also to make us live more simply--on vegetables
perhaps? Do you not remember how it fared with Daniel, Hananiah,
Mishael, and Azariah, when they refused the meat and the wine, and ate
pulse instead? At the end of ten days their countenances appeared fairer
and fatter in flesh than all the children which did eat the portion of
the king's meat. Pulse, you know, means peas and beans, and every thing
of that kind--which is now proved to be almost as full of nourishment as
meat itself, and to many constitutions more wholesome. Let us have a
dinner of beans. You can buy haricot beans at the grocer's--can you not?
If Ducky does not thrive on them, or they don't agree with you, my
Dorothy, you will have only to drop them. I am sure they will agree with
me. But let us try, and then the money I owe Mr. Jones, will not any
longer hang like a millstone about my neck."

"We will begin this very day," said Dorothy, delighted to see her father
restored to equanimity. "I will go and see after a dinner of herbs.--We
shall have love with it anyhow, father!" she added, kissing him.

That day the minister, who in his earlier days had been allowed by his
best friends to be a little particular about his food, and had been no
mean connoisseur in wines, found more pleasure at his table, from
lightness of heart, and the joy of a new independence, than he had had
for many a day. It added much also to his satisfaction with the
experiment, that, instead of sleeping, as his custom was, after dinner,
he was able to read without drowsiness even. Perhaps Dorothy's
experience was not quite so satisfactory, for she looked weary when they
sat down to tea.




CHAPTER XVII.

THE PARLOR AGAIN.


Faber had never made any effort to believe in a divine order of
things--indeed he had never made strenuous effort to believe in any
thing. It had never at all occurred to him that it might be a duty to
believe. He was a kindly and not a repellent man, but when he doubted
another, he doubted him; it never occurred to him that perhaps he ought
to believe in that man. There must be a lack of something, where a man's
sense of duty urges him mainly to denial. His existence is a positive
thing--his main utterance ought to be positive. I would not forget that
the nature of a denial may be such as to involve a strong positive.

To Faber it seemed the true and therefore right thing, to deny the
existence of any such being as men call God. I heartily admit that such
denial may argue a nobler condition than that of the man who will reason
for the existence of what he calls a Deity, but omits to order his way
after what he professes to believe His will. At the same time, his
conclusion that he was not bound to believe in any God, seemed to lift a
certain weight off the heart of the doctor--the weight, namely, that
gathers partly from the knowledge of having done wrong things, partly
from the consciousness of not _being_ altogether right. It would be very
unfair, however, to leave the impression that this was the origin of all
the relief the doctor derived from the conclusion. For thereby he got
rid, in a great measure at least, of the notion--horrible in proportion
to the degree in which it is actually present to the mind, although, I
suspect, it is not, in a true sense, credible to any mind--of a cruel,
careless, unjust Being at the head of affairs. That such a notion should
exist at all, is mainly the fault of the mass of so-called religious
people, for they seem to believe in, and certainly proclaim such a God.
In their excuse it may be urged they tell the tale as it was told to
them; but the fault lies in this, that, with the gospel in their hands,
they have yet lived in such disregard of its precepts, that they have
never discovered their representation of the God of Truth to be such,
that the more honest a man is, the less can he accept it. That the
honest man, however, should not thereupon set himself to see whether
there might not be a true God notwithstanding, whether such a God was
not conceivable consistently with things as they are, whether the
believers had not distorted the revelation they professed to follow;
especially that he should prefer to believe in some sort of _vitalic_
machine, equally void of beneficence and malevolence, existing because
it can not help it, and giving birth to all sorts of creatures, men and
women included, because it can not help it--must arise from a condition
of being, call it spiritual, moral, or mental--I can not be obliging
enough to add _cerebral,_ because so I should nullify my conclusion,
seeing there would be no substance left wherein it could be wrought
out--for which the man, I can not but think, will one day discover that
he was to blame--for which a living God sees that he is to blame, makes
all the excuse he can, and will give the needful punishment to the
uttermost lash.

There are some again, to whom the idea of a God perfect as they could
imagine Him in love and devotion and truth, seems, they say, too good to
be true: such have not yet perceived that no God any thing less than
absolutely glorious in loveliness would be worth believing in, or such
as the human soul could believe in. But Faber did not belong to this
class--still less to that portion of it whose inconsolable grief over
the lack of such a God may any day blossom into hope of finding Him. He
was in practice at one with that portion of it who, accepting things at
their worst, find alleviation for their sorrows in the strenuous effort
to make the best of them; but he sought to content himself with the
order of things which, blind and deaf and non-willing, he said had
existed for evermore, most likely--the thing was hardly worth
discussing; blind, for we can not see that it sees; deaf, for we can not
hear that it hears; and without will, for we see no strife, purpose, or
change in its going!

There was no God, then, and people would be more comfortable to know it.
In any case, as there was none, they ought to know it. As to his
certainty of there being none, Faber felt no desire to find one, had met
with no proof that there was one, and had reasons for supposing that
there was none. He had not searched very long or very wide, or with any
eager desire to discover Him, if indeed there should be a God that hid
Himself. His genial nature delighted in sympathy, and he sought it even
in that whose perfect operation, is the destruction of all sympathy. Who
does not know the pleasure of that moment of nascent communion, when
argument or expostulation has begun to tell, conviction begins to dawn,
and the first faint thrill of response is felt? But the joy may be
either of two very different kinds--delight in victory and the personal
success of persuasion, or the ecstasy of the shared vision of truth, in
which contact souls come nearer to each other than any closest
familiarity can effect. Such a nearness can be brought about by no
negation however genuine, or however evil may be the thing denied.

Sympathy, then, such as he desired, Faber was now bent on finding, or
bringing about in Juliet Meredith. He would fain get nearer to her.
Something pushed, something drew him toward the lovely phenomenon into
which had flowered invisible Nature's bud of shapeless protoplasm. He
would have her trust him, believe him, love him. If he succeeded, so
much the greater would be the value and the pleasure of the conquest,
that it had been gained in spite of all her prejudices of education and
conscience. And if in the process of finding truth a home in her bosom,
he should cause her pain even to agony, would not the tenderness born of
their lonely need for each other, be far more consoling than any mere
aspiration after a visionary comforter?

Juliet had been, so far as her father was concerned in her education,
religiously brought up. No doubt Captain Meredith was more fervid than
he was reasonable, but he was a true man, and in his regiment, on which
he brought all his influence to bear, had been regarded with respect,
even where not heartily loved. But her mother was one of those weakest
of women who can never forget the beauty they once possessed, or quite
believe they have lost it, remaining, even after the very traces of it
have vanished, as greedy as ever of admiration. Her maxims and
principles, if she could be said to have any of the latter, were not a
little opposed to her husband's; but she died when Juliet was only five
years old, and the child grew to be almost the companion of her father.
Hence it came that she heard much religious conversation, often
partaking not a little of the character of discussion and even of
dispute. She thus became familiar with the forms of a religious belief
as narrow as its partisans are numerous. Her heart did not remain
uninterested, but she was never in earnest sufficiently to discover what
a thing of beggarly elements the system was, and how incapable of
satisfying any childlike soul. She never questioned the truth of what
she heard, and became skilled in its idioms and arguments and forms of
thought. But the more familiar one becomes with any religious system,
while yet the conscience and will are unawakened and obedience has not
begun, the harder is it to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Such
familiarity is a soul-killing experience, and great will be the excuse
for some of those sons of religious parents who have gone further
toward hell than many born and bred thieves and sinners.

When Juliet came to understand clearly that her new friend did mean
thorough-going unbelief, the rejection of _all_ the doctrines she had
been taught by him whose memory she revered, she was altogether shocked,
and for a day and a night regarded him as a monster of wickedness. But
her horror was mainly the reflex of that with which her father would
have regarded him, and all that was needed to moderate horror to
disapproval, was familiarity with his doctrines in the light of his
agreeable presence and undeniable good qualities. Thoroughly acquainted
as she believed herself with "the plan of salvation," Jesus of Nazareth
was to her but the vague shadow of something that was more than a man,
yet no man at all. I had nearly said that what He came to reveal had
become to her yet more vague from her nebulous notion of Him who was its
revelation. Her religion was, as a matter of course, as dusky and
uncertain, as the object-center of it was obscure and unrealized. Since
her father's death and her comparative isolation, she had read and
thought a good deal; some of my readers may even think she had read and
thought to tolerable purposes judging from her answers to Faber in the
first serious conversation they had; but her religion had lain as before
in a state of dull quiescence, until her late experience, realizing to
her the idea of the special care of which she stood so much in need,
awoke in her a keen sense of delight, and if not a sense of gratitude as
well, yet a dull desire to be grateful.

The next day, as she sat pondering what had passed between them,
altogether unaware of her own weakness, she was suddenly seized with the
ambition--in its inward relations the same as his--of converting him to
her belief. The purpose justified an interest in him beyond what
gratitude obligated, and was in part the cause why she neither shrank
from his society, nor grew alarmed at the rapid growth of her intimacy.
But they only who love the truth simply and altogether, can really know
what they are about.

I do not care to follow the intellectual duel between them. Argument,
save that of a man with himself, when council is held between heart,
will, imagination, conscience, vision, and intellect, is of little avail
or worth. Nothing, however, could have suited Faber's desires better.
Under the shadow of such difficulties as the wise man ponders and the
fool flaunts, difficulties which have been difficulties from the dawn
of human thought, and will in new shapes keep returning so long as the
human understanding yearns to infold its origin, Faber brought up an
array of arguments utterly destructive of the wretched theories of forms
of religion which were all she had to bring into the field: so wretched
and false were they--feeblest she found them just where she had regarded
them as invincible--that in destroying them Faber did even a poor part
of the work of a soldier of God: Mephistopheles describes himself as

                   Ein Theil von jener Kraft,
  Die stets das Böse will, und stets das Gute schafft,
   .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .
   .     .     .     .  der Geist der stets verneint.

For the nature of Juliet's argument I must be content to refer any
curious reader to the false defenses made, and lies spoken for God, in
many a pulpit and many a volume, by the worshipers of letter and system,
who for their sakes "accept His person," and plead unrighteously for
Him. Before the common sense of Faber, they went down like toys, and
Juliet, without consciously yielding at first, soon came to perceive
that they were worse than worthless--weapons whose handles were sharper
than their blades. She had no others, nor metal of which to make any;
and what with the persuasive influence of the man, and the pleasure in
the mere exercise of her understanding, became more and more interested
as she saw the drift of his argument, and apprehended the weight of what
truth lay upon his side. For even the falsest argument is sustained in
virtue of some show of truth, or perhaps some crumb of reality belonging
to it. The absolute lie, if such be frameable by lips of men, can look
only the blackness of darkness it is. The lie that can hurt, hurts in
the strength of the second lie in which it is folded--a likeness to the
truth. It would have mattered little that she was driven from line after
line of her defense, had she not, while she seemed to herself to be its
champion, actually lost sight of that for which she thought she was
striving.

It added much to Faber's influence on Juliet, that a tone of pathos and
an element of poetry generally pervaded the forms of his denial. The
tone was the more penetrating that it veiled the pride behind it all,
the pride namely of an unhealthy conscious individuality, the pride of
_self_ as self, which makes a man the center of his own universe, and a
mockery to all the demons of the real universe. That man only who rises
above the small yet mighty predilection, who sets the self of his own
consciousness behind his back, and cherishes only the self of the
Father's thought, the angel that beholds the eternal face, that man only
is a free and noble being, he only breathes the air of the infinite.
Another may well deny the existence of any such Father, any such
infinite, for he knows nothing of the nature of either, and his
testimony for it would be as worthless as that is which he gives against
it.

The nature of Juliet Meredith was true and trusting--but in respect of
her mother she had been sown in weakness, and she was not yet raised in
strength. Because of his wife, Captain Meredith had more than once had
to exchange regiments. But from him Juliet had inherited a certain
strength of honest purpose, which had stood him in better stead than the
whole sum of his gifts and acquirements, which was by no means
despicable.

Late one lovely evening in the early summer, they sat together in the
dusky parlor of the cottage, with the window to the garden open. The
sweetest of western airs came in, with a faint scent chiefly of damp
earth, moss, and primroses, in which, to the pensive imagination, the
faded yellow of the sunset seemed to bear a part.

"I am sorry to say we must shut the window, Miss Meredith," said the
doctor, rising. "You must always be jealous of the night air. It will
never be friendly to you."

"What enemies we have all about us!" she returned with a slight shiver,
which Faber attributed to the enemy in question, and feared his care had
not amounted to precaution. "It is strange," she went on, "that all
things should conspire, or at least rise, against 'the roof and crown of
things,' as Tennyson calls us. Are they jealous of us?"

"Clearly, at all events, we are not at home amidst them--not genuinely
so," admitted the doctor.

"And yet you say we are sprung of them?" said Juliet.

"We have lifted ourselves above them," rejoined the doctor, "and must
conquer them next."

"And until we conquer them," suggested Juliet, "our lifting above them
is in vain?"

"For we return to them," assented Faber; and silence fell.--"Yes," he
resumed, "it is sad. The upper air is sweet, and the heart of man loves
the sun;--"

"Then," interrupted Juliet, "why would you have me willing to go down
to the darkness?"

"I would not have you willing. I would have you love the light as you
do. We can not but love the light, for it is good; and the sorrow that
we must leave it, and that so soon, only makes it dearer. The sense of
coming loss is, or ought to be, the strongest of all bonds between the
creatures of a day. The sweetest, saddest, most entrancing songs that
love can sing, must be but variations on this one theme.--'The morning
is clear; the dew mounts heavenward; the odor spreads; the sun looks
over the hill; the world breaks into laughter: let us love one another!
The sun grows hot, the shadow lies deep; let us sit in it, and remember;
the sea lies flashing in green, dulled with purple; the peacock spreads
his glories, a living garden of flowers; all is mute but the rush of the
stream: let us love one another! The soft evening draws nigh; the dew is
coming down again; the air is cool, dusky, and thin; it is sweeter than
the morning; other words of death gleam out of the deepening sky; the
birds close their wings and hide their heads, for death is near: let us
love one another! The night is come, and there is no morrow; it is dark;
the end is nigh; it grows cold; in the darkness and the cold we tremble,
we sink; a moment and we are no more; ah! ah, beloved! let us love, let
us cleave to one another, for we die!'"

But it seems to me, that the pitifulness with which we ought to regard
each other in the horror of being the offspring of a love we do not
love, in the danger of wandering ever, the children of light, in the
midst of darkness, immeasurably surpasses the pitifulness demanded by
the fancy that we are the creatures of but a day.

Moved in his soul by the sound of his own words, but himself the harp
upon which the fingers of a mightier Nature than he knew were playing a
prelude to a grander phantasy than he could comprehend, Faber caught the
hand of Juliet where it gleamed white in the gathering gloom. But she
withdrew it, saying in a tone which through the darkness seemed to him
to come from afar, tinged with mockery.

"You ought to have been a poet--not a doctor, Mr. Faber!"

The jar of her apparent coolness brought him back with a shock to the
commonplace. He almost shuddered. It was like a gust of icy wind
piercing a summer night.

"I trust the doctor can rule the poet," he said, recovering his
self-possession with an effort, and rising.

"The doctor ought at least to keep the poet from falsehood. Is false
poetry any better than false religion?" returned Juliet.

"I do not quite see--"

"Your day is not a true picture of life such as you would make it.--Let
me see! I will give you one.--Sit down.--Give me time.--'The morning is
dark; the mist hangs and will not rise; the sodden leaves sink under the
foot; overhead the boughs are bare; the cold creeps into bone and
marrow; let us love one another! The sun is buried in miles of vapor;
the birds sit mute on the damp twigs; the gathered drizzle slowly drips
from the eaves; the wood will not burn in the grate; there is a crust in
the larder, no wine in the cellar: let us love one another!'"

"Yes!" cried Faber, again seizing her hand, "let us but love, and I am
content!"

Again she withdrew it.

"Nay, but hear my song out," she said, turning her face towards the
window.--In the fading light he saw a wild look of pain, which vanished
in a strange, bitter smile as she resumed.--"'The ashes of life's
volcano are falling; they bepowder my hair; its fires have withered the
rose of my lips; my forehead is wrinkled, my cheeks are furrowed, my
brows are sullen; I am weary, and discontented, and unlovely: ah, let us
love one another! The wheels of time grind on; my heart is sick, and
cares not for thee; I care not for myself, and thou art no longer lovely
to me; I can no more recall wherefore I desired thee once; I long only
for the endless sleep; death alone hath charms: to say, Let us love one
another, were now a mockery too bitter to be felt. Even sadness is
withered. No more can it make me sorrowful to brood over the days that
are gone, or to remember the song that once would have made my heart a
fountain of tears. Ah, hah! the folly to think we could love to the end!
But I care not; the fancy served its turn; and there is a grave for thee
and me--apart or together I care not, so I cease. Thou needst not love
me any more; I care not for thy love. I hardly care for the blessed
darkness itself. Give me no sweet oblivious antidote, no precious poison
such as I once prayed for when I feared the loss of love, that it might
open to me the gate of forgetfulness, take me softly in unseen arms, and
sink with me into the during dark. No; I will, not calmly, but in utter
indifference, await the end. I do not love thee; but I can eat, and I
enjoy my wine, and my rubber of whist--'"

She broke into a dreadful laugh. It was all horribly unnatural! She
rose, and in the deepening twilight seemed to draw herself up far beyond
her height, then turned, and looked out on the shadowy last of the
sunset. Faber rose also. He felt her shudder, though she was not within
two arm's-lengths of him. He sprang to her side.

"Miss Meredith--Juliet--you have suffered! The world has been too hard
for you! Let me do all I can to make up for it! I too know what
suffering is, and my heart is bleeding for you!"

"What! are you not part of the world? Are you not her last-born--the
perfection of her heartlessness?--and will _you_ act the farce of
consolation? Is it the last stroke of the eternal mockery?"

"Juliet," he said, and once more took her hand, "I love you."

"As a man may!" she rejoined with scorn, and pulled her hand from his
grasp. "No! such love as you can give, is too poor even for me. Love you
I _will_ not. If you speak to me so again, you will drive me away. Talk
to me as you will of your void idol. Tell me of the darkness of his
dwelling, and the sanctuary it affords to poor, tormented,
specter-hunted humanity; but do not talk to me of love also, for where
your idol is, love can not be."

Faber made a gentle apology, and withdrew--abashed and hurt--vexed with
himself, and annoyed with his failure.

The moment he was gone, she cast herself on the sofa with a choked
scream, and sobbed, and ground her teeth, but shed no tear. Life had
long been poor, arid, vague; now there was not left even the luxury of
grief! Where all was loss, no loss was worth a tear.

"It were good for me that I had never been born!" she cried.

But the doctor came again and again, and looked devotion, though he
never spoke of love. He avoided also for a time any further pressing of
his opinions--talked of poetry, of science, of nature--all he said
tinged with the same sad glow. Then by degrees direct denial came up
again, and Juliet scarcely attempted opposition. Gradually she got quite
used to his doctrine, and as she got used to it, it seemed less
dreadful, and rather less sad. What wickedness could there be in denying
a God whom the very works attributed to him declared not to exist! Mr.
Faber was a man of science, and knew it. She could see for herself that
it must draw closer the bonds between human beings, to learn that there
was no such power to hurt them or aid them, or to claim lordship over
them, and enslave them to his will. For Juliet had never had a glimpse
of the idea, that in oneness with the love-creating Will, alone lies
freedom for the love created. When Faber perceived that his words had
begun and continued to influence her, he, on his part, grew more kindly
disposed toward her superstitions.

Let me here remark that, until we see God as He is, and are changed into
His likeness, all our beliefs must partake more or less of superstition;
but if there be a God, the greatest superstition of all will be found to
have consisted in denying him.

"Do not think me incapable," he said one day, after they had at length
slid back into their former freedom with each other, "of seeing much
that is lovely and gracious in the orthodox fancies of religion. Much
depends, of course, upon the nature of the person who holds them. No
belief could be beautiful in a mind that is unlovely. A sonnet of
Shakespeare can be no better than a burned cinder in such a mind as Mrs.
Ramshorn's. But there is Mr. Wingfold, the curate of the abbey-church! a
true, honest man, who will give even an infidel like me fair play:
nothing that finds acceptance with him can be other than noble, whether
it be true or not. I fear he expects me to come over to him one day. I
am sorry he will be disappointed, for he is a fellow quite free from the
flummery of his profession. For my part, I do not see why two friends
should not consent to respect each other's opinions, letting the one do
his best without a God to hinder him, and the other his best with his
belief in one to aid him. Such a pair might be the most emulous of
rivals in good works."

Juliet returned no satisfactory response to this tentative remark; but
it was from no objection any longer in her mind to such a relation in
the abstract. She had not yet at all consented with herself to abandon
the faith of her father, but she did not see, and indeed it were hard
for any one in her condition to see, why a man and a woman, the one
denying after Faber's fashion, the other believing after hers, should
not live together, and love and help each other. Of all valueless
things, a merely speculative theology is one of the most valueless. To
her, God had never been much more than a name--a name, it is true, that
always occurred to her in any vivid moment of her life; but the Being
whose was that name, was vague to her as a storm of sand--hardly so much
her father as was the first forgotten ancestor of her line. And now it
was sad for her chat at such a time of peculiar emotion, when the heart
is ready to turn of itself toward its unseen origin, feeling after the
fountain of its love, the very occasion of the tide Godward should be an
influence destructive of the same. Under the growing fascination of the
handsome, noble-minded doctor, she was fast losing what little shadow of
faith she had possessed. The theology she had attempted to defend was so
faulty, so unfair to God, that Faber's atheism had an advantage over it
as easy as it was great. His unbelief was less selfish than Juliet's
faith; consequently her faith sank, as her conscience rose meeting what
was true in Faber's utterances. How could it be otherwise when she
opposed lies uttered for the truth, to truths uttered for the lie? the
truth itself she had never been true enough to look in the face. As her
arguments, yea the very things she argued for, went down before him, her
faith, which, to be faith, should have been in the living source of all
true argument, found no object, was swept away like the uprooted weed it
was, and whelmed in returning chaos.

"If such is your God," he said, "I do Him a favor in denying His
existence, for His very being would be a disgrace to Himself. At times,
as I go my rounds, and think of the horrors of misery and suffering
before me, I feel as if I were out on a campaign against an Evil
supreme, the Author of them all. But when I reflect that He must then
actually create from very joy in the infliction and sight of agony, I am
ashamed of my foolish and cruel, though but momentary imagination,
and--'There can be no such being!' I say. "I but labor in a region of
inexorable law, blind as Justice herself; law that works for good in the
main, and whose carelessness of individual suffering it is for me, and
all who know in any way how, to supplement with the individual care of
man for his fellow-men, who, either from Nature's own necessity, or by
neglect or violation of her laws, find themselves in a sea of troubles."
For Nature herself, to the man who will work in harmony with her,
affords the means of alleviation, of restoration even--who knows if not
of something better still?--the means, that is, of encountering the
ills that result from the breach of her own laws; and the best the man
who would help his fellows can do, is to search after and find such
other laws, whose applied operation will restore the general conduction,
and render life after all an endurable, if not a desirable thing."

"But you can do nothing with death," said Juliet.

"Nothing--yet--alas!"

"Is death a law, or a breach of law, then?" she asked.

"That is a question I can not answer."

"In any case, were it not better to let the race die out, instead of
laboriously piecing and patching at a too old garment, and so leave room
for a new race to come up, which the fruit of experience, both sweet and
bitter, left behind in books, might enable to avoid like ruin?"

"Ages before they were able to read our books, they would have broken
the same laws, found the same evils, and be as far as we are now beyond
the help of foregone experiences: they would have the experience itself,
of whose essence it is, that it is still too late."

"Then would not the kindest thing be to poison the race--as men on the
prairies meet fire with fire--and so with death foil Death and have done
with dying?"

"It seems to me better to live on in the hope that someone may yet--in
some far-off age it may only be, but what a thing if it should
be!--discover the law of death, learn how to meet it, and, with its
fore-runners, disease and decay, banish it from the world. Would you
crush the dragonfly, the moth, or the bee, because its days are so few?
Rather would you not pitifully rescue them, that they might enjoy to
their natural end the wild intoxication of being?"

"Ah, but they are happy while they live!"

"So also are men--all men--for parts of their time. How many, do you
think, would thank me for the offered poison?"

Talk after talk of this kind, which the scope of my history forbids me
to follow, took place between them, until at length Juliet, generally
silenced, came to be silenced not unwillingly. All the time, their
common humanity, each perceiving that the other had suffered, was urging
to mutual consolation. And all the time, that mysterious force,
inscrutable as creation itself, which draws the individual man and woman
together, was mightily at work between them--a force which, terrible as
is the array of its attendant shadows, will at length appear to have
been one of the most powerful in the redemption of the world. But Juliet
did nothing, said nothing, to attract Faber. He would have cast himself
before her as a slave begging an owner, but for something in her
carriage which constantly prevented him. At one time he read it as an
unforgotten grief, at another as a cherished affection, and trembled at
the thought of the agonies that might be in store for him.

Weeks passed, and he had not made one inquiry after a situation for her.
It was not because he would gladly have, prolonged the present
arrangement of things, but that he found it almost impossible to bring
himself to talk about her. If she would but accept him, he thought--then
there would be no need! But he dared not urge her--mainly from fear of
failure, not at all from excess of modesty, seeing he soberly believed
such love and devotion as his, worth the acceptance of any woman--even
while-he believed also, that to be loved of a true woman was the one
only thing which could make up for the enormous swindle of life, in
which man must ever be a sorrow to himself, as ever lagging behind his
own child, his ideal. Even for this, the worm that must forever lie
gnawing in the heart of humanity, it would be consolation enough to
pluck together the roses of youth; they had it in their own power to die
while their odor was yet red. Why did she repel him? Doubtless, he
concluded over and over again, because, with her lofty ideal of love, a
love for this world only seemed to her a love not worth the stooping to
take. If he could but persuade her that the love offered in the agony of
the fire must be a nobler love than that whispered from a bed of roses,
then perhaps, dissolved in confluent sadness and sweetness, she would
hold out to him the chalice of her heart, and the one pearl of the world
would yet be his--a woman all his own--pure as a flower, sad as the
night, and deep as nature unfathomable.

He had a grand idea of woman. He had been built with a goddess-niche in
his soul, and thought how he would worship the woman that could fill it.
There was a time when she must, beyond question, be one whose radiant
mirror had never reflected form of man but his: now he would be content
if for him she would abjure and obliterate her past. To make the woman
who had loved forget utterly, was a greater victory, he said, than to
wake love in the heart of a girl, and would yield him a finer treasure,
a richer conquest. Only, pure as snow she must be--pure as the sun
himself! Paul Faber was absolutely tyrannous in his notions as to
feminine purity. Like the diamond shield of Prince Arthur, Knight of
Magnificence, must be the purity that would satisfy this lord of the
race who could live without a God! Was he then such a master of purity
himself? one so immaculate that in him such aspiration was no
presumption? Was what he knew himself to be, an idea to mate with his
unspotted ideal? The notion men have of their own worth, and of claims
founded thereon, is amazing; most amazing of all is what a man will set
up to himself as the standard of the woman he will marry. What the woman
may have a right to claim, never enters his thought. He never doubts the
right or righteousness of aspiring to wed a woman between whose nature
and his lies a gulf, wide as between an angel praising God, and a devil
taking refuge from him in a swine. Never a shadow of compunction crosses
the leprous soul, as he stretches forth his arms to infold the clean
woman! Ah, white dove! thou must lie for a while among the pots. If only
thy mother be not more to blame than the wretch that acts but after his
kind! He does hot die of self-loathing! how then could he imagine the
horror of disgust with which a glimpse of him such as he is would blast
the soul of the woman?' Yet has he--what is it?--the virtue? the pride?
or the cruel insolence?--to shrink with rudest abhorrence from one who
is, in nature and history and ruin, his fitting and proper mate! To see
only how a man will be content to be himself the thing which he scorns
another for being, might well be enough to send any one crying to the
God there may be, to come between him and himself. Lord! what a turning
of things upside down there will be one day! What a setting of lasts
first, and firsts last!




CHAPTER XVIII.

THE PARK AT NESTLEY.


Just inside the park, on a mossy knoll, a little way from the ancient
wrought-iron gate that opened almost upon the one street of Owlkirk, the
rector dug the foundation of his chapel--an oblong Gothic hall, of two
squares and a half, capable of seating all in the parish nearer to it
than to the abbey church. In his wife's eyes, Mr. Bevis was now an
absolute saint, for not only had he begun to build a chapel in his own
grounds, but to read prayers in his own church! She was not the only
one, however, who remarked how devoutly he read them, and his presence
was a great comfort to Wingfold. He often objected to what his curate
preached--but only to his face, and seldom when they were not alone.
There was policy in this restraint: he had come to see that in all
probability he would have to give in--that his curate would most likely
satisfy him that he was right. The relation between them was marvelous
and lovely. The rector's was a quiet awakening, a gentle second birth
almost in old age. But then he had been but a boy all the time, and a
very good sort of boy. He had acted in no small measure according to the
light he had, and time was of course given him to grow in. It is not the
world alone that requires the fullness of its time to come, ere it can
receive a revelation; the individual also has to pass through his
various stages of Pagan, Guebre, Moslem, Jew, Essene--God knows what
all--before he can begin to see and understand the living Christ. The
child has to pass through all the phases of lower animal life; when,
change is arrested, he is born a monster; and in many a Christian the
rudiments of former stages are far from extinct--not seldom revive, and
for the time seem to reabsorb the development, making indeed a monstrous
show.

"For myself,"--I give a passage from Wingfold's note-book, written for
his wife's reading--"I feel sometimes as if I were yet a pagan,
struggling hard to break through where I see a glimmer of something
better, called Christianity. In any case what I have, can be but a
foretaste of what I have yet to _be_; and if so, then indeed is there a
glory laid up for them that will have God, the _I_ of their _I_, to
throne it in the temple he has built, to pervade the life he has _lifed_
out of himself. My soul is now as a chaos with a hungry heart of order
buried beneath its slime, that longs and longs for the moving of the
breath of God over its water and mud."

The foundation-stone of the chapel was to be laid with a short and
simple ceremony, at which no clergy but themselves were to be present.
The rector had not consented, and the curate had not urged, that it
should remain unconsecrated; it was therefore uncertain, so far at least
as Wingfold knew, whether it was to be chapel or lecture hall. In either
case it was for the use and benefit of the villagers, and they were all
invited to be present. A few of the neighbors who were friends of the
rector and his wife, were also invited, and among them was Miss
Meredith.

Mr. and Mrs. Bevis had long ere now called upon her, and found her, as
Mrs. Bevis said, fit for any society. She had lunched several times with
them, and, her health being now greatly restored, was the readier to
accept the present invitation, that she was growing again anxious about
employment.

Almost every one was taken with her sweet manner, shaded with sadness.
At one time self-dissatisfaction had made her too anxious to please: in
the mirror of other minds she sought a less unfavorable reflection of
herself. But trouble had greatly modified this tendency, and taken the
too-much out of her courtesy.

She and Mrs. Puckridge went together, and Faber, calling soon after,
found the door locked. He saw the gathering in the park, however, had
heard something about the ceremony, concluded they were assisting, and,
after a little questioning with himself, led his horse to the gate, made
fast the reins to it, went in, and approached the little assembly. Ere
he reached it, he saw them kneel, whereupon he made a circuit and got
behind a tree, for he would not willingly seem rude, and he dared not be
hypocritical. Thence he descried Juliet kneeling with the rest, and
could not help being rather annoyed. Neither could he help being a
little struck with the unusual kind of prayer the curate was making; for
he spoke as to the God of workmen, the God of invention and creation,
who made the hearts of his creatures so like his own that they must
build and make.

When the observance was over, and the people were scattering in groups,
till they should be summoned to the repast prepared for them, the rector
caught sight of the doctor, and went to him.

"Ha, Faber!" he cried, holding out his hand, "this _is_ kind of you! I
should hardly have expected you to be present on such an occasion!"

"I hoped my presence would not offend you," answered the doctor. "I did
not presume to come closer than just within earshot of your devotions.
Neither must you think me unfriendly for keeping aloof."

"Certainly not. I would not have you guilty of irreverence."

"That could hardly be, if I recognized no presence."

"There was at least," rejoined Mr. Bevis, "the presence of a good many
of your neighbors, to whom you never fail to recognize your duty, and
that is the second half of religion: would it not have showed want of
reverence toward them, to bring an unsympathetic presence into the midst
of their devotion?"

"That I grant," said the doctor.

"But it may be," said the curate, who had come up while they talked,
"that what you, perhaps justifiably, refuse to recognize as irreverence,
has its root in some fault of which you are not yet aware."

"Then I'm not to blame for it," said Faber quietly.

"But you might be terribly the loser by it."

"That is, you mean, if there should be One to whom reverence is due?"

"Yes."

"Would that be fair, then--in an All-wise, that is, toward an ignorant
being?"

"I think not. Therefore I look for something to reveal it to you. But,
although I dare not say you are to blame, because that would be to take
upon myself the office of a judge, which is God's alone, He only being
able to give fair play, I would yet have you search yourself, and see
whether you may not come upon something which keeps you from giving full
and honest attention to what some people, as honest as yourself, think
they see true. I am speaking only from my knowledge of myself, and the
conviction that we are all much alike. What if you should discover that
you do not really and absolutely disbelieve in a God?--that the human
nature is not capable of such a disbelief?--that your unbelief has been
only indifference and irreverence--and that to a Being grander and
nobler and fairer than human heart can conceive?"

"If it be so, let Him punish me," said the doctor gravely.

"If it be so, He will," said the curate solemnly, "--and you will thank
Him for it--after a while. The God of my belief is too good not to make
Himself known to a man who loves what is fair and honest, as you do."

The doctor was silent.

While they were talking thus, two ladies had left the others and now
approached them--Mrs. Wingfold and Miss Meredith. They had heard the
last few sentences, and seeing two clergymen against one infidel,
hastened with the generosity of women to render him what aid they might.

"I am sure Mr. Faber is honest," said Helen.

"That is much to say for any man," returned the curate.

"If any man is, then," adjected Juliet.

"That is a great _If_," rejoined Wingfold."--Are _you_ honest, Helen?"
he added, turning to his wife.

"No," she answered; "but I am honester than I was a year ago."

"So am I," said her husband; "and I hope to be honester yet before
another is over. It's a big thing to say, _I am honest_."

Juliet was silent, and Helen, who was much interested with her, turned
to see how she was taking it. Her lips were as white as her face. Helen
attributed the change to anger, and was silent also. The same moment the
rector moved toward the place where the luncheon-tables were, and they
all accompanied him, Helen still walking, in a little anxiety, by
Juliet's side. It was some minutes before the color came back to her
lips; but when Helen next addressed her, she answered as gently and
sweetly as if the silence had been nothing but an ordinary one.

"You will stay and lunch with us, Mr. Faber?" said the rector. "There
can be no hypocrisy in that--eh?"

"Thank you," returned the doctor heartily; "but my work is waiting me,
and we all agree that _must_ be done, whatever our opinions as to the
ground of the obligation."

"And no man can say you don't do it," rejoined the curate kindly.
"That's one thing we do agree in, as you say: let us hold by it, Faber,
and keep as good friends as we can, till we grow better ones."

Faber could not quite match the curate in plain speaking: the pupil was
not up with his master yet.

"Thank you, Wingfold," he returned, and his voice was not free of
emotion, though Juliet alone felt the tremble of the one vibrating
thread in it. "--Miss Meredith," he went on, turning to her, "I have
heard of something that perhaps may suit you: will you allow me to call
in the evening, and talk it over with you?"

"Please do," responded Juliet eagerly. "Come before post-time if you
can. It may be necessary to write."

"I will. Good morning."

He made a general bow to the company and walked away, cutting off the
heads of the dandelions with his whip as he went. All followed with
their eyes his firm, graceful figure, as he strode over the grass in his
riding-boots and spurs.

"He's a fine fellow that!" said the rector. "--But, bless me!" he added,
turning to his curate, "how things change! If you had told me a year
ago, the day would come when I should call an atheist a fine fellow, I
should almost have thought you must be one yourself! Yet here I am
saying it--and never in my life so much in earnest to be a Christian!
How is it, Wingfold, my boy?"

"He who has the spirit of his Master, will speak the truth even of his
Master's enemies," answered the curate. "To this he is driven if he does
not go willingly, for he knows his Master loves his enemies. If you see
Faber a fine fellow, you say so, just as the Lord would, and try the
more to save him. A man who loves and serves his neighbor, let him speak
ever so many words against the Son of Man, is not sinning against the
Holy Ghost. He is still open to the sacred influence--the virtue which
is ever going forth from God to heal. It is the man who in the name of
religion opposes that which he sees to be good, who is in danger of
eternal sin."

"Come, come, Wingfold! whatever you do, don't mis-quote," said the
rector.

"I don't say it is the right reading," returned the curate, "but I can
hardly be convicted of misquoting, so long as it is that of the two
oldest manuscripts we have."

"You always have the better of me," answered the rector. "But tell
me--are not the atheists of the present day a better sort of fellows
than those we used to hear of when we were young?"

"I do think so. But, as one who believes with his whole soul, and
strives with his whole will, I attribute their betterness to the growing
influences of God upon the race through them that have believed. And I
am certain of this, that, whatever they are, it needs but time and
continued unbelief to bring them down to any level from whatever height.
They will either repent, or fall back into the worst things, believing
no more in their fellow-man and the duty they owe him--of which they now
rightly make so much, and yet not half enough--than they do in God and
His Christ. But I do not believe half the bad things Christians have
said and written of atheists. Indeed I do not believe the greater number
of those they have called such, were atheists at all. I suspect that
worse dishonesty, and greater injustice, are to be found among the
champions, lay and cleric, of religious Opinion, than in any other
class. If God were such a One as many of those who would fancy
themselves His apostles, the universe would be but a huge hell. Look at
certain of the so-called religious newspapers, for instance. Religious!
Their tongue is set on fire of hell. It may be said that they are mere
money-speculations; but what makes them pay? Who buys them? To please
whom do they write? Do not many buy them who are now and then themselves
disgusted with them? Why do they not refuse to touch the unclean things?
Instead of keeping the commandment, 'that he who loveth God love his
brother also,' these, the prime channels of Satanic influence in the
Church, powerfully teach, that He that loveth God must abuse his
brother--or he shall be himself abused."

"I fancy," said the rector, "they would withhold the name of brother
from those they abuse."

"No; not always."

"They would from an unbeliever."

"Yes. But let them then call him an enemy, and behave to him as
such--that is, love him, or at least try to give him the fair play to
which the most wicked of devils has the same right as the holiest of
saints. It is the vile falsehood and miserable unreality of Christians,
their faithlessness to their Master, their love of their own wretched
sects, their worldliness and unchristianity, their talking and not
doing, that has to answer, I suspect, for the greater part of our
present atheism."

"I have seen a good deal of Mr. Faber of late," Juliet said, with a
slight tremor in her voice, "and he seems to me incapable of falling
into those vile conditions I used to hear attributed to atheists."

"The atheism of some men," said the curate, "is a nobler thing than the
Christianity of some of the foremost of so-called and so-believed
Christians, and I may not doubt they will fare better at the last."

The rector looked a little blank at this, but said nothing. He had so
often found, upon reflection, that what seemed extravagance in his
curate was yet the spirit of Scripture, that he had learned to suspend
judgment.

Miss Meredith's face glowed with the pleasure of hearing justice
rendered the man in whom she was so much interested, and she looked the
more beautiful. She went soon after luncheon was over, leaving a
favorable impression behind her. Some of the ladies said she was much
too fond of the doctor; but the gentlemen admired her spirit in standing
up for him. Some objected to her paleness; others said it was not
paleness, but fairness, for her eyes and hair were as dark as the night;
but all agreed, that whatever it was to be called, her complexion was
peculiar--some for that very reason judging it the more admirable, and
others the contrary. Some said she was too stately, and attributed her
carriage to a pride to which, in her position, she had no right, they
said. Others judged that she needed such a bearing the more for
self-defense, especially if she had come down in the world. Her dress,
it was generally allowed, was a little too severe--some thought, in its
defiance of the fashion, assuming. No one disputed that she had been
accustomed to good society, and none could say that she had made the
slightest intrusive movement toward their circle. Still, why was it that
nobody knew any thing about her?




CHAPTER XIX.

THE RECTORY.


The curate and his wife had a good deal of talk about Juliet as they
drove home from Nestley. Much pleased with herself, they heard from
their hostess what she had learned of her history, and were the more
interested. They must find her a situation, they agreed, where she would
feel at home; and in the meantime would let her understand that, if she
took up her abode in Glaston, and were so inclined, the town was large
enough to give a good hope of finding a few daily engagements.

Before they left Nestley, Helen had said to Mrs. Bevis that she would
like to ask Miss Meredith to visit them for a few days.

"No one knows much about her," remarked Mrs. Bevis, feeling responsible.

"She can't be poison," returned Helen. "And if she were, she couldn't
hurt us. That's the good of being husband and wife: so long as you are
of one mind, you can do almost any thing."

When Faber called upon Juliet in the evening, nothing passed between
them concerning the situation at which he had hinted. When he entered
she was seated as usual in the corner of the dingy little couch, under
the small window looking into the garden, in the shadow. She did not
rise, but held out her hand to him. He went hastily up to her, took the
hand she offered, sat down beside her, and at once broke into a full
declaration of his love--now voluble, now hesitating, now submissive,
now persuasive, but humblest when most passionate. Whatever the man's
conceit, or his estimate of the thing he would have her accept, it was
in all honesty and modesty that he offered her the surrender of the very
citadel of his being--alas, too "empty, swept, and garnished!" Juliet
kept her head turned from him; he felt the hand he held tremble, and
every now and then make a faint struggle to escape from his; but he
could not see that her emotion was such as hardly to be accounted for
either by pleasure at the hearing of welcome words, or sorrow that her
reply must cause pain. He ceased at length, and with eyes of longing
sought a glimpse of her face, and caught one. Its wild, waste expression
frightened him. It was pallid like an old sunset, and her breath came
and went stormily. Three times, in a growing agony of effort, her lips
failed of speech. She gave a sudden despairing cast of her head
sideways, her mouth opened a little as if with mere helplessness, she
threw a pitiful glance in his face, burst into a tumult of sobs, and
fell back on the couch. Not a tear came to her eyes, but such was her
trouble that she did not even care to lift her hand to her face to hide
the movements of its rebellious muscles. Faber, bewildered, but, from
the habits of his profession, master of himself, instantly prepared her
something, which she took obediently; and as soon as she was quieted a
little, mounted and rode away: two things were clear--one, that she
could not be indifferent to him; the other, that, whatever the cause of
her emotion, she would for the present be better without him. He was
both too kind and too proud to persist in presenting himself.

The next morning Helen drew up her ponies at Mrs. Puckridge's door, and
Wingfold got out and stood by their heads, while she went in to call on
Miss Meredith.

Juliet had passed a sleepless night, and greatly dreaded the next
interview with Faber. Helen's invitation, therefore, to pay them a few
days' visit, came to her like a redemption: in their house she would
have protection both from Faber and from herself. Heartily, with tears
in her eyes, she accepted it; and her cordial and grateful readiness
placed her yet a step higher in the regard of her new friends. The
acceptance of a favor may be the conferring of a greater. Quickly,
hurriedly, she put up "her bag of needments," and with a sad, sweet
smile of gentle apology, took the curate's place beside his wife, while
he got into the seat behind.

Juliet, having been of late so much confined to the house, could not
keep back the tears called forth by the pleasure of the rapid motion
through the air, the constant change of scene, and that sense of human
story which haunts the mind in passing unknown houses and farms and
villages. An old thatched barn works as directly on the social feeling
as the ancient castle or venerable manor-seat; many a simple house will
move one's heart like a poem; many a cottage like a melody. When at last
she caught sight of the great church-tower, she clapped her hands with
delight. There was a place in which to wander and hide! she thought--in
which to find refuge and rest, and coolness and shadow! Even for Faber's
own sake she would not believe that faith a mere folly which had built
such a pile as that! Surely there was some way of meeting the terrible
things he said--if only she could find it!

"Are you fastidious, Miss Meredith, or willing to do any thing that is
honest?" the curate asked rather abruptly, leaning forward from the back
seat.

"If ever I was fastidious," she answered, "I think I am pretty nearly
cured. I should certainly like my work to be so far within my capacity
as to be pleasant to me."

"Then there is no fear," answered the curate. "The people who don't get
on, are those that pick and choose upon false principles. They
generally attempt what they are unfit for, and deserve their
failures.--Are you willing to teach little puds and little tongues?"

"Certainly."

"Tell me what you are able to do?"

"I would rather not. You might think differently when you came to know
me. But you can ask me any questions you please. I shan't hide my
knowledge, and I can't hide my ignorance."

"Thank you," said the curate, and leaned back again in his seat.

After luncheon, Helen found to her delight that, although Juliet was
deficient enough in the mechanics belonging to both voice and
instrument, she could yet sing and play with expression and facility,
while her voice was one of the loveliest she had ever heard. When the
curate came home from his afternoon attentions to the ailing of his
flock, he was delighted to hear his wife's report of her gifts.

"Would you mind reading a page or two aloud?" he said to their visitor,
after they had had a cup of tea. "I often get my wife to read to me."

She consented at once. He put a volume of Carlyle into her hand. She had
never even tasted a book of his before, yet presently caught the spirit
of the passage, and read charmingly.

In the course of a day or two they discovered that she was sadly
defective in spelling, a paltry poverty no doubt, yet awkward for one
who would teach children. In grammar and arithmetic also the curate
found her lacking. Going from place to place with her father, she had
never been much at school, she said, and no one had ever compelled her
to attend to the dry things. But nothing could be more satisfactory than
the way in which she now, with the help of the curate and his wife, set
herself to learn; and until she should have gained such proficiency as
would enable them to speak of her acquirements with confidence, they
persuaded her, with no great difficulty, to continue their guest.
Wingfold, who had been a tutor in his day, was well qualified to assist
her, and she learned with wonderful rapidity.

The point that most perplexed Wingfold with her was that, while very
capable of perceiving and admiring the good, she was yet capable of
admiring things of altogether inferior quality. What did it mean? Could
it arise from an excess of productive faculty, not yet sufficiently
differenced from the receptive? One could imagine such an excess ready
to seize the poorest molds, flow into them, and endow them for itself
with attributed life and power. He found also that she was familiar with
the modes of thought and expression peculiar to a certain school of
theology--embodiments from which, having done their good, and long
commenced doing their evil, Truth had begun to withdraw itself,
consuming as it withdrew. For the moment the fire ceases to be the life
of the bush in which it appears, the bush will begin to be consumed. At
the same time he could perfectly recognize the influence of Faber upon
her. For not unfrequently, the talk between the curate and his wife
would turn upon some point connected with the unbelief of the land, so
much more active, though but seemingly more extensive than heretofore;
when she would now make a remark, now ask a question, in which the
curate heard the doctor as plainly as if the words had come direct from
his lips: those who did not believe might answer so and so--might refuse
the evidence--might explain the thing differently. But she listened
well, and seemed to understand what they said. The best of her
undoubtedly appeared in her music, in which she was fundamentally far
superior to Helen, though by no means so well trained, taught or
practiced in it; whence Helen had the unspeakable delight, one which
only a humble, large and lofty mind can ever have, of consciously
ministering to the growth of another in the very thing wherein that
other is naturally the superior. The way to the blessedness that is in
music, as to all other blessednesses, lies through weary labors, and the
master must suffer with the disciple; Helen took Juliet like a child,
set her to scales and exercises, and made her practice hours a day.




CHAPTER XX.

AT THE PIANO.


When Faber called on Juliet, the morning after the last interview
recorded, and found where she was gone, he did not doubt she had taken
refuge with her new friends from his importunity, and was at once
confirmed in the idea he had cherished through the whole wakeful night,
that the cause of her agitation was nothing else than the conflict
between her heart and a false sense of duty, born of prejudice and
superstition. She was not willing to send him away, and yet she dared
not accept him. Her behavior had certainly revealed any thing but
indifference, and therefore must not make him miserable. At the same
time if it was her pleasure to avoid him, what chance had he of seeing
her alone at the rectory? The thought made him so savage that for a
moment he almost imagined his friend had been playing him false.

"I suppose he thinks every thing fair in religion, as well as in love
and war!" he said to himself. "It's a mighty stake, no doubt--a soul
like Juliet's!"

He laughed scornfully. It was but a momentary yielding to the temptation
of injustice, however, for his conscience told him at once that the
curate was incapable of any thing either overbearing or underhand. He
would call on her as his patient, and satisfy himself at once how things
were between them. At best they had taken a bad turn.

He judged it better, however, to let a day or two pass. When he did
call, he was shown into the drawing-room, where he found Helen at the
piano, and Juliet having a singing-lesson from her. Till then he had
never heard Juliet's song voice. A few notes of it dimly reached him as
he approached the room, and perhaps prepared him for the impression he
was about to receive: when the door opened, like a wind on a more mobile
sea, it raised sudden tumult in his soul. Not once in his life had he
ever been agitated in such fashion; he knew himself as he had never
known himself. It was as if some potent element, undreamed of before,
came rushing into the ordered sphere of his world, and shouldered its
elements from the rhythm of their going. It was a full contralto, with
pathos in the very heart of it, and it seemed to wrap itself round his
heart like a serpent of saddest splendor, and press the blood from it up
into his eyes. The ladies were too much occupied to hear him announced,
or note his entrance, as he stood by the door, absorbed, entranced.

Presently he began to feel annoyed, and proceeded thereupon to take
precautions with himself. For Juliet was having a lesson of the severest
kind, in which she accepted every lightest hint with the most heedful
attention, and conformed thereto with the sweetest obedience; whence it
came that Faber, the next moment after fancying he had screwed his
temper to stoic pitch, found himself passing from displeasure to
indignation, and thence almost to fury, as again and again some
exquisite tone, that went thrilling through all his being, discovering
to him depths and recesses hitherto unimagined, was unceremoniously, or
with briefest apology, cut short for the sake of some suggestion from
Helen. Whether such suggestion was right or wrong, was to Faber not of
the smallest consequence: it was in itself a sacrilege, a breaking into
the house of life, a causing of that to cease whose very being was its
justification. Mrs. Wingfold! she was not fit to sing in the same chorus
with her! Juliet was altogether out of sight of her. He had heard Mrs.
Wingfold sing many a time, and she could no more bring out a note like
one of those she was daring to criticise, than a cat could emulate a
thrush!

"Ah, Mr. Faber!--I did not know you were there," said Helen at length,
and rose. "We were so busy we never heard you."

If she had looked at Juliet, she would have said _I_ instead of _we_.
Her kind manner brought Faber to himself a little.

"Pray, do not apologize," he said. "I could have listened forever."

"I don't wonder. It is not often one hears notes like those. Were you
aware what a voice you had saved to the world?"

"Not in the least. Miss Meredith leaves her gifts to be discovered."

"All good things wait the seeker," said Helen, who had taken to
preaching since she married the curate, some of her half-friends said;
the fact being that life had grown to her so gracious, so happy, so
serious, that she would not unfrequently say a thing worth saying.

In the interstices of this little talk, Juliet and Faber had shaken
hands, and murmured a conventional word or two.

"I suppose this is a professional visit?" said Helen. "Shall I leave you
with your patient?"

As she put the question, however, she turned to Juliet.

"There is not the least occasion," Juliet replied, a little eagerly, and
with a rather wan smile. "I am quite well, and have dismissed my
doctor."

Faber was in the mood to imagine more than met the ear, and the words
seemed to him of cruel significance. A flush of anger rose to his
forehead, and battled with the paleness of chagrin. He said nothing.
But Juliet saw and understood. Instantly she held out her hand to him
again, and supplemented the offending speech with the words,

"--but, I hope, retained my friend?"

The light rushed again into Faber's eyes, and Juliet repented afresh,
for the words had wrought too far in the other direction.

"That is," she amended, "if Mr. Faber will condescend to friendship,
after having played the tyrant so long."

"I can only aspire to it," said the doctor.

It sounded mere common compliment, the silliest thing between man and
woman, and Mrs. Wingfold divined nothing more: she was not quick in such
matters. Had she suspected, she might, not knowing the mind of the lady
have been a little perplexed. As it was, she did not leave the room, and
presently the curate entered, with a newspaper in his hand.

"They're still at it, Faber," he said, "with their heated liquids and
animal life!"

"I need not ask which side you take," said the doctor, not much inclined
to enter upon any discussion.

"I take neither," answered the curate. "Where is the use, or indeed
possibility, so long as the men of science themselves are disputing
about the facts of experiment? It will be time enough to try to
understand them, when they are agreed and we know what the facts really
are. Whatever they may turn out to be, it is but a truism to say they
must be consistent with all other truth, although they may entirely
upset some of our notions of it."

"To which side then do you lean, as to the weight of the evidence?"
asked Faber, rather listlessly.

He had been making some experiments of his own in the direction referred
to. They were not so complete as he would have liked, for he found a
large country practice unfriendly to investigation; but, such as they
were, they favored the conclusion that no form of life appeared where
protection from the air was thorough.

"I take the evidence," answered the curate, "to be in favor of what they
so absurdly call spontaneous generation."

"I am surprised to hear you say so," returned Faber. "The conclusions
necessary thereupon, are opposed to all your theology."

"Must I then, because I believe in a living Truth, be myself an unjust
judge?" said the curate. "But indeed the conclusions are opposed to no
theology I have any acquaintance with; and if they were, it would give
me no concern. Theology is not my origin, but God. Nor do I acknowledge
any theology but what Christ has taught, and has to teach me. When, and
under what circumstances, life comes first into human ken, can not
affect His lessons of trust and fairness. If I were to play tricks with
the truth, shirk an argument, refuse to look a fact in the face, I
should be ashamed to look Him in the face. What he requires of his
friends is pure, open-eyed truth."

"But how," said the doctor, "can you grant spontaneous generation, and
believe in a Creator?"

"I said the term was an absurd one," rejoined the curate.

"Never mind the term then: you admit the fact?" said Faber.

"What fact?" asked Wingfold.

"That in a certain liquid, where all life has been destroyed, and where
no contact with life is admitted, life of itself appears," defined the
doctor.

"No, no; I admit nothing of the sort," cried Wingfold. "I only admit
that the evidence seems in favor of believing that in some liquids that
have been heated to a high point, and kept from the air, life has yet
appeared. How can I tell whether _all_ life already there was first
destroyed? whether a yet higher temperature would not have destroyed yet
more life? What if the heat, presumed to destroy all known germs of life
in them, should be the means of developing other germs, further removed?
Then as to _spontaneity_, as to life appearing of itself, that question
involves something beyond physics. Absolute life can exist only of and
by itself, else were it no perfect thing; but will you say that a mass
of protoplasm--that _proto_ by the way is a begged question--exists by
its own power, appears by its own will? Is it not rather there because
it can not help it?"

"It is there in virtue of the life that is in it," said Faber.

"Of course; that is a mere truism," returned Wingfold, "equivalent to,
It lives in virtue of life. There is nothing _spontaneous_ in that. Its
life must in some way spring from the true, the original, the
self-existent life."

"There you are begging the whole question," objected the doctor.

"No; not the whole," persisted the curate; "for I fancy you will
yourself admit there is some blind driving law behind the phenomenon.
But now I will beg the whole question, if you like to say so, for the
sake of a bit of purely metaphysical argument: the law of life behind,
if it be spontaneously existent, can not be a blind, deaf, unconscious
law; if it be unconscious of itself, it can not be spontaneous; whatever
is of itself must be God, and the source of all non-spontaneous, that
is, all other existence."

"Then it has been only a dispute about a word?" said Faber.

"Yes, but a word involving a tremendous question," answered Wingfold.

"Which I give up altogether," said the doctor, "asserting that there is
_nothing_ spontaneous, in the sense you give the word--the original
sense I admit. From all eternity a blind, unconscious law has been at
work, producing."

"I say, an awful living Love and Truth and Right, creating children of
its own," said the curate--"and there is our difference."

"Yes," assented Faber.

"Anyhow, then," said Wingfold, "so far as regards the matter in hand,
all we can say is, that under such and such circumstances life
_appears--whence_, we believe differently; _how_, neither of us can
tell--perhaps will ever be able to tell. I can't talk in scientific
phrase like you, Faber, but truth is not tied to any form of words."

"It is well disputed," said the doctor, "and I am inclined to grant that
the question with which we started does not immediately concern the
great differences between us."

It was rather hard upon Faber to have to argue when out of condition and
with a lady beside to whom he was longing to pour out his soul--his
antagonist a man who never counted a sufficing victory gained, unless
his adversary had had light and wind both in his back. Trifling as was
the occasion of the present skirmish, he had taken his stand on the
lower ground. Faber imagined he read both triumph and pity in Juliet's
regard, and could scarcely endure his position a moment longer.

"Shall we have some music?" said Wingfold. "--I see the piano open. Or
are you one of those worshipers of work, who put music in the morning in
the same category with looking on the wine when it is red?"

"Theoretically, no; but practically, yes," answered Faber, "--at least
for to-day. I shouldn't like poor Widow Mullens to lie listening to the
sound of that old water-wheel, till it took up its parable against the
faithlessness of men in general, and the doctor in particular. I can't
do her much good, poor old soul, but I can at least make her fancy
herself of consequence enough not to be forgotten."

The curate frowned a little--thoughtfully--but said nothing, and
followed his visitor to the door. When he returned, he said,

"I wonder what it is in that man that won't let him believe!"

"Perhaps he will yet, some day," said Juliet, softly.

"He will; he must," answered the curate. "He always reminds me of the
young man who had kept the law, and whom our Lord loved. Surely he must
have been one of the first that came and laid his wealth at the
apostles' feet! May not even that half of the law which Faber tries to
keep, be school-master enough to lead him to Christ?--But come, Miss
Meredith; now for our mathematics!"

Every two or three days the doctor called to see his late patient. She
wanted looking after, he said. But not once did he see her alone. He
could not tell from their behavior whether she or her hostess was to
blame for his recurring disappointment; but the fact was, that his ring
at the door-bell was the signal to Juliet not to be alone.




CHAPTER XXI.

THE PASTOR'S STUDY.


Happening at length to hear that visitors were expected, Juliet,
notwithstanding the assurances of her hostess that there was plenty of
room for her, insisted on finding lodgings, and taking more direct
measures for obtaining employment. But the curate had not been idle in
her affairs, and had already arranged for her with some of his own
people who had small children, only he had meant she should not begin
just yet. He wanted her both to be a little stronger, and to have got a
little further with one or two of her studies. And now, consulting with
Helen, he broached a new idea on the matter of her lodgment.

A day or two before Jones, the butcher, had been talking to him about
Mr. Drake--saying how badly his congregation had behaved to him, and in
what trouble he had come to him, because he could not pay his bill. The
good fellow had all this time never mentioned the matter; and it was
from growing concern about the minister that he now spoke of it to the
curate.

"We don't know all the circumstances, however, Mr. Jones," the curate
replied; "and perhaps Mr. Drake himself does not think so badly of it as
you do. He is a most worthy man. Mind you let him have whatever he
wants. I'll see to you. Don't mention it to a soul."

"Bless your heart and liver, sir!" exclaimed the butcher, "he's ten
times too much of a gentleman to do a kindness to. I couldn't take no
liberty with that man--no, not if he was 'most dead of hunger. He'd eat
the rats out of his own cellar, I do believe, before he'd accept what
you may call a charity; and for buying when he knows he can't pay, why
he'd beg outright before he'd do that. What he do live on now I can't
nohow make out--and that's what doos make me angry with him--as if a
honest tradesman didn't know how to behave to a gentleman! Why, they
tell me, sir, he did use to drive his carriage and pair in London! And
now he's a doin' of his best to live on nothink at all!--leastways, so
they tell me--seem' as how he'd have 'em believe he was turned a--what's
it they call it!--a--a--a wegetablarian!--that's what he do, sir! But I
know better. He may be eatin' grass like a ox, as did that same old king
o' Israel as growed the feathers and claws in consequence; and I don't
say he ain't; but one thing I'm sure of, and that is, that if he be,
it's by cause he can't help it. Why, sir, I put it to you--no gentleman
would--if he could help it.--Why don't he come to me for a bit o'
wholesome meat?" he went on in a sorely injured tone. "He knows I'm
ready for anythink in reason! Them peas an' beans an' cabbages an'
porridges an' carrots an' turmits--why, sir, they ain't nothink at all
but water an' wind. I don't say as they mayn't keep a body alive for a
year or two, but, bless you, there's nothink in them; and the man'll be
a skelinton long before he's dead an' buried; an' I shed jest like to
know where's the good o' life on sich terms as them!"

Thus Jones, the butcher--a man who never sold bad meat, never charged
for an ounce more than he delivered, and when he sold to the poor,
considered them. In buying and selling he had a weakness for giving the
fair play he demanded. He had a little spare money somewhere, but he did
not make a fortune out of hunger, retire early, and build churches. A
local preacher once asked him if he knew what was the plan of salvation.
He answered with the utmost innocence, cutting him off a great lump of
leg of beef for a family he had just told him was starving, that he
hadn't an idea, but no Christian could doubt it was all right.

The curate, then, pondering over what Mr. Jones had told him, had an
idea; and now he and his wife were speedily of one mind as to attempting
an arrangement for Juliet with Miss Drake. What she would be able to pay
would, they thought, ease them a little, while she would have the
advantage of a better protection than a lodging with more humble people
would afford her. Juliet was willing for any thing they thought best.

Wingfold therefore called on the minister, to make the proposal to him,
and was shown up to his study--a mere box, where there was just room for
a chair on each side of the little writing-table. The walls from top to
bottom were entirely hidden with books.

Mr. Drake received him with a touching mixture of sadness and
cordiality, and heard in silence what he had to say.

"It is very kind of you to think of us, Mr. Wingfold," he replied, after
a moment's pause. "But I fear the thing is impossible. Indeed, it is out
of the question. Circumstances are changed with us. Things are not as
they once were."

There had always been a certain negative virtue in Mr. Drake, which only
his friends were able to see, and only the wisest of them to set over
against his display--this, namely, that he never attempted to gain
credit for what he knew he had not. As he was not above show, I can not
say he was safely above false show, for he who is capable of the one is
still in danger of the other; but he was altogether above deception:
that he scorned. If, in his time of plenty he liked men to be aware of
his worldly facilities, he now, in the time of his poverty, preferred
that men should be aware of the bonds in which he lived. His nature was
simple, and loved to let in the daylight. Concealment was altogether
alien to him. From morning to night anxious, he could not bear to be
supposed of easy heart. Some men think poverty such a shame that they
would rather be judged absolutely mean than confess it. Mr. Drake's
openness may have sprung from too great a desire for sympathy; or from
a diseased honesty--I can not tell; I will freely allow that if his
faith had been as a grain of mustard seed, he would not have been so
haunted with a sense of his poverty, as to be morbidly anxious to
confess it. He would have known that his affairs were in high charge:
and that, in the full flow of the fountain of prosperity, as well as in
the scanty, gravelly driblets from the hard-wrought pump of poverty, the
supply came all the same from under the throne of God, and he would not
have _felt_ poor. A man ought never to feel rich for riches, nor poor
for poverty. The perfect man must always feel rich, because God is rich.

"The fact is," Mr. Drake went on, "we are very poor--absolutely poor,
Mr. Wingfold--so poor that I may not even refuse the trifling annuity my
late congregation will dole out to me."

"I am sorry to know it," said the curate.

"But I must take heed of injustice," the pastor resumed; "I do not think
they would have treated me so had they not imagined me possessed of
private means. The pity now is that the necessity which would make me
glad to fall in with your kind proposal itself renders the thing
impracticable. Even with what your friend would contribute to the
housekeeping we could not provide a table fit for her. But Dorothy ought
to have the pleasure of hearing your kind proposition: if you will allow
me I will call her."

Dorothy was in the kitchen, making pastry--for the rare treat of a
chicken pudding: they had had a present of a couple of chickens from
Mrs. Thomson--when she heard her father's voice calling her from the top
of the little stair. When Lisbeth opened the door to the curate she was
on her way out, and had not yet returned; so she did not know any one
was with him, and hurried up with her arms bare. She recoiled half a
step when she saw Mr. Wingfold, then went frankly forward to welcome
him, her hands in her white pinafore.

"It's only flour," she said, smiling.

"It is a rare pleasure now-a-days to catch a lady at work" said
Wingfold. "My wife always dusts my study for me. I told her I would not
have it done except she did it--just to have the pleasure of seeing her
at it. My conviction is, that only a lady can become a thorough
servant."

"Why don't you have lady-helps then?" said Dorothy.

"Because I don't know where to find them. Ladies are scarce; and any
thing almost would be better than a houseful of half-ladies."

"I think I understand," said Dorothy thoughtfully.

Her father now stated Mr. Wingfold's proposal--in the tone of one sorry
to be unable to entertain it.

"I see perfectly why you think we could not manage it, papa," said
Dorothy. "But why should not Miss Meredith lodge with us in the same way
as with Mrs. Puckridge? She could have the drawing-room and my bedroom,
and her meals by herself. Lisbeth is wretched for want of dinners to
cook."

"Miss Meredith would hardly relish the idea of turning you out of your
drawing-room," said Wingfold.

"Tell her it may save us from being turned out of the house. Tell her
she will be a great help to us," returned Dorothy eagerly.

"My child," said her father, the tears standing in his eyes, "your
reproach sinks into my very soul."

"My reproach, father!" repeated Dorothy aghast. "How you do mistake me!
I can't say with you that the will of God is every thing; but I can say
that far less than your will--your ability--will always be enough for
me."

"My child," returned her father, "you go on to rebuke me! You are
immeasurably truer to me than I am to my God.--Mr. Wingfold, you love
the Lord, else I would not confess my sin to you: of late I have often
thought, or at least felt as if He was dealing hardly with me. Ah, my
dear sir! you are a young man: for the peace of your soul serve God so,
that, by the time you are my age, you may be sure of Him. I try hard to
put my trust in Him, but my faith is weak. It ought by this time to have
been strong. I always want to see the way He is leading me--to
understand something of what He is doing with me or teaching me, before
I can accept His will, or get my heart to consent not to complain. It
makes me very unhappy. I begin to fear that I have never known even the
beginning of confidence, and that faith has been with me but a thing of
the understanding and the lips."

He bowed his head on his hands. Dorothy went up to him and laid a hand
on his shoulder, looking unspeakably sad. A sudden impulse moved the
curate.

"Let us pray," he said, rising, and kneeled down.

It was a strange, unlikely thing to do; but he was an unlikely man, and
did it. The others made haste to kneel also.

"God of justice," he said, "Thou knowest how hard it is for us, and Thou
wilt be fair to us. We have seen no visions; we have never heard the
voice of Thy Son, of whom those tales, so dear to us, have come down the
ages; we have to fight on in much darkness of spirit and of mind, both
from the ignorance we can not help, and from the fault we could have
helped; we inherit blindness from the error of our fathers; and when
fear, or the dread of shame, or the pains of death, come upon us, we are
ready to despair, and cry out that there is no God, or, if there be, He
has forgotten His children. There are times when the darkness closes
about us like a wall, and Thou appearest nowhere, either in our hearts,
or in the outer universe; we can not tell whether the things we seemed
to do in Thy name, were not mere hypocrisies, and our very life is but a
gulf of darkness. We cry aloud, and our despair is as a fire in our
bones to make us cry; but to all our crying and listening, there seems
neither hearing nor answer in the boundless waste. Thou who knowest
Thyself God, who knowest Thyself that for which we groan, Thou whom
Jesus called Father, we appeal to Thee, not as we imagine Thee, but as
Thou seest Thyself, as Jesus knows Thee, to Thy very self we cry--help
us, O Cause of us! O Thou from whom alone we are this weakness, through
whom alone we can become strength, help us--be our Father. We ask for
nothing beyond what Thy Son has told us to ask. We beg for no signs or
wonders, but for Thy breath upon our souls, Thy spirit in our hearts. We
pray for no cloven tongues of fire--for no mighty rousing of brain or
imagination; but we do, with all our power of prayer, pray for Thy
spirit; we do not even pray to know that it is given to us; let us, if
so it pleases Thee, remain in doubt of the gift for years to come--but
lead us thereby. Knowing ourselves only as poor and feeble, aware only
of ordinary and common movements of mind and soul, may we yet be
possessed by the spirit of God, led by His will in ours. For all things
in a man, even those that seem to him the commonest and least uplifted,
are the creation of Thy heart, and by the lowly doors of our wavering
judgment, dull imagination, luke-warm love, and palsied will, Thou canst
enter and glorify all. Give us patience because our hope is in Thee, not
in ourselves. Work Thy will in us, and our prayers are ended. Amen."

They rose. The curate said he would call again in the evening, bade
them good-by, and went. Mr. Drake turned to his daughter and said--

"Dorothy, that's not the way I have been used to pray or hear people
pray; nevertheless the young man seemed to speak very straight up to
God. It appears to me there was another spirit there with his. I will
humble myself before the Lord. Who knows but he may lift me up!"

"What can my father mean by saying that perhaps God will lift him up?"
said Dorothy to herself when she was alone. "It seems to me if I only
knew God was anywhere, I should want no other lifting up. I should then
be lifted up above every thing forever."

Had she said so to the curate, he would have told her that the only way
to be absolutely certain of God, is to see Him as He is, and for that we
must first become absolutely pure in heart. For this He is working in
us, and perfection and vision will flash together. Were conviction
possible without that purity and that vision, I imagine it would work
evil in us, fix in their imperfection our ideas, notions, feelings,
concerning God, give us for His glory the warped reflection of our
cracked and spotted and rippled glass, and so turn our worship into an
idolatry.

Dorothy was a rather little woman, with lightish auburn hair, a large
and somewhat heavy forehead, fine gray eyes, small well-fashioned
features, a fair complexion on a thin skin, and a mouth that would have
been better in shape if it had not so often been informed of trouble.
With this trouble their poverty had nothing to do; that did not weigh
upon her a straw. She was proud to share her father's lot, and could
have lived on as little as any laboring woman with seven children. She
was indeed a trifle happier since her father's displacement, and would
have been happier still had he found it within the barest possibility to
decline the annuity allotted him; for, as far back as she could
remember, she had been aware of a dislike to his position--partly from
pride it may be, but partly also from a sense of the imperfection of the
relation between him and his people--one in which love must be
altogether predominant, else is it hateful--and chiefly because of a
certain sordid element in the community--a vile way of looking at sacred
things through the spectacles of mammon, more evident--I only say more
evident--in dissenting than in Church of England communities, because of
the pressure of expenses upon them. Perhaps the impossibility of
regarding her father's church with reverence, laid her mind more open to
the cause of her trouble--such doubts, namely, as an active intellect,
nourished on some of the best books, and disgusted with the weak fervor
of others rated high in her hearing, had been suggesting for years
before any words of Faber's reached her. The more her devout nature
longed to worship, the more she found it impossible to worship that
which was presented for her love and adoration. See believed entirely in
her father, but she knew he could not meet her doubts, for many things
made it plain that he had never had such himself. An ordinary mind that
has had doubts, and has encountered and overcome them, or verified and
found them the porters of the gates of truth, may be profoundly useful
to any mind similarly assailed; but no knowledge of books, no amount of
logic, no degree of acquaintance with the wisest conclusions of others,
can enable a man who has not encountered skepticism in his own mind, to
afford any essential help to those caught in the net. For one thing,
such a man will be incapable of conceiving the possibility that the net
may be the net of The Fisher of Men.

Dorothy, therefore, was sorely oppressed. For a long time her life had
seemed withering from her, and now that her father was fainting on the
steep path, and she had no water to offer him, she was ready to cry
aloud in bitterness of spirit.

She had never heard the curate preach--had heard talk of his oddity on
all sides, from men and women no more capable of judging him than the
caterpillar of judging the butterfly--which yet it must become. The
draper, who understood him, naturally shrunk from praising to her the
teaching for which he not unfrequently deserted that of her father, and
she never looked in the direction of him with any hope. Yet now, the
very first time she had heard him speak out of the abundance of his
heart, he had left behind him a faint brown ray of hope in hers. It was
very peculiar of him to break out in prayer after such an abrupt
fashion--in the presence of an older minister than himself--and praying
for him too! But there was such an appearance of reality about the man!
such a simplicity in his look! such a directness in his petitions! such
an active fervor of hope in his tone--without an atom of what she had
heard called _unction_! His thought and speech appeared to arise from no
separated sacred mood that might be assumed and laid aside, but from
present faith and feeling, from the absolute point of life at that
moment being lived by him. It was an immediate appeal to a hearing, and
understanding, and caring God, whose breath was the very air His
creatures breathed, the element of their life; an utter acknowledgment
of His will as the bliss of His sons and daughters! Such was the shining
of the curate's light, and it awoke hope in Dorothy.

In the evening he came again as he had said, and brought Juliet. Each in
the other, Dorothy and she recognized suffering, and in a very few
moments every thing was arranged between them. Juliet was charmed with
the simplicity and intentness of Dorothy; in Juliet's manner and
carriage, Dorothy at once recognized a breeding superior to her own, and
at once laid hold of the excellence by acknowledging it. In a moment she
made Juliet understand how things were, and Juliet saw as quickly that
she must assent to the arrangement proposed. But she had not been with
them two days, when Dorothy found the drawing-room as open to her as
before she came, and far more pleasant.

While the girls were talking below, the two clergymen sat again in the
study.

"I have taken the liberty," said the curate, "of bringing an old book I
should like you to look at, if you don't mind--chiefly for the sake of
some verses that pleased me much when I read them first, and now please
me more when I read them for the tenth time. If you will allow me, I
will read them to you."

Mr. Drake liked good poetry, but did not much relish being called upon
to admire, as he imagined he was now. He assented, of course, graciously
enough, and soon found his mistake.

This is the poem Wingfold read:

  CONSIDER THE RAVENS.

  Lord, according to Thy words,
  I have considered Thy birds;
  And I find their life good,
  And better the better understood;
  Sowing neither corn nor wheat,
  They have all that they can eat;
  Reaping no more than they sow.
  They have all they can stow;
  Having neither barn nor store,
  Hungry again, they eat more.

  Considering, I see too that they
  Have a busy life, and plenty of play;
  In the earth they dig their bills deep,
  And work well though they do not heap;
  Then to play in the air they are not loth,
  And their nests between are better than both.

  But this is when there blow no storms;
  When berries are plenty in winter, and worms;
  When their feathers are thick, and oil is enough
  To keep the cold out and the rain off:
  If there should come a long hard frost,
  Then it looks as Thy birds were lost.

  But I consider further, and find
  A hungry bird has a free mind;
  He is hungry to-day, not to-morrow;
  Steals no comfort, no grief doth borrow;
  This moment is his, Thy will hath said it,
  The next is nothing till Thou hast made it.

  The bird has pain, but has no fear,
  Which is the worst of any gear;
  When cold and hunger and harm betide him,
  He gathers them not to stuff inside him;
  Content with the day's ill he has got,
  He waits just, nor haggles with his lot;
  Neither jumbles God's will
  With driblets from his own still.

  But next I see, in my endeavor,
  Thy birds here do not live forever;
  That cold or hunger, sickness or age,
  Finishes their earthly stage;
  The rook drops without a stroke,
  And never gives another croak;
  Birds lie here, and birds lie there,
  With little feathers all astare;
  And in Thy own sermon, Thou
  That the sparrow falls dost allow.

  It shall not cause me any alarm,
  For neither so comes the bird to harm,
  Seeing our Father, Thou hast said,
  Is by the sparrow's dying bed;
  Therefore it is a blessed place,
  And the sparrow in high grace.

  It cometh therefore to this. Lord;
  I have considered Thy word,
  And henceforth will be Thy bird.

By the time Wingfold ceased, the tears were running down the old man's
face. When he saw that, the curate rose at once, laid the book on the
table, shook hands with him, and went away. The minister laid his head
on the table, and wept.

Juliet had soon almost as much teaching as she could manage. People
liked her, and children came to love her a little. A good report of her
spread. The work was hard, chiefly because it included more walking than
she had been accustomed to; but Dorothy generally walked with her, and
to the places furthest off, Helen frequently took her with her ponies,
and she got through the day's work pretty well. The fees were small, but
they sufficed, and made life a little easier to her host and his family.
Amanda got very fond of her, and, without pretending to teach her,
Juliet taught her a good deal. On Sundays she went to church; and
Dorothy, although it cost her a struggle to face the imputation of
resentment, by which the chapel-people would necessarily interpret the
change, went regularly with her, in the growing hope of receiving light
from the curate. Her father also not unfrequently accompanied her.




CHAPTER XXII.

TWO MINDS.


All this time poor Faber, to his offer of himself to Juliet, had
received no answer but a swoon--or something very near it. Every attempt
he made to see her alone at the rectory had been foiled; and he almost
came to the conclusion that the curate and his wife had set themselves
to prejudice against himself a mind already prejudiced against his
principles. It added to his uneasiness that, as he soon discovered, she
went regularly to church. He knew the power and persuasion of Wingfold,
and looked upon his influence as antagonistic to his hopes. Pride,
anger, and fear were all at work in him; but he went on calling, and did
his best to preserve an untroubled demeanor. Juliet imagined no change
in his feelings, and her behavior to him was not such as to prevent them
from deepening still.

Every time he went it was with a desperate resolution of laying his
hand on the veil in which she had wrapped herself, but every time he
found it impossible, for one reason or another, to make a single
movement toward withdrawing it. Again and again he tried to write to
her, but the haunting suspicion that she would lay his epistle before
her new friends, always made him throw down his pen in a smothering
indignation. He found himself compelled to wait what opportunity chance
or change might afford him.

When he learned that she had gone to live with the Drakes, it was a
relief to him; for although he knew the minister was far more personal
in his hostility than Wingfold, he was confident his influence over her
would not be so great; and now he would have a better chance, he
thought, of seeing her alone. Meantime he took satisfaction in knowing
that he did not neglect a single patient, and that in no case had he
been less successful either as to diagnosis or treatment because of his
trouble. He pitied himself just a little as a martyr to the truth, a
martyr the more meritorious that the truth to which he sacrificed
himself gave him no hope for the future, and for the present no shadow
of compensation beyond the satisfaction of not being deceived. It
remains a question, however, which there was no one to put to
Faber--whether he had not some amends in relief from the notion, vaguely
it may be, yet unpleasantly haunting many minds--of a Supreme Being--a
Deity--putting forth claims to obedience--an uncomfortable sort of
phantom, however imaginary, for one to have brooding above him, and
continually coming between him and the freedom of an else empty
universe. To the human soul as I have learned to know it, an empty
universe would be as an exhausted receiver to the lungs that thirst for
air; but Faber liked the idea: how he would have liked the reality
remains another thing. I suspect that what we call damnation is
something as near it as it can be made; itself it can not be, for even
the damned must live by God's life. Was it, I repeat, no compensation
for his martyrdom to his precious truth, to know that to none had he to
render an account? Was he relieved from no misty sense of a moral
consciousness judging his, and ready to enforce its rebuke--a belief
which seems to me to involve the highest idea, the noblest pledge, the
richest promise of our nature? There may be men in whose turning from
implicit to explicit denial, no such element of relief is concerned--I
can not tell; but although the structure of Paul Faber's life had in it
material of noble sort, I doubt if he was one of such.

The summer at length reigned lordly in the land. The roses were in
bloom, from the black purple to the warm white. Ah, those roses! He must
indeed be a God who invented the roses. They sank into the red hearts of
men and women, caused old men to sigh, young men to long, and women to
weep with strange ecstatic sadness. But their scent made Faber lonely
and poor, for the rose-heart would not open its leaves to him.

The winds were soft and odor-laden. The wide meadows through which
flowed the river, seemed to smite the eye with their greenness; and the
black and red and white kine bent down their sleek necks among the
marsh-marigolds and the meadow-sweet and the hundred lovely things that
border the level water-courses, and fed on the blessed grass. Along the
banks, here with nets, there with rod and line, they caught the gleaming
salmon, and his silver armor flashed useless in the sun. The old pastor
sat much in his little summer-house, and paced his green walk on the
border of the Lythe; but in all the gold of the sunlight, in all the
glow and the plenty around him, his heart was oppressed with the sense
of his poverty. It was not that he could not do the thing he would, but
that he could not meet and rectify the thing he had done. He could
behave, he said to himself, neither as a gentleman nor a Christian, for
lack of money; and, worst of all, he could not get rid of a sense of
wrong--of rebellious heavings of heart, of resentments, of doubts that
came thick upon him--not of the existence of God, nor of His goodness
towards men in general, but of His kindness to himself. Logically, no
doubt, they were all bound in one, and the being that could be unfair to
a beetle could not be God, could not make a beetle; but our feelings,
especially where a wretched self is concerned, are notably illogical.

The morning of a glorious day came in with saffron, gold, and crimson.
The color sobered, but the glory grew. The fleeting dyes passed, but the
azure sky, the white clouds, and the yellow fire remained. The larks
dropped down to their breakfast. The kine had long been busy at theirs,
for they had slept their short night in the midst of their food. Every
thing that could move was in motion, and what could not move was
shining, and what could not shine was feeling warm. But the pastor was
tossing restless. He had a troubled night. The rent of his house fell
due with the miserable pittance allowed him by the church; but the hard
thing was not that he had to pay nearly the whole of the latter to meet
the former, but that he must first take it. The thought of that burned
in his veins like poison. But he had no choice. To refuse it would be
dishonest; it would be to spare or perhaps indulge his feelings at the
expense of the guiltless. He must not kill himself, he said, because he
had insured his life, and the act would leave his daughter nearly
destitute. Yet how was the insurance longer to be paid? It _was_ hard,
with all his faults, to be brought to this! It _was_ hard that he who
all his life had been urging people to have faith, should have his own
turned into a mockery.

Here heart and conscience together smote him. Well might his faith be
mocked, for what better was it than a mockery itself! Where was this
thing he called his faith? Was he not cherishing, talking flat
unbelief?--as much as telling God he did _not_ trust in Him? Where was
the faithlessness of which his faithlessness complained? A phantom of
its own! Yea, let God be true and every man a liar! Had the hour come,
and not the money? A fine faith it was that depended on the very
presence of the help!--that required for its existence that the supply
should come before the need!--a fine faith in truth, which still would
follow in the rear of sight!--But why then did God leave him thus
without faith? Why did not God make him able to trust? He had prayed
quite as much for faith as for money. His conscience replied, "That is
your part--the thing you will not do. If God put faith into your heart
without your stirring up your heart to believe, the faith would be God's
and not yours. It is true all is God's; he made this you call _me_, and
made it able to believe, and gave you Himself to believe in; and if
after that He were to make you believe without you doing your utmost
part, He would be making you down again into a sort of holy dog, not
making you grow a man like Christ Jesus His Son"--"But I have tried hard
to trust in Him," said the little self.--"Yes, and then fainted and
ceased," said the great self, the conscience.

Thus it went on in the poor man's soul. Ever and anon he said to
himself, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him," and ever and anon
his heart sickened afresh, and he said to himself, "I shall go down to
the grave with shame, and my memorial will be debts unpaid, for the
Lord hath forsaken me." All the night he had lain wrestling with fear
and doubt: fear was hard upon him, but doubt was much harder. "If I
could but trust," he said, "I could endure any thing."

In the splendor of the dawn, he fell into a troubled sleep, and a more
troubled dream, which woke him again to misery. Outside his chamber, the
world was rich in light, in song, in warmth, in odor, in growth, in
color, in space; inside, all was to him gloomy, groanful, cold, musty,
ungenial, dingy, confined; yet there was he more at ease, shrunk from
the light, and in the glorious morning that shone through the chinks of
his shutters, saw but an alien common day, not the coach of his Father,
come to carry him yet another stage toward his home. He was in want of
nothing at the moment. There were no holes in the well-polished shoes
that seemed to keep ghostly guard outside his chamber-door. The clothes
that lay by his bedside were indeed a little threadbare, but sound and
spotless. The hat that hung in the passage below might have been much
shabbier without necessarily indicating poverty. His walking-stick had a
gold knob like any earl's. If he did choose to smoke a church-warden, he
had a great silver-mounted meerschaum on his mantle-shelf. True, the
butcher's shop had for some time contributed nothing to his dinners, but
his vegetable diet agreed with him. He would himself have given any man
time, would as soon have taken his child by the throat as his debtor,
had worshiped God after a bettering fashion for forty years at least,
and yet would not give God time to do His best for him--the best that
perfect love, and power limited only by the lack of full consent in the
man himself, could do.

His daughter always came into his room the first thing in the morning.
It was plain to her that he had been more restless than usual, and at
sight of his glazy red-rimmed eyes and gray face, her heart sank within
her. For a moment she was half angry with him, thinking in herself that
if she believed as he did, she would never trouble her heart about any
thing: her head should do all the business. But with his faith, she
would have done just the same as he, It is one thing to be so used to
certain statements and modes of thought that you take all for true, and
quite another so to believe the heart of it all, that you are in
essential and imperturbable peace and gladness because of it. But oh,
how the poor girl sighed for the freedom of a God to trust in! She could
content herself with the husks the swine ate, if she only knew that a
Father sat at the home-heart of the universe, wanting to have her.
Faithful in her faithlessness, she did her best to comfort her
_believing_ father: beyond the love that offered it, she had but cold
comfort to give. He did not listen to a word she said, and she left him
at last with a sigh, and went to get him his breakfast. When she
returned, she brought him his letters with his tea and toast. He told
her to take them away: she might open them herself if she liked; they
could be nothing but bills! She might take the tray too; he did not want
any breakfast: what right had he to eat what he had no money to pay for!
There would be a long bill at the baker's next! What right had any one
to live on other people! Dorothy told him she paid for every loaf as it
came, and that there was no bill at the baker's, though indeed he had
done his best to begin one. He stretched out his arms, drew her down to
his bosom, said she was his only comfort, then pushed her away, turned
his face to the wall, and wept. She saw it would be better to leave him,
and, knowing in this mood he would eat nothing, she carried the tray
with her. A few moments after, she came rushing up the stair like a
wind, and entered his room swiftly, her face "white with the whiteness
of what is dead."




CHAPTER XXIII.

THE MINISTER'S BEDROOM.


The next day, in the afternoon, old Lisbeth appeared at the rectory,
with a hurried note, in which Dorothy begged Mr. Wingfold to come and
see her father. The curate rose at once and went. When he reached the
house, Dorothy, who had evidently been watching for his arrival, herself
opened the door.

"What's the matter?" he asked. "Nothing alarming, I hope?"

"I hope not," she answered. There was a strange light on her face, like
that of a sunless sky on a deep, shadowed well. "But I am a little
alarmed about him. He has suffered much of late. Ah, Mr. Wingfold, you
don't know how good he is! Of course, being no friend to the church--"

"I don't wonder at that, the church is so little of a friend to
herself," interrupted the curate, relieved to find her so composed, for
as he came along he had dreaded something terrible.

"He wants very much to see you. He thinks perhaps you may be able to
help him. I am sure if you can't nobody can. But please don't heed much
what he says about himself. He is feverish and excited. There is such a
thing--is there not?--as a morbid humility? I don't mean a false
humility, but one that passes over into a kind of self disgust."

"I know what you mean," answered the curate, laying down his hat: he
never took his hat into a sick-room.

Dorothy led the way up the narrow creaking stairs.

It was a lowly little chamber in which the once popular preacher
lay--not so good as that he had occupied when a boy, two stories above
his father's shop. That shop had been a thorn in his spirit in the days
of his worldly success, but again and again this morning he had been
remembering it as a very haven of comfort and peace. He almost forgot
himself into a dream of it once; for one blessed moment, through the
upper half of the window he saw the snow falling in the street, while he
sat inside and half under the counter, reading Robinson Crusoe! Could
any thing short of heaven be so comfortable?

As the curate stepped in, a grizzled head turned toward him a haggard
face with dry, bloodshot eyes, and a long hand came from the bed to
greet him.

"Ah, Mr. Wingfold!" cried the minister, "God has forsaken me. If He had
only forgotten me, I could have borne that, I think; for, as Job says,
the time would have come when He would have had a desire to the work of
His hands. But He has turned His back upon me, and taken His free Spirit
from me. He has ceased to take His own way, to do His will with me, and
has given me my way and my will. Sit down, Mr. Wingfold. You can not
comfort me, but you are a true servant of God, and I will tell you my
sorrow. I am no friend to the church, as you know, but--"

"So long as you are a friend of its Head, that goes for little with me,"
said the curate. "But if you will allow me, I should like to say just
one word on the matter."

He wished to try what a diversion of thought might do; not that he
foolishly desired to make him forget his trouble, but that he knew from
experience any gap might let in comfort.

"Say on, Mr. Wingfold. I am a worm and no man."

"It seems, then, to me a mistake for any community to spend precious
energy upon even a just finding of fault with another. The thing is, to
trim the lamp and clean the glass of our own, that it may be a light to
the world. It is just the same with communities as with individuals. The
community which casts if it be but the mote out of its own eye, does the
best thing it can for the beam in its neighbor's. For my part, I confess
that, so far as the clergy form and represent the Church of England, it
is and has for a long time been doing its best--not its worst, thank
God--to serve God and Mammon."

"Ah! that's my beam!" cried the minister. "I have been serving Mammon
assiduously. I served him not a little in the time of my prosperity,
with confidence and show, and then in my adversity with fears and
complaints. Our Lord tells us expressly that we are to take no thought
for the morrow, because we can not serve God and Mammon. I have been
taking thought for a hundred morrows, and that not patiently, but
grumbling in my heart at His dealings with me. Therefore now He has cast
me off."

"How do you know that He has cast you off?" asked the curate.

"Because He has given me my own way with such a vengeance. I have been
pulling, pulling my hand out of His, and He has let me go, and I lie in
the dirt."

"But you have not told me your grounds for concluding so."

"Suppose a child had been crying and fretting after his mother for a
spoonful of jam," said the minister, quite gravely, "and at last she set
him down to a whole pot--what would you say to that?"

"I should say she meant to give him a sharp lesson, perhaps a reproof as
well--certainly not that she meant to cast him off," answered Wingfold,
laughing. "But still I do not understand."

"Have you not heard then? Didn't Dorothy tell you?"

"She has told me nothing."

"Not that my old uncle has left me a hundred thousand pounds and more?"

The curate was on the point of saying, "I am very glad to hear it,"
when the warning Dorothy had given him returned to his mind, and with it
the fear that the pastor was under a delusion--that, as a rich man is
sometimes not unnaturally seized with the mania of imagined poverty, so
this poor man's mental barometer had, from excess of poverty, turned its
index right round again to riches.

"Oh!" he returned, lightly and soothingly, "perhaps it is not so bad as
that. You may have been misinformed. There may be some mistake."

"No, no!" returned the minister; "it is true, every word of it. You
shall see the lawyers' letter. Dorothy has it, I think. My uncle was an
ironmonger in a country town, got on, and bought a little bit of land in
which he found iron. I knew he was flourishing, but he was a churchman
and a terrible Tory, and I never dreamed he would remember me. There had
been no communication between our family and his for many years. He must
have fancied me still a flourishing London minister, with a rich wife!
If he had had a suspicion of how sorely I needed a few pounds, I can not
believe he would have left me a farthing. He did not save his money to
waste it on bread and cheese, I can fancy him saying."

Although a look almost of despair kept coming and going upon his face,
he lay so still, and spoke so quietly and collectedly, that Wingfold
began to wonder whether there might not be some fact in his statement.
He did not well know what to say.

"When I heard the news from Dorothy--she read the letter first," Mr.
Drake went on, "--old fool that I was I was filled with such delight
that, although I could not have said whether I believed or not, the very
idea of the thing made me weep. Alas! Mr. Wingfold, I have had visions
of God in which the whole world would not have seemed worth a salt tear!
And now!--I jumped out of bed, and hurried on my clothes, but by the
time I came to kneel at my bedside, God was away. I could not speak a
word to Him! I had lost all the trouble that kept me crying after Him
like a little child at his mother's heels, the bond was broken and He
was out of sight. I tried to be thankful, but my heart was so full of
the money, it lay like a stuffed bag. But I dared not go even to my
study till I had prayed. I tramped up and down this little room,
thinking more about paying my butcher's bill than any thing else. I
would give him a silver snuff-box; but as to God and His goodness my
heart felt like a stone; I _could not_ lift it up. All at once I saw how
it was: He had heard my prayers in anger! Mr. Wingfold, the Lord has
sent me this money as He sent the quails to the Israelites: while it was
yet, as it were, between my teeth, He smote me with hardness of heart. O
my God! how shall I live in the world with a hundred thousand pounds
instead of my Father in heaven! If it were only that He had hidden His
face, I should be able to pray somehow! He has given me over to the
Mammon I was worshiping! Hypocrite that I am! how often have I not
pointed out to my people, while yet I dwelt in the land of Goshen, that
to fear poverty was the same thing as to love money, for that both came
of lack of faith in the living God! Therefore has He taken from me the
light of His countenance, which yet, Mr. Wingfold, with all my sins and
shortcomings, yea, and my hypocrisy, is the all in all to me!"

He looked the curate in the face with such wild eyes as convinced him
that, even if perfectly sane at present, he was in no small danger of
losing his reason.

"Then you would willingly give up this large fortune," he said, "and
return to your former condition?"

"Rather than not be able to pray--I would! I would!" he cried; then
paused and added, "--if only He would give me enough to pay my debts and
not have to beg of other people."

Then, with a tone suddenly changed to one of agonized effort, with
clenched hands, and eyes shut tight, he cried vehemently, as if in the
face of a lingering unwillingness to encounter again the miseries
through which he had been passing.

"No, no, Lord! Forgive me. I will not think of conditions. Thy will be
done! Take the money and let me be a debtor and a beggar if Thou wilt,
only let me pray to Thee; and do Thou make it up to my creditors."

Wingfold's spirit was greatly moved. Here was victory! Whether the
fortune was a fact or fancy, made no feature of difference. He thanked
God and took courage. The same instant the door opened, and Dorothy came
in hesitating, and looking strangely anxious. He threw her a
face-question. She gently bowed her head, and gave him a letter with a
broad black border which she held in her hand.

He read it. No room for rational doubt was left. He folded it softly,
gave it back to her, and rising, kneeled down by the bedside, near the
foot, and said--

"Father, whose is the fullness of the earth, I thank Thee that Thou hast
set my brother's heel on the neck of his enemy. But the suddenness of
Thy relief from holy poverty and evil care, has so shaken his heart and
brain, or rather, perhaps, has made him think so keenly of his lack of
faith in his Father in heaven, that he fears Thou hast thrown him the
gift in disdain, as to a dog under the table, though never didst Thou
disdain a dog, and not given it as to a child, from Thy hand into his.
Father, let Thy spirit come with the gift, or take it again, and make
him poor and able to pray."--Here came an _amen_, groaned out as from
the bottom of a dungeon.--"Pardon him, Father," the curate prayed on,
"all his past discontent and the smallness of his faith. Thou art our
Father, and Thou knowest us tenfold better than we know ourselves; we
pray Thee not only to pardon us, but to make all righteous excuse for
us, when we dare not make any for ourselves, for Thou art the truth. We
will try to be better children. We will go on climbing the mount of God
through all the cloudy darkness that swaths it, yea, even in the face of
the worst terrors--that when we reach the top, we shall find no one
there."--Here Dorothy burst into sobs.--"Father!" thus the curate ended
his prayer, "take pity on Thy children. Thou wilt not give them a piece
of bread, in place of a stone--to poison them! The egg Thou givest will
not be a serpent's. We are Thine, and Thou art ours: in us be Thy will
done! Amen."

As he rose from his knees, he saw that the minister had turned his face
to the wall, and lay perfectly still. Rightly judging that he was
renewing the vain effort to rouse, by force of the will, feelings which
had been stunned by the strange shock, he ventured to try a more
authoritative mode of address.

"And now, Mr. Drake, you have got to spend this money," he said, "and
the sooner you set about it the better. Whatever may be your ideas about
the principal, you are bound to spend at least every penny of the
income."

The sad-hearted man stared at the curate.

"How is a man to do any thing whom God has forsaken?" he said.

"If He had forsaken you, for as dreary work as it would be, you would
have to try to do your duty notwithstanding. But He has not forsaken
you. He has given you a very sharp lesson, I grant, and as such you must
take it, but that is the very opposite of forsaking you. He has let you
know what it is not to trust in Him, and what it would be to have money
that did not come from His hand. You did not conquer in the fight with
Mammon when you were poor, and God has given you another chance: He
expects you to get the better of him now you are rich. If God had
forsaken you, I should have found you strutting about and glorying over
imagined enemies."

"Do you really think that is the mind of God toward me?" cried the poor
man, starting half up in bed. "_Do_ you think so?" he repeated, staring
at the curate almost as wildly as at first, but with a different
expression.

"I do," said Wingfold; "and it will be a bad job indeed if you fail in
both trials. But that I am sure you will not. It is your business now to
get this money into your hands as soon as possible, and proceed to spend
it."

"Would there be any harm in ordering a few things from the
tradespeople?" asked Dorothy.

"How should there be?" returned Wingfold.

"Because, you see," answered Dorothy, "we can't be sure of a bird in the
bush."

"Can you be sure of it in your hands? It may spread its wings when you
least expect it. But Helen will be delighted to take the risk--up to a
few hundreds," he added laughing.

"Somebody may dispute the will: they do sometimes," said Dorothy.

"They do very often," answered Wingfold. "It does not look likely in the
present case; but our trust must be neither in the will nor in the
fortune, but in the living God. You have to get all the _good_ out of
this money you can. If you will walk over to the rectory with me now,
while your father gets up, we will carry the good news to my wife, and
she will lend you what money you like, so that you need order nothing
without paying for it."

"Please ask her not to tell any body," said Mr. Drake. "I shouldn't like
it talked about before I understand it myself."

"You are quite right. If I were you I would tell nobody yet but Mr.
Drew. He is a right man, and will help you to bear your good fortune. I
have always found good fortune harder to bear than bad."

Dorothy ran to put her bonnet on. The curate went back to the bedside.
Mr. Drake had again turned his face to the wall.

"Sixty years of age!" he was murmuring to himself.

"Mr. Drake," said Wingfold, "so long as you bury yourself with the
centipedes in your own cellar, instead of going out into God's world,
you are tempting Satan and Mammon together to come and tempt you.
Worship the God who made the heaven and the earth, and the sea and the
mines of iron and gold, by doing His will in the heart of them. Don't
worship the poor picture of Him you have got hanging up in your
closet;--worship the living power beyond your ken. Be strong in Him
whose is your strength, and all strength. Help Him in His work with His
own. Give life to His gold. Rub the canker off it, by sending it from
hand to hand. You must rise and bestir yourself. I will come and see you
again to-morrow. Good-by for the present."

He turned away and walked from the room. But his hand had scarcely left
the lock, when he heard the minister alight from his bed upon the floor.

"He'll do!" said the curate to himself, and walked down the stair.

When he got home, he left Dorothy with his wife, and going to his study,
wrote the following verses, which had grown in his mind as he walked
silent beside her:--

  WHAT MAN IS THERE OF YOU?

  The homely words, how often read!
    How seldom fully known!
  "Which father of you, asked for bread,
    Would give his son a stone?"

  How oft has bitter tear been shed,
    And heaved how many a groan,
  Because Thou wouldst not give for bread
    The thing that was a stone!

  How oft the child Thou wouldst have fed,
    Thy gift away has thrown!
  He prayed, Thou heardst, and gav'st the bread:
    He cried, it is a stone!

  Lord, if I ask in doubt or dread
    Lest I be left to moan--
  I am the man who, asked for bread,
    Would give his son a stone.

As Dorothy returned from the rectory, where Helen had made her happier
than all the money by the kind words she said to her, she stopped at Mr.
Jones' shop, and bought of him a bit of loin of mutton.

"Shan't I put it down, miss?" he suggested, seeing her take out her
purse.--Helen had just given her the purse: they had had great fun, with
both tears and laughter over it.

"I would rather not--thank you very much," she replied with a smile.

He gave her a kind, searching glance, and took the money.

That day Juliet dined with them. When the joint appeared, Amanda, who
had been in the kitchen the greater part of the morning, clapped her
hands as at sight of an old acquaintance.

"Dere it comes! dere it comes!" she cried.

But the minister's grace was a little longer than she liked, for he was
trying hard to feel grateful. I think some people mistake pleasure and
satisfaction for thankfulness: Mr. Drake was not so to be taken in. Ere
long, however, he found them a good soil for thankfulness to grow
in.--So Amanda fidgeted not a little, and the moment the grace was
over--

"Now 'en! now 'en!" she almost screamed, her eyes sparkling with
delight. "'Iss is dinner!--'Ou don't have dinner every day, Miss
Mellidif!"

"Be quiet, Ducky," said her aunt, as she called her. "You mustn't make
any remarks."

"Ducky ain't makin' no marks," returned the child, looking anxiously at
the table-cloth, and was quiet but not for long.

"Lisbef say surely papa's sip come home wif 'e nice dinner!" she said
next.

"No, my ducky," said Mr. Drake: "it was God's ship that came with it."

"Dood sip!" said the child.

"It will come one day and another, and carry us all home," said the
minister.

"Where Ducky's yeal own papa and mamma yive in a big house, papa?" asked
Amanda, more seriously.

"I will tell you more about it when you are older," said Mr. Drake. "Now
let us eat the dinner God has sent us." He was evidently far happier
already, though his daughter could see that every now and then his
thoughts were away; she hoped they were thanking God. Before dinner was
over, he was talking quite cheerfully, drawing largely from his stores
both of reading and experience. After the child was gone, they told
Juliet of their good fortune. She congratulated them heartily, then
looked a little grave, and said--

"Perhaps you would like me to go?"

"What!" said Mr. Drake; "does your friendship go no further than that?
Having helped us so much in adversity, will you forsake us the moment
prosperity looks in at the window?"

Juliet gave one glance at Dorothy, smiled, and said no more. For
Dorothy, she was already building a castle for Juliet--busily.




CHAPTER XXIV.

JULIET'S CHAMBER.


After tea, Mr. Drake and Dorothy went out for a walk together--a thing
they had not once done since the church-meeting of acrid memory in which
had been decreed the close of the minister's activity, at least in
Glaston. It was a lovely June twilight; the bats were flitting about
like the children of the gloamin', and the lamps of the laburnum and
lilac hung dusky among the trees of Osterfield Park.

Juliet, left all but alone in the house, sat at her window, reading. Her
room was on the first floor, but the dining-room beneath it was of low
pitch, and at the lane-door there were two steps down into the house, so
that her window was at no great height above the lane. It was open, but
there was little to be seen from it, for immediately opposite rose a
high old garden-wall, hiding every thing with its gray bulk, lovelily
blotted with lichens and moss, brown and green and gold, except the
wall-flowers and stone-crop that grew on its coping, and a running plant
that hung down over it, like a long fringe worn thin. Had she put her
head out of the window, she would have seen in the one direction a
cow-house, and in the other the tall narrow iron gate of the garden--and
that was all. The twilight deepened as she read, until the words before
her began to play hide and seek; they got worse and worse, until she was
tired of catching at them; and when at last she stopped for a moment,
they were all gone like a troop of fairies, and her reading was ended.
She closed the book, and was soon dreaming awake; and the twilight world
was the globe in which the dream-fishes came and went--now swelling up
strange and near, now sinking away into the curious distance.

Her mood was broken by the sound of hoofs, which she almost immediately
recognized as those of the doctor's red horse--great hoofs falling at
the end of long straight-flung steps. Her heart began to beat violently,
and confident in the protection of the gathering night, she rose and
looked cautiously out toward the side on which was the approach. In a
few moments, round the furthest visible corner, and past the gate in the
garden-wall, swung a huge shadowy form--gigantic in the dusk. She drew
back her head, but ere she could shape her mind to retreat from the
window, the solid gloom hurled itself thundering past, and she stood
trembling and lonely, with the ebb of Ruber's paces in her ears--and in
her hand a letter. In a minute she came to herself, closed her window,
drew down the blind, lighted a candle, set it on the window-sill, and
opened the letter. It contained these verses, and nothing more:--

  My morning rose in laughter--
    A gold and azure day.
  Dull clouds came trooping after,
    Livid, and sullen gray.

  At noon, the rain did batter,
    And it thundered like a hell:
  I sighed, it is no matter,
    At night I shall sleep as well.

  But I longed with a madness tender
    For an evening like the morn,
  That my day might die in splendor,
    Not folded in mist forlorn--

  Die like a tone elysian,
    Like a bee in a cactus-flower,
  Like a day-surprised vision,
    Like a wind in a summer shower.

  Through the vaulted clouds about me
    Broke trembling an azure space:
  Was it a dream to flout me--
    Or was it a perfect face?

  The sky and the face together
    Are gone, and the wind blows fell.
  But what matters a dream or the weather?
    At night it will all be well.

  For the day of life and labor,
    Of ecstasy and pain,
  Is only a beaten tabor,
    And I shall not dream again.

  But as the old Night steals o'er me,
    Deepening till all is dead,
  I shall see thee still before me
    Stand with averted head.

  And I shall think, Ah sorrow!
    The _might_ that never was _may!_
  The night that has no morrow!
    And the sunset all in gray!

Juliet laid her head on her hands and wept.

"Why should I not let him have his rosy sunset?" she thought. "It is all
he hopes for--cares for, I think--poor fellow! Am I not good enough to
give him that? What does it matter about me, if it is all but a vision
that flits between heaven and earth, and makes a passing shadow on human
brain and nerves?--a tale that is telling--then a tale that is told!
Much the good people make out of their better faith! Should _I_ be
troubled to learn that it was indeed a lasting sleep? If I were dead,
and found myself waking, should I want to rise, or go to sleep again?
Why should not I too dare to hope for an endless rest? Where would be
the wrong to any? If there be a God, He will have but to wake me to
punish me hard enough. Why should I not hope at least for such a lovely
thing? Can any one help desiring peace? Oh, to sleep, and sleep, and
wake no more forever and ever! I would not hasten the sleep; the end
will surely come, and why should we not enjoy the dream a little
longer--at least while it is a good dream, and the tossing has not
begun? There would always be a time. Why wake before our time out of the
day into the dark nothing? I should always want to see what to-morrow
and to-morrow and to-morrow would bring--that is, so long as he loved
me. He is noble, and sad, and beautiful, and gracious!--but would
he--could he love me to the end--even if--? Why should we not make the
best of what we have? Why should we not make life as happy to ourselves
and to others as we can--however worthless, however arrant a cheat it
may be? Even if there be no such thing as love, if it be all but a
lovely vanity, a bubble-play of color, why not let the bubble-globe
swell, and the tide of its ocean of color flow and rush and mingle and
change? Will it not break at last, and the last come soon enough, when
of all the glory is left but a tear on the grass? When we dream a
pleasant dream, and know it is but a dream, we will to dream on, and
quiet our minds that it may not be scared and flee: why should we not
yield to the stronger dream, that it may last yet another sweet,
beguiling moment? Why should he not love me--kiss me? Why should we not
be sad together, that we are not and can not be the real man and woman
we would--that we are but the forms of a dream--the fleeting shadows of
the night of Nature?--mourn together that the meddlesome hand of fate
should have roused us to consciousness and aspiration so long before the
maturity of our powers that we are but a laughter--no--a scorn and a
weeping to ourselves? We could at least sympathize with each other in
our common misery--bear with its weakness, comfort its regrets, hide its
mortifications, cherish its poor joys, and smooth the way down the
steepening slope to the grave! Then, if in the decrees of blind fate,
there should be a slow, dull procession toward perfection, if indeed
some human God be on the way to be born, it would be grand, although we
should know nothing of it, to have done our part fearless and hopeless,
to have lived and died that the triumphant Sorrow might sit throned on
the ever dying heart of the universe. But never, never would I have
chosen to live for that! Yes, one might choose to be born, if there were
suffering one might live or die to soften, to cure! That would be to be
like Paul Faber. To will to be born for that would be grand indeed!"

In paths of thought like these her mind wandered, her head lying upon
her arms on the old-fashioned, wide-spread window-sill. At length, weary
with emotion and weeping, she fell fast asleep, and slept for some time.

The house was very still. Mr. Drake and Dorothy were in no haste to
return. Amanda was asleep, and Lisbeth was in the kitchen--perhaps also
asleep.

Juliet woke with a great start. Arms were around her from behind,
lifting her from her half-prone position of sorrowful rest. With a
terrified cry, she strove to free herself.

"Juliet, my love! my heart! be still, and let me speak," said Faber.
His voice trembled as if full of tears. "I can bear this no longer. You
are my fate. I never lived till I knew you. I shall cease to live when I
know for certain that you turn from me."

Juliet was like one half-drowned, just lifted from the water, struggling
to beat it away from eyes and ears and mouth.

"Pray leave me, Mr. Faber," she cried, half-terrified, half-bewildered,
as she rose and turned toward him. But while she pushed him away with
one hand, she unconsciously clasped his arm tight with the other. "You
have no right to come into my room, and surprise me--startle me so! Do
go away. I will come to you."

"Pardon, pardon, my angel! Do not speak so loud," he said, falling on
his knees, and clasping hers.

"Do go away," persisted Juliet, trying to remove his grasp. "What will
they think if they find us--you here. They know I am perfectly well."

"You drive me to liberties that make me tremble, Juliet. Everywhere you
avoid me. You are never to be seen without some hateful protector. Ages
ago I put up a prayer to you--one of life or death to me, and, like the
God you believe in, you have left it unanswered. You have no pity on the
sufferings you cause me! If your God _be_ cruel, why should you be cruel
too? Is not one tormentor enough in your universe? If there be a future
let us go on together to find it. If there be not, let us yet enjoy what
of life may be enjoyed. My past is a sad one--"

Juliet shuddered.

"Ah, my beautiful, you too have suffered!" he went on. "Let us be angels
of mercy to each other, each helping the other to forget! My griefs I
should count worthless if I might but erase yours."

"I would I could say the same!" said Juliet, but only in her heart.

"Whatever they may have been," he continued, "my highest ambition shall
be to make you forget them. We will love like beings whose only eternity
is the moment. Come with me, Juliet; we will go down into the last
darkness together, loving each other--and then peace. At least there is
no eternal hate in my poor, ice-cold religion, as there is in yours. I
am not suffering alone, Juliet. All whom it is my work to relieve, are
suffering from your unkindness. For a time I prided myself that I gave
every one of them as full attention as before, but I can not keep it up.
I am defeated. My brain seems deserting me. I mistake symptoms, forget
cases, confound medicines, fall into incredible blunders. My hand
trembles, my judgment wavers, my will is undecided. Juliet, you are
ruining me."

"He saved my life," said Juliet to herself, "and that it is which has
brought him to this. He has a claim to me. I am his property. He found
me a castaway on the shore of Death, and gave me _his_ life to live
with. He must not suffer where I can prevent it."--She was on the point
of yielding.

The same moment she heard a step in the lane approaching the door.

"If you love me, do go now, dear Mr. Faber," she said. "I will see you
again. Do not urge me further to-night.--Ah, I wish! I wish!" she added,
with a deep sigh, and ceased.

The steps came up to the door. There came a knock at it. They heard
Lisbeth go to open it. Faber rose.

"Go into the drawing-room," said Juliet. "Lisbeth may be coming to fetch
me; she must not see you here."

He obeyed. Without a word he left the chamber, and went into the
drawing-room. He had been hardly a moment there, when Wingfold entered.
It was almost dark, but the doctor stood against the window, and the
curate knew him.

"Ah, Faber!" he said, "it is long since I saw you. But each has been
about his work, I suppose, and there could not be a better reason."

"Under different masters, then," returned Faber, a little out of temper.

"I don't exactly think so. All good work is done under the same master."

"Pooh! Pooh!"

"Who is your master, then?"

"My conscience. Who is yours?"

"The Author of my conscience."

"A legendary personage!"

"One who is every day making my conscience harder upon me. Until I
believed in Him, my conscience was dull and stupid--not half-awake,
indeed."

"Oh! I see You mean my conscience is dull and stupid."

"I do not. But if you were once lighted up with the light of the world,
you would pass just such a judgment on yourself. I can't think you so
different from myself, as that that shouldn't be the case; though most
heartily I grant you do your work ten times better than I did. And all
the time I thought myself an honest man! I wasn't. A man may honestly
think himself honest, and a fresh week's experience may make him doubt
it altogether. I sorely want a God to make me honest."

Here Juliet entered the room, greeted Mr. Wingfold, and then shook hands
with Faber. He was glad the room was dark.

"What do you think, Miss Meredith--is a man's conscience enough for his
guidance?" said the curate.

"I don't know any thing about a man's conscience," answered Juliet.

"A woman's then?" said the curate.

"What else has she got?" returned Juliet.

The doctor was inwardly cursing the curate for talking shop. Only, if a
man knows nothing so good, so beautiful, so necessary, as the things in
his shop, what else ought he to talk--especially if he is ready to give
them without money and without price? The doctor would have done better
to talk shop too.

"Of course he has nothing else," answered the curate; "and if he had, he
must follow his conscience all the same."

"There you are, Wingfold!--always talking paradoxes!" said Faber.

"Why, man! you may only have a blundering boy to guide you, but if he is
your only guide, you must follow him. You don't therefore call him a
sufficient guide!"

"What a logomachist you are! If it is a horn lantern you've got, you
needn't go mocking at it."

"The lantern is not the light. Perhaps you can not change your horn for
glass, but what if you could better the light? Suppose the boy's father
knew all about the country, but you never thought it worth while to send
the lad to him for instructions?"

"Suppose I didn't believe he had a father? Suppose he told me he
hadn't?"

"Some men would call out to know if there was any body in the house to
give the boy a useful hint."

"Oh bother! I'm quite content with my fellow."

"Well, for my part I should count my conscience, were it ten times
better than it is, poor company on any journey. Nothing less than the
living Truth ever with me can make existence a peace to me,--that's the
joy of the Holy Ghost, Miss Meredith.--What if you should find one day,
Faber, that, of all facts, the thing you have been so coolly refusing
was the most precious and awful?"

Faber had had more than enough of it. There was but one thing precious
to him; Juliet was the perfect flower of nature, the apex of law, the
last presentment of evolution, the final reason of things! The very soul
of the world stood there in the dusk, and there also stood the foolish
curate, whirling his little vortex of dust and ashes between him and
her!

"It comes to this," said Faber; "what you say moves nothing in me. I am
aware of no need, no want of that Being of whom you speak. Surely if in
Him I did live and move and have my being, as some old heathen taught
your Saul of Tarsus, I should in one mode or another be aware of Him!"

While he spoke, Mr. Drake and Dorothy had come into the room. They stood
silent.

"That is a weighty word," said Wingfold. "But what if you feel His
presence every moment, only do not recognize it as such?"

"Where would be the good of it to me then?"

"The good of it to you might lie in the blinding. What if any further
revelation to one who did not seek it would but obstruct the knowledge
of Him? Truly revealed, the word would be read untruly--even as The Word
has been read by many in all ages. Only the pure in heart, we are told,
shall see Him. The man who, made by Him, does not desire Him--how should
he know Him?"

"Why don't I desire Him then?--I don't."

"That is for you to find out."

"I do what I know to be right; even on your theory I ought to get on,"
said Faber, turning from him with a laugh.

"I think so too," replied Wingfold. "Go on, and prosper. Only, if there
be untruth in you alongside of the truth--? It might be, and you are not
awake to it. It is marvelous what things can co-exist in a human mind."

"In that case, why should not your God help me?"

"Why not? I think he will. But it may _have_ to be in a way you will not
like."

"Well, well! good night. Talk is but talk, whatever be the subject of
it.--I beg your pardon," he added, shaking hands with the minister and
his daughter; "I did not see you come in. Good night."

"I won't allow that talk is only talk, Faber," Wingfold called after him
with a friendly laugh. Then turning to Mr. Drake, "Pardon me," he said,
"for treating you with so much confidence. I saw you come in, but
believed you would rather have us end our talk than break it off."

"Certainly. But I can't help thinking you grant him too much, Mr.
Wingfold," said the minister seriously.

"I never find I lose by giving, even in argument," said the curate.
"Faber rides his hobby well, but the brute is a sorry jade. He will find
one day she has not a sound joint in her whole body."

The man who is anxious to hold every point, will speedily bring a
question to a mere dispute about trifles, leaving the real matter, whose
elements may appeal to the godlike in every man, out in the cold. Such a
man, having gained his paltry point, will crow like the bantam he is,
while the other, who may be the greater, perhaps the better man,
although in the wrong, is embittered by his smallness, and turns away
with increased prejudice. Human nature can hardly be blamed for its
readiness to impute to the case the shallowness of its pleader. Few men
do more harm than those who, taking the right side, dispute for personal
victory, and argue, as they are sure then to do, ungenerously. But even
genuine argument for the truth is not preaching the gospel, neither is
he whose unbelief is thus assailed, likely to be brought thereby into
any mood but one unfit for receiving it. Argument should be kept to
books; preachers ought to have nothing to do with it--at all events in
the pulpit. There let them hold forth light, and let him who will,
receive it, and him who will not, forbear. God alone can convince, and
till the full time is come for the birth of the truth in a soul, the
words of even the Lord Himself are not there potent.

"The man irritates me, I confess," said Mr. Drake. "I do not say he is
self-satisfied, but he is very self-sufficient."

"He is such a good fellow," said Wingfold, "that I think God will not
let him go on like this very long. I think we shall live to see a change
upon him. But much as I esteem and love the man, I can not help a
suspicion that he has a great lump of pride somewhere about him, which
has not a little to do with his denials."

Juliet's blood seemed seething in her veins as she heard her lover thus
weighed, and talked over; and therewith came the first rift of a
threatened breach betwixt her heart and the friends who had been so good
to her. He had done far more for her than any of them, and mere loyalty
seemed to call upon her to defend him; but she did not know how, and,
dissatisfied with herself as well as indignant with them, she maintained
an angry silence.




CHAPTER XXV.

OSTERFIELD PARK.


It was a long time since Mr. Drake and Dorothy had had such a talk
together, or had spent such a pleasant evening as that on which they
went into Osterfield Park to be alone with a knowledge of their changed
fortunes. The anxiety of each, differing so greatly from that of the
other, had tended to shut up each in loneliness beyond the hearing of
the other; so that, while there was no breach in their love, it was yet
in danger of having long to endure

    "an expansion,
  Like gold to airy thinness beat."

But this evening their souls rushed together. The father's anxiety was
chiefly elevated; the daughter's remained much what it was before; yet
these anxieties no longer availed to keep them apart.

Each relation of life has its peculiar beauty of holiness; but that
beauty is the expression of its essential truth, and the essence itself
is so strong that it bestows upon its embodiment even the power of
partial metamorphosis with all other vital relations. How many daughters
have in the devotion of their tenderness, become as mothers to their own
fathers! Who has not known some sister more of a wife to a man than she
for whose sake he neglected her? But it will take the loves of all the
relations of life gathered in one, to shadow the love which, in the
kingdom of heaven, is recognized as due to each from each human being
_per se_. It is for the sake of the essential human, that all human
relations and all forms of them exist--that we may learn what it is, and
become capable of loving it aright.

Dorothy would now have been as a mother to her father, had she had but a
good hope, if no more, of finding her Father in heaven. She was not at
peace enough to mother any body. She had indeed a grasp of the skirt of
His robe--only she could not be sure it was not the mere fringe of a
cloud she held. Not the less was her father all her care, and pride, and
joy. Of his faults she saw none: there was enough of the noble and
generous in him to hide them from a less partial beholder than a
daughter. They had never been serious in comparison with his virtues. I
do not mean that every fault is not so serious that a man must be
willing to die twenty deaths to get rid of it; but that, relatively to
the getting rid of it, a fault is serious or not, in proportion to the
depth of its root, rather than the amount of its foliage. Neither can
that be the worst-conditioned fault, the man's own suspicion of which
would make him hang his head in shame; those are his worst faults which
a man will start up to defend; those are the most dangerous moral
diseases whose symptoms are regarded as the signs of health.

Like lovers they walked out together, with eyes only for each other, for
the good news had made them shy--through the lane, into the cross
street, and out into Pine street, along which they went westward,
meeting the gaze of the low sun, which wrapped them round in a veil of
light and dark, for the light made their eyes dark, so that they seemed
feeling their way out of the light into the shadow.

"This is like life," said the pastor, looking down at the precious face
beside him: "our eyes can best see from under the shadow of
afflictions."

"I would rather it were from under the shadow of God's wings," replied
Dorothy timidly.

"So it is! so it is! Afflictions are but the shadow of His wings," said
her father eagerly. "Keep there, my child, and you will never need the
afflictions I have needed. I have been a hard one to save."

But the child thought within herself, "Alas, father! you have never had
any afflictions which you or I either could not bear tenfold better than
what I have to bear." She was perhaps right. Only she did not know that
when she got through, all would be transfigured with the light of her
resurrection, just as her father's poverty now was in the light of his
plenty.

Little more passed between them in the street. All the way to the
entrance of the park they were silent. There they exchanged a few words
with the sweet-faced little dwarf-woman that opened the gate, and those
few words set the currents of their thoughts singing yet more sweetly as
they flowed. They entered the great park, through the trees that
bordered it, still in silence, but when they reached the wide expanse of
grass, with its clumps of trees and thickets, simultaneously they
breathed a deep breath of the sweet wind, and the fountains of their
deeps were broken up. The evening was lovely, they wandered about long
in delight, and much was the trustful converse they held. It was getting
dark before they thought of returning.

The father had been telling the daughter how he had mourned and wept
when his boys were taken from him, never thinking at all of the girl who
was left him.

"And now," he said, "I would not part with my Dorothy to have them back
the finest boys in the world. What would my old age be without you, my
darling?"

Dorothy's heart beat high. Surely there must be a Father in heaven too!
They walked a while in a great silence, for the heart of each was full.
And all the time scarce an allusion had been made to the money.

As they returned they passed the new house, at some distance, on the
highest point in the park. It stood unfinished, with all its windows
boarded up.

"The walls of that house," said Mr. Drake, "were scarcely above ground
when I came to Glaston. So they had been for twenty years, and so they
remained until, as you remember, the building was recommenced some three
or four years ago. Now, again, it is forsaken, and only the wind is at
home in it."

"They tell me the estate is for sale," said Dorothy. "Those
building-lots, just where the lane leads into Pine street, I fancy
belong to it."

"I wish," returned her father, "they would sell me that tumble-down
place in the hollow they call the Old House of Glaston. I shouldn't mind
paying a good sum for it. What a place it would be to live in! And what
a pleasure there would be in the making of it once more habitable, and
watching order dawn out of neglect!"

"It would be delightful," responded Dorothy. "When I was a child, it
was one of my dreams that that house was my papa's--with the wild garden
and all the fruit, and the terrible lake, and the ghost of the lady that
goes about in the sack she was drowned in. But would you really buy it,
father, if you could get it?"

"I think I should, Dorothy," answered Mr. Drake.

"Would it not be damp--so much in the hollow? Is it not the lowest spot
in the park?"

"In the park--yes; for the park drains into it. But the park lies high;
and you must note that the lake, deep as it is--very deep, yet drains
into the Lythe. For all they say of no bottom to it, I am nearly sure
the deepest part of the lake is higher than the surface of the river. If
I am right, then we could, if we pleased, empty the lake altogether--not
that I should like the place nearly so well without it. The situation is
charming--and so sheltered!--looking full south--just the place to keep
open house in!"

"That is just like you, father!" cried Dorothy, clapping her hands once
and holding them together as she looked up at him. "The very day you
are out of prison, you want to begin to keep an open house!--Dear
father!"

"Don't mistake me, my darling. There was a time, long ago, after your
mother was good enough to marry me, when--I am ashamed to confess it
even to you, my child--I did enjoy making a show. I wanted people to
see, that, although I was a minister of a sect looked down upon by the
wealthy priests of a worldly establishment, I knew how to live after the
world's fashion as well as they. That time you will scarcely recall,
Dorothy?"

"I remember the coachman's buttons," answered Dorothy.

"Well! I suppose it will be the same with not a few times and
circumstances we may try to recall in the other world. Some
insignificant thing will be all, and fittingly too, by which we shall be
able to identify them.--I liked to give nice dinner parties, and we
returned every invitation we accepted. I took much pains to have good
wines, and the right wines with the right dishes, and all that kind of
thing--though I dare say I made more blunders than I knew. Your mother
had been used to that way of living, and it was no show in her as it was
in me. Then I was proud of my library and the rare books in it. I
delighted in showing them, and talking over the rarity of this edition,
the tallness of that copy, the binding, and such-like follies. And where
was the wonder, seeing I served religion so much in the same
way--descanting upon the needlework that clothed the king's daughter,
instead of her inward glory! I do not say always, for I had my better
times. But how often have I not insisted on the mint and anise and
cummin, and forgotten the judgment, mercy and faith! How many sermons
have I not preached about the latchets of Christ's shoes, when I might
have been talking about Christ himself! But now I do not want a good
house to make a show with any more: I want to be hospitable. I don't
call giving dinners being hospitable. I would have my house a
hiding-place from the wind, a covert from the tempest. That would be to
be hospitable. Ah! if your mother were with us, my child! But you will
be my little wife, as you have been for so many years now.--God keeps
open house; I should like to keep open house.--I wonder does any body
ever preach hospitality as a Christian duty?"

"I hope you won't keep a butler, and set up for grand, father," said
Dorothy.

"Indeed I will not, my child. I would not run the risk of postponing the
pleasure of the Lord to that of inhospitable servants. I will look to
you to keep a warm, comfortable, welcoming house, and such servants only
as shall be hospitable in heart and behavior, and make no difference
between the poor and the rich."

"I can't feel that any body is poor," said Dorothy, after a pause,
"except those that can't be sure of God.--They are so poor!" she added.

"You are right, my child!" returned her father. "It was not my
poverty--it was not being sure of God that crushed me.--How long is it
since I was poor, Dorothy?"

"Two days, father--not two till to-morrow morning."

"It looks to me two centuries. My mind is at ease, and I have not paid a
debt yet! How vile of me to want the money in my own hand, and not be
content it should be in God's pocket, to come out just as it was wanted!
Alas! I have more faith in my uncle's leavings than in my Father's
generosity! But I must not forget gratitude in shame. Come, my child--no
one can see us--let us kneel down here on the grass and pray to God who
is in yon star just twinkling through the gray, and in my heart and in
yours, my child."

I will not give the words of the minister's prayer. The words are not
the prayer. Mr. Drake's words were commonplace, with much of the
conventionality and platitude of prayer-meetings. He had always objected
to the formality of the Prayer-book, but the words of his own prayers
without book were far more formal; the prayer itself was in the heart,
not on the lips, and was far better than the words. But poor Dorothy
heard only the words, and they did not help her. They seemed rather to
freeze than revive her faith, making her feel as if she never could
believe in the God of her father. She was too unhappy to reason well, or
she might have seen that she was not bound to measure God by the way her
father talked to him--that the form of the prayer had to do with her
father, not immediately with God--that God might be altogether adorable,
notwithstanding the prayers of all heathens and of all saints.

Their talk turned again upon the Old House of Glaston.

"If it be true, as I have heard ever since I came," said Mr. Drake,
"that Lord de Barre means to pull down the house and plow up the garden,
and if he be so short of money as they say, he might perhaps take a few
thousands for it. The Lythe bounds the estate, and there makes a great
loop, so that a portion might be cut off by a straight line from one arm
of the curve to the other, which would be quite outside the park. I will
set some inquiry on foot. I have wished for a long time to leave the
river, only we had a lease. The Old House is nothing like so low as the
one we are in now. Besides, as I propose, we should have space to build,
if we found it desirable, on the level of the park."

When they reached the gate on their return, a second dwarfish figure, a
man, pigeon-chested, short-necked, and asthmatic--a strange, gnome-like
figure, came from the lodge to open it. Every body in Glaston knew
Polwarth the gatekeeper.

"How is the asthma to-night, Mr. Polwarth?" said the pastor. He had not
yet got rid of the tone in which in his young days he had been
accustomed to address the poor of his flock--a tone half familiar, half
condescending. To big ships barnacles will stick--and may add weeks to
the length of a voyage too.

"Not very bad, thank you, Mr. Drake. But, bad or not, it is always a
friendly devil," answered the little man.

"I am ast---- a little surprised to hear you use such----express
yourself so, Mr. Polwarth," said the minister.

The little man laughed a quiet, huskily melodious, gently merry laugh.

"I am not original in the idea, and scarcely so in my way of expressing
it. I am sorry you don't like it, Mr. Drake," he said. "I found it in
the second epistle to the Corinthians last night, and my heart has been
full of it ever since. It is surely no very bad sign if the truth should
make us merry at a time! It ought to do so, I think, seeing merriment is
one of the lower forms of bliss."

"I am at a loss to understand you, Mr. Polwarth," said the minister.

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Drake. I will come to the point. In the passage
I refer to St. Paul says: 'There was given to me a thorn in the flesh,
the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above
measure:'--am I not right in speaking of such a demon as a friendly one?
He was a gift from God."

"I had not observed--that is, I had not taken particular notice of the
unusual combination of phrases in the passage," answered Mr. Drake. "It
is a very remarkable one, certainly. I remember no other in which a
messenger of Satan is spoken of as being _given_ by God."

"Clearly, sir, St. Paul accepted him as something to be grateful for, so
soon as his mission was explained to him; and after that, who is to say
what may not be a gift of God! It won't do to grumble at any thing--will
it, sir?--when it may so unexpectedly turn out to be _given_ to us by
God. I begin to suspect that never, until we see a thing plainly a gift
of God, can we be sure that we see it right. I am quite certain the most
unpleasant things may be such gifts. I should be glad enough to part
with this asthma of mine, if it pleased God it should depart from me;
but would I yield a fraction of what it has brought me, for the best
lungs in England? I trow not!"

"You are a happy man, Mr. Polwarth--if you can say that and abide by
it."

"I _am_ a happy man, sir. I don't know what would come of me sometimes,
for very gladness, if I hadn't my good friend, the asthma-devil, to keep
me down a bit. Good night, sir," he added, for Mr. Drake was already
moving away.

He felt superior to this man, set him down as forward, did not quite
approve of him. Always ready to judge involuntarily from externals, he
would have been shocked to discover how much the deformity of the man,
which caused him discomfort, prejudiced him also against him. Then
Polwarth seldom went to a place of worship, and when he did, went to
church! A cranky, visionary, talkative man, he was in Mr. Drake's eyes.
He set him down as one of those mystical interpreters of the Word, who
are always searching it for strange things, whose very insight leads
them to vagary, blinding them to the relative value of things. It is
amazing from what a mere fraction of fact concerning him, a man will
dare judge the whole of another man. In reality, little Polwarth could
have carried big Drake to the top of any hill Difficulty, up which, in
his spiritual pilgrimage, he had yet had to go panting and groaning--and
to the top of many another besides, within sight even of which the
minister would never come in this world.

"He is too ready with his spiritual experience, that little man!--too
fond of airing it," said the minister to his daughter. "I don't quite
know what to make of him. He is a favorite with Mr. Wingfold; but my
experience makes me doubtful. I suspect prodigies."

Now Polwarth was not in the habit of airing his religious experiences;
but all Glaston could see that the minister was in trouble, and he
caught at the first opportunity he had of showing his sympathy with him,
offering him a share of the comfort he had just been receiving himself.
He smiled at its apparent rejection, and closed the gate softly, saying
to himself that the good man would think of it yet, he was sure.

Dorothy took little interest in Polwarth, little therefore in her
father's judgment of him. But, better even than Wingfold himself, that
poor physical failure of a man could have helped her from under every
gravestone that was now crushing the life out of her--not so much from
superiority of intellect, certainly not from superiority of learning,
but mainly because he was alive all through, because the life eternal
pervaded every atom of his life, every thought, every action. Door nor
window of his being had a lock to it! All of them were always on the
swing to the wind that bloweth where it listeth. Upon occasions when
most would seek refuge from the dark sky and gusty weather of trouble,
by hiding from the messengers of Satan in the deepest cellar of their
hearts, there to sit grumbling, Polwarth always went out into the open
air. If the wind was rough, there was none the less life in it: the
breath of God, it was rough to blow the faults from him, genial to put
fresh energy in him; if the rain fell, it was the water of cleansing and
growth. Misfortune he would not know by that name: there was no _mis_
but in himself, and that the messenger of Satan was there to buffet. So
long as God was, all was right. No wonder the minister then was
incapable of measuring the gate-keeper! But Polwarth was right about
him--as he went home he pondered the passage to which he had referred
him, wondering whether he was to regard the fortune sent him as a
messenger of Satan given to buffet him.




CHAPTER XXVI.

THE SURGERY DOOR.


That Juliet loved Faber as she had at one time resolved never to love
man, she no longer attempted to conceal from herself; but she was far
from being prepared to confess the discovery to him. His atheism she
satisfactorily justified herself in being more ready to pity than to
blame. There were difficulties! There were more than difficulties! Not a
few of them she did not herself see how to get over! If her father had
been alive, then indeed!--children must not break their parents' hearts.
But if, as _appeared_ the most likely thing, that father, tenderly as
she had loved him, was gone from her forever, if life was but a flash
across from birth to the grave, why should not those who loved make the
best of it for each other during that one moment "brief as the lightning
in the collied night"? They must try to be the more to one another, and
the time was so short. All that Faber had ever pleaded was now
blossoming at once in her thought. She had not a doubt that he loved
her--as would have been enough once at all events. A man of men he
was!--noble, unselfish, independent, a ruler of himself, a benefactor of
his race! What right had those _believers_ to speak of him as they did?
In any personal question he was far their superior. That they
undervalued him, came all of their narrow prejudices! He was not of
their kind, therefore he must be below them! But there were first that
should be last, and last first!

She felt herself no whit worthy of him. She believed herself not for a
moment comparable to him! But his infinite chivalry, gentleness,
compassion, would be her refuge! Such a man would bear with her
weaknesses, love her love, and forgive her sins! If he took her God from
her, he must take His place, and be a God-like man to her! Then, if
there should be any further truth discoverable, why indeed, as himself
said, should they not discover it together? Could they be as likely to
discover it apart, and distracted with longing? She must think about it
a little longer, though. She could not make up her mind the one way, and
would not the other. She would wait and see. She dared not yet.
Something might turn up to decide her. If she could but see into his
heart for a moment!

All this later time, she had been going to church every Sunday, and
listening to sermons in which the curate poured out the energy of a
faith growing stronger day by day; but not a word he said had as yet
laid hold of one root-fiber of her being. She judged, she accepted, she
admired, she refused, she condemned, but she never _did_. To many souls
hell itself seems a less frightful alternative than the agony of
resolve, of turning, of being born again; but Juliet had never got so
far as that: she had never yet looked the thing required of her in the
face. She came herself to wonder that she had made any stand at all
against the arguments of Faber. But how is it that any one who has been
educated in Christianity, yet does not become the disciple of Jesus
Christ, avoids becoming an atheist? To such the whole thing must look so
unlike what it really is! Does he prefer to keep half believing the
revelation, in order to attribute to it elements altogether unlovely,
and so justify himself in refusing it? Were it not better to reject it
altogether if it be not fit to be believed in? If he be unable to do
that, if he dare not proclaim an intellectual unbelief, if some
reverence for father or mother, some inward drawing toward the good
thing, some desire to keep an open door of escape, prevent, what a
hideous folly is the moral disregard! "The thing is true, but I don't
mind it!" What is this acknowledged heedlessness, this apologetic
arrogance? Is it a timid mockery, or the putting forth of a finger in
the very face of the Life of the world? I know well how foolish words
like these must seem to such as Faber, but for such they are not
written; they are written for the men and women who close the lids of
but half-blinded eyes, and think they do God service by not denying
that there is not a sun in the heavens. There may be some denying Christ
who shall fare better than they, when He comes to judge the world with a
judgment which even those whom He sends from Him shall confess to be
absolutely fair--a judgment whose very righteousness may be a
consolation to some upon whom it falls heavily.

That night Juliet hardly knew what she had said to Faber, and longed to
see him again. She slept little, and in the morning was weary and
exhausted. But he had set her the grand example of placing work before
every thing else, and she would do as he taught her. So, in the name of
her lover, and in spite of her headache, she rose to her day's duty.
Love delights to put on the livery of the loved.

After breakfast, as was their custom, Dorothy walked with her to the
place where she gave her first lesson. The nearest way led past the
house of the doctor; but hitherto, as often as she could frame fitting
reason, generally on the ground that they were too early, and must make
a little longer walk of it, Juliet had contrived to avoid turning the
corner of Mr. Drew's shop. This day, however, she sought no excuse, and
they went the natural road. She wanted to pass his house--to get a
glimpse of him if she might.

As they approached it, they were startled by a sudden noise of strife.
The next instant the door of the surgery, which was a small building
connected with the house by a passage, flew open, and a young man was
shot out. He half jumped, half fell down the six or eight steps, turned
at once, and ran up again. He had rather a refined look, notwithstanding
the annoyance and resentment that discomposed his features. The mat had
caught the door and he was just in time to prevent it from being shut in
his face.

"I will _not_ submit to such treatment, Mr. Faber," cried the youth. "It
is not the part of a gentleman to forget that another is one."

"To the devil with your _gentleman!_" they heard the doctor shout in a
rage, from behind the half-closed door. "The less said about the
gentleman the better, when the man is nowhere!"

"Mr. Faber, I will allow no man to insult me," said the youth, and made
a fierce attempt to push the door open.

"You are a wretch below insult," returned the doctor; and the next
moment the youth staggered again down the steps, this time to fall, in
awkward and ignominious fashion, half on the pavement, half in the road.

Then out on the top of the steps came Paul Faber, white with wrath, too
full of indignation to see person or thing except the object of it.

"You damned rascal!" he cried. "If you set foot on my premises again, it
will be at the risk of your contemptible life."

"Come, come, Mr. Faber! this won't do," returned the youth, defiantly,
as he gathered himself up. "I don't want to make a row, but--

"_You_ don't want to make a row, you puppy! Then _I_ do. You don't come
into my house again. I'll have your traps turned out to
you.--Jenkins!--You had better leave the town as fast as you can, too,
for this won't be a secret."

"You'll allow me to call on Mr. Crispin first?"

"Do. Tell him the truth, and see whether he'll take the thing up! If I
were God, I'd damn you!"

"Big words from you, Faber!" said the youth with a sneer, struggling
hard to keep the advantage he had in temper. "Every body knows you don't
believe there is any God."

"Then there ought to be, so long as such as you 'ain't got your deserts.
_You_ set up for a doctor! I would sooner lose all the practice I ever
made than send _you_ to visit woman or child, you heartless miscreant!"

The epithet the doctor really used here was stronger and more
contemptuous, but it is better to take the liberty of substituting this.

"What have I done then to let loose all this Billingsgate?" cried the
young man indignantly. "I have done nothing the most distinguished in
the profession haven't done twenty times over."

"I don't care a damn. What's the profession to humanity! For a wonder
the public is in the right on this question, and I side with the public.
The profession may go to--Turkey!"--Probably Turkey was not the place he
had intended to specify, but at the moment he caught sight of Juliet and
her companion.--"There!" he concluded, pointing to the door behind him,
"you go in and put your things up--_and be off_."

Without another word, the young man ascended the steps, and entered the
house.

Juliet stood staring, motionless and white. Again and again Dorothy
would have turned back, but Juliet grasped her by the arm, stood as if
frozen to the spot, and would not let her move. She _must_ know what it
meant. And all the time a little crowd had been gathering, as it well
might, even in a town no bigger than Glaston, at such uproar in its
usually so quiet streets. At first it was all women, who showed their
interest by a fixed regard of each speaker in the quarrel in turn, and a
confused staring from one to the other of themselves. No handle was yet
visible by which to lay hold of the affair. But the moment the young man
re-entered the surgery, and just as Faber was turning to go after him,
out, like a bolt, shot from the open door a long-legged, gaunt mongrel
dog, in such a pitiful state as I will not horrify my readers by
attempting to describe. It is enough to say that the knife had been used
upon him with a ghastly freedom. In an agony of soundless terror the
poor animal, who could never recover the usage he had had, and seemed
likely to tear from himself a part of his body at every bound, rushed
through the spectators, who scattered horror-stricken from his path. Ah,
what a wild waste look the creature had!--as if his spirit within him
were wan with dismay at the lawless invasion of his humble house of
life. A cry, almost a shriek, rose from the little crowd, to which a few
men had now added themselves. The doctor came dashing down the steps in
pursuit of him. The same instant, having just escaped collision with the
dog, up came Mr. Drew. His round face flamed like the sun in a fog with
anger and pity and indignation. He rushed straight at the doctor, and
would have collared him. Faber flung him from him without a word, and
ran on. The draper reeled, but recovered himself, and was starting to
follow, when Juliet, hurrying up, with white face and flashing eyes,
laid her hand on his arm, and said, in a voice of whose authoritative
tone she was herself unconscious,

"Stop, Mr. Drew."

The draper obeyed, but stood speechless with anger, not yet doubting it
was the doctor who had so misused the dog.

"I have been here from the first," she went on. "Mr. Faber is as angry
as you are.--Please, Dorothy, will you come?--It is that assistant of
his, Mr. Drew! He hasn't been with him more than three days."

With Dorothy beside her, Juliet now told him, loud enough for all to
hear, what they had heard and seen. "I must go and beg his pardon," said
the draper. "I had no right to come to such a hasty conclusion. I hope
he will not find it hard to forgive me."

"You did no more than he would have done in your place," replied Juliet.
"--But," she added, "where is the God of that poor animal, Mr. Drew?"

"I expect He's taken him by this time," answered the draper. "But I must
go and find the doctor."

So saying, he turned and left them. The ladies went also, and the crowd
dispersed. But already rumors, as evil as discordant, were abroad in
Glaston to the prejudice of Faber, and at the door of his godlessness
was from all sides laid the charge of cruelty.

How difficult it is to make prevalent the right notion of any thing! But
only a little reflection is required to explain the fact. The cause is,
that so few people give themselves the smallest trouble to understand
what is told them. The first thing suggested by the words spoken is
taken instead of the fact itself, and to that as a ground-plan all that
follows is fitted. People listen so badly, even when not sleepily, that
the wonder is any thing of consequence should ever be even approximately
understood. How appalling it would be to one anxious to convey a
meaning, to see the shapes his words assumed in the mind of his
listening friend! For, in place of falling upon the table of his
perception, kept steady by will and judgment, he would see them tumble
upon the sounding-board of his imagination, ever vibrating, and there be
danced like sand into all manner of shapes, according to the tune played
by the capricious instrument. Thus, in Glaston, the strangest stories of
barbarity and cruelty were now attributed to a man entirely incapable of
them. He was not one of the foul seekers after knowledge, and if he had
had a presentiment of the natural tendency of his opinions, he would
have trembled at the vision, and set himself to discover whether there
might not be truth in another way of things.

As he went about in the afternoon amongst his sick and needy, the curate
heard several of these ill reports. Some communicated them to ease their
own horror, others in the notion of pleasing the believer by revolting
news of the unbeliever. In one house he was told that the poor young man
whom Dr. Faber had enticed to be his assistant, had behaved in the most
gentlemanly fashion, had thrown up his situation, consenting to the loss
of his salary, rather than connive at the horrors of cruelty in which
the doctor claimed his help. Great moan was made over the pity that
such a nice man should be given to such abominations; but where was the
wonder, some said, seeing he was the enemy of God, that he should be the
enemy of the beasts God had made? Much truth, and many wise reflections
were uttered, only they were not "as level as the cannon to his blank,"
for they were pointed at the wrong man.

There was one thing in which Wingfold differed from most of his
parishioners: he could hear with his judgment, and make his imagination
lie still. At the same time, in order to arrive the more certainly at
the truth, in any matter presented to him, he would, in general, listen
to the end of what any body had to say. So doing he let eagerness
exhaust itself, and did not by opposition in the first heat of
narration, excite partisan interest, or wake malevolent caution. If the
communication was worthy, he thus got all the worth of it; if it was
evil, he saw to the bottom of it, and discovered, if such were there,
the filthy reptile in the mud beneath, which was setting the whole ugly
pool in commotion. By this deliberateness he also gave the greater
weight to what answer he saw fit to give at last--sometimes with the
result of considerable confusion of face to the narrator. In the present
instance, he contented himself with the strongest assurance that the
whole story was a mistake so far as it applied to Mr. Faber, who had, in
fact, dismissed his assistant for the very crime of which they accused
himself. The next afternoon, he walked the whole length of Pine street
with the doctor, conversing all the way.

Nor did he fail to turn the thing to advantage. He had for some time
been awaiting a fit opportunity for instructing his people upon a point
which he thought greatly neglected: here was the opportunity, and he
made haste to avail himself of it.




CHAPTER XXVII.

THE GROANS OF THE INARTICULATE.


The rest of the week was rainy, but Sunday rose a day of perfect summer.
As the curate went up the pulpit-stair, he felt as if the pulse of all
creation were beating in unison with his own; for to-day he was the
speaker for the speechless, the interpreter of groans to the creation of
God.

He read, _Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them
shall not fall on the ground without your Father_, and said:

"My friends, doth God care for sparrows? Or saith He it altogether for
our sakes, and not at all for the sparrows? No, truly; for indeed it
would be nothing to us if it were not every thing to the sparrows. The
word can not reach our door except through the sparrow's nest. For see!
what comfort would it be to us to be told we were of more value than
ever so many sparrows, if their value was nothing--if God only knew and
did not care for them? The saying would but import that we were of more
value than just nothing. Oh, how skillful is unbelief to take all the
color and all the sweetness and all the power out of the words of The
Word Himself! How many Christians are there not who take the passage to
mean that not a sparrow can fall to the ground without the _knowledge_
of its Creator! A mighty thing that for the sparrow! If such a Christian
seemed to the sparrow the lawful interpreter of the sparrow's Creator,
he would make an infidel of the sparrow. What Christ-like heart, what
heart of loving man, could be content to take all the comfort to itself,
and leave none for the sparrows? Not that of our mighty brother Paul. In
his ears sounded, in his heart echoed, the cries of all the creation of
God. Their groanings that could not be uttered, roused the response of
his great compassion. When Christ was born in the heart of Paul, the
whole creation of God was born with him; nothing that could feel could
he help loving; in the trouble of the creatures' troubles, sprang to
life in his heart the hope, that all that could groan should yet
rejoice, that on the lowest servant in the house should yet descend the
fringe of the robe that was cast about the redeemed body of the Son.
_He_ was no pettifogging priest standing up for the rights of the
superior! An exclusive is a self-excluded Christian. They that shut the
door will find themselves on the wrong side of the door they have shut.
They that push with the horn and stamp with the hoof, can not be
admitted to the fold. St. Paul would acknowledge no distinctions. He saw
every wall--of seclusion, of exclusion, of partition, broken down. Jew
and Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond and free--all must come in to his
heart. Mankind was not enough to fill that divine space, enlarged to
infinitude by the presence of the Christ: angels, principalities, and
powers, must share in its conscious splendor. Not yet filled, yet
unsatisfied with beings to love, Paul spread forth his arms to the whole
groaning and troubled race of animals. Whatever could send forth a sigh
of discomfort, or heave a helpless limb in pain, he took to the bosom of
his hope and affection--yea, of his love and faith: on them, too, he saw
the cup of Christ's heart overflow. For Paul had heard, if not from His
own, yet from the lips of them that heard Him speak, the words, _Are not
five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten
before God?_ What if the little half-farthing things bear their share,
and always have borne, in that which is behind of the sufferings of
Christ? In any case, not one of them, not one so young that it topples
from the edge of its nest, unable to fly, is forgotten by the Father of
men. It shall not have a lonely deathbed, for the Father of Jesus will
be with it. It _must_ be true. It is indeed a daring word, but less
would not be enough for the hearts of men, for the glory of God, for the
need of the sparrow. I do not close my eyes to one of a thousand
seemingly contradictory facts. I misdoubt my reading of the small-print
notes, and appeal to the text, yea, beyond the text, even to the God of
the sparrows Himself.

"I count it as belonging to the smallness of our faith, to the poorness
of our religion, to the rudimentary condition of our nature, that our
sympathy with God's creatures is so small. Whatever the narrowness of
our poverty-stricken, threadbare theories concerning them, whatever the
inhospitality and exclusiveness of our mean pride toward them, we can
not escape admitting that to them pain is pain, and comfort is comfort;
that they hunger and thirst; that sleep restores and death delivers
them: surely these are ground enough to the true heart wherefore it
should love and cherish them--the heart at least that believes with St.
Paul, that they need and have the salvation of Christ as well as we.
Right grievously, though blindly, do they groan after it.

"The ignorance and pride which is forever sinking us toward them, are
the very elements in us which mislead us in our judgment concerning
them, causing us to imagine them not upon a lower merely, but upon an
altogether different footing in creation from our own. The same things
we call by one name in us, and by another in them. How jealous have not
men been as to allowing them any share worthy the name of reason! But
you may see a greater difference in this respect between the lowest and
the highest at a common school, than you will between them and us. A
pony that has taught itself without hands to pump water for its thirst,
an elephant that puts forth its mighty lip to lift the moving wheel of
the heavy wagon over the body of its fallen driver, has rather more to
plead on the score of intellect than many a schoolboy. Not a few of them
shed tears. A bishop, one of the foremost of our scholars, assured me
that once he saw a certain animal laugh while playing off a practical
joke on another of a different kind from himself. I do not mention the
kind of animal, because it would give occasion for a silly articulate
joke, far inferior to his practical one. I go further, and say, that I
more than suspect a rudimentary conscience in every animal. I care not
how remotely rudimentary. There must be in the moral world absolute and
right potent germinal facts which lie infinitudes beyond the reach of
any moral microscope, as in the natural world beyond the most powerful
of lenses. Yet surely in this respect also, one may see betwixt boys at
the same school greater differences than there are betwixt the highest
of the animals and the lowest of the humans. If you plead for time for
the boy to develop his poor rudimentary mollusk of a conscience, take it
and heartily welcome--but grant it the animals also. With some of them
it may need millions of years for any thing I know. Certainly in many
human beings it never comes plainly into our ken all the time they walk
the earth. Who shall say how far the vision of the apostle reached? but
surely the hope in which he says God Himself subjected the creature to
vanity, must have been an infinite hope: I will hope infinitely. That
the Bible gives any ground for the general fancy that at death an animal
ceases to exist, is but the merest dullest assumption. Neither is there
a single scientific argument, so far as I know, against the continued
existence of the animals, which would not tell equally against human
immortality. My hope is, that in some way, concerning which I do not now
choose to speculate, there may be progress, growth, for them also. While
I believe for myself, I _must_ hope for them. This much at least seems
clear--and I could press the argument further: if not one of them is
forgotten before God--and one of them yet passes out of being--then is
God the God of the dead and not of the living! But we praise Thee, we
bless Thee, we worship Thee, we glorify Thee, we give thanks to Thee for
Thy great glory, O Lord God, heavenly King, God the Father almighty! Thy
universe is life, life and not death. Even the death which awoke in the
bosom of Sin, Thy Son, opposing Himself to its hate, and letting it
spend its fury upon Him, hath abolished. I know nothing, therefore care
little, as to whether or not it may have pleased God to bring man up to
the hill of humanity through the swamps and thickets of lower animal
nature, but I do care that I should not now any more approach that
level, whether once rightly my own or not. For what is honor in the
animals, would be dishonor in me. Not the less may such be the
punishment, perhaps redemption, in store for some men and women. For
aught I know, or see unworthy in the thought, the self-sufficing
exquisite, for instance, may one day find himself chattering amongst
fellow apes in some monkey-village of Africa or Burmah. Nor is the
supposition absurd, though at first sight it may well so appear. Let us
remember that we carry in us the characteristics of each and every
animal. There is not one fiercest passion, one movement of affection,
one trait of animal economy, one quality either for praise or blame,
existing in them that does not exist in us. The relationship can not be
so very distant. And if theirs be so freely in us, why deny them so much
we call ours? Hear how one of the ablest doctors of the English church,
John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's in the reign of James the first,
writes:--

  Man is a lump where all beasts kneaded be;
  Wisdom makes him an ark where all agree;
  The fool, in whom these beasts do live at jar,
  Is sport to others, and a theater;
  Nor scapes he so, but is himself their prey;
  All which was man in him, is eat away;
  And now his beasts on one another feed,
  Yet couple in anger, and new monsters breed.
  How happy's he which hath due place assigned
  To his beasts, and disaforested his mind!
  Impaled himself to keep them out, not in;
  Can sow, and dares trust corn where they have been;
  Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and every beast,
  And is not ass himself to all the rest!
  Else man not only is the herd of swine,
  But he's those devils, too, which did incline
  Them to an headlong rage, and made them worse;
  For man can add weight to heaven's heaviest curse.

"It astonishes me, friends, that we are not more terrified at
ourselves. Except the living Father have brought order, harmony, a
world, out of His chaos, a man is but a cage of unclean beasts, with no
one to rule them, however fine a gentleman he may think himself. Even in
this fair, well-ordered England of ours, at Kirkdale, in Yorkshire, was
discovered, some fifty years ago, a great cavern that had once been a
nest of gigantic hyenas, evidenced by their own broken bones, and the
crushed bones of tigers, elephants, bears, and many other creatures. See
to what a lovely peace the Creating Hand has even now brought our
England, far as she is yet from being a province in the kingdom of
Heaven; but see also in her former condition a type of the horror to
which our souls may festering sink, if we shut out His free spirit, and
have it no more moving upon the face of our waters. And when I say a
type, let us be assured there is no type worth the name which is not
poor to express the glory or the horror it represents.

"To return to the animals: they are a care to God! they occupy part of
His thoughts; we have duties toward them, owe them friendliness,
tenderness. That God should see us use them as we do is a terrible
fact--a severe difficulty to faith. For to such a pass has the worship
of Knowledge--an idol vile even as Mammon himself, and more
cruel--arrived, that its priests, men kind as other men to their own
children, kind to the animals of their household, kind even to some of
the wild animals, men who will scatter crumbs to the robins in winter,
and set water for the sparrows on their house-top in summer, will yet,
in the worship of this their idol, in their greed after the hidden
things of the life of the flesh, without scruple, confessedly without
compunction, will, I say, dead to the natural motions of the divine
element in them, the inherited pity of God, subject innocent, helpless,
appealing, dumb souls to such tortures whose bare description would
justly set me forth to the blame of cruelty toward those who sat
listening to the same. Have these living, moving, seeing, hearing,
feeling creatures, who could not be but by the will and the presence of
Another any more than ourselves--have they no rights in this their
compelled existence? Does the most earnest worship of an idol excuse
robbery with violence extreme to obtain the sacrifices he loves? Does
the value of the thing that may be found there justify me in breaking
into the house of another's life? Does his ignorance of the existence of
that which I seek alter the case? Can it be right to water the tree of
knowledge with blood, and stir its boughs with the gusts of bitter
agony, that we may force its flowers into blossom before their time?
Sweetly human must be the delights of knowledge so gained! grand in
themselves, and ennobling in their tendencies! Will it justify the same
as a noble, a laudable, a worshipful endeavor to cover it with the
reason or pretext--God knows which--of such love for my own human kind
as strengthens me to the most ruthless torture of their poorer
relations, whose little treasure I would tear from them that it may
teach me how to add to their wealth? May my God give me grace to prefer
a hundred deaths to a life gained by the suffering of one simplest
creature. He holds his life as I hold mine by finding himself there
where I find myself. Shall I quiet my heart with the throbs of another
heart? soothe my nerves with the agonized tension of a system? live a
few days longer by a century of shrieking deaths? It were a hellish
wrong, a selfish, hateful, violent injustice. An evil life it were that
I gained or held by such foul means! How could I even attempt to justify
the injury, save on the plea that I am already better and more valuable
than he; that I am the stronger; that the possession of all the
pleasures of human intelligence gives me the right to turn the poor
innocent joys of his senses into pains before which, threatening my own
person, my very soul would grow gray with fear? Or let me grant what
many professional men deny utterly, that some knowledge of what is
called practical value to the race has been thus attained--what can be
its results at best but the adding of a cubit to the life? Grant that it
gave us an immortal earthly existence, one so happy that the most
sensual would never wish for death: what would it be by such means to
live forever? God in Heaven! who, what is the man who would dare live a
life wrung from the agonies of tortured innocents? Against the will of
my Maker, live by means that are an abhorrence to His soul! Such a life
must be all in the flesh! the spirit could have little share therein.
Could it be even a life of the flesh that came of treason committed
against essential animality? It could be but an abnormal monstrous
existence, that sprang, toadstool-like, from the blood-marsh of
cruelty--a life neither spiritual nor fleshey, but devilish.

"It is true we are above the creatures--but not to keep them down; they
are for our use and service, but neither to be trodden under the foot of
pride, nor misused as ministers, at their worst cost of suffering, to
our inordinate desires of ease. After no such fashion did God give them
to be our helpers in living. To be tortured that we might gather ease!
none but a devil could have made them for that! When I see a man who
professes to believe not only in a God, but such a God as holds His
court in the person of Jesus Christ, assail with miserable cruelty the
scanty, lovely, timorous lives of the helpless about him, it sets my
soul aflame with such indignant wrath, with such a sense of horrible
incongruity and wrong to every harmony of Nature, human and divine, that
I have to make haste and rush to the feet of the Master, lest I should
scorn and hate where He has told me to love. Such a wretch, not content
that Christ should have died to save men, will tear Christ's living
things into palpitating shreds, that he may discover from them how
better to save the same men. Is this to be in the world as He was in the
world! Picture to yourselves one of these Christian inquirers erect
before his class of students: knife in hand, he is demonstrating to them
from the live animal, so fixed and screwed and wired that he cannot find
for his agony even the poor relief of a yelp, how this or that writhing
nerve or twitching muscle operates in the business of a life which his
demonstration has turned from the gift of love into a poisoned curse;
picture to yourself such a one so busied, suddenly raising his eyes and
seeing the eyes that see him! the eyes of Him who, when He hung upon the
cross, knew that He suffered for the whole creation of His Father, to
lift it out of darkness into light, out of wallowing chaos into order
and peace! Those eyes watching him, that pierced hand soothing his
victim, would not the knife fall from his hand in the divine paralysis
that shoots from the heart and conscience? Ah me! to have those eyes
upon me in any wrong-doing! One thing only could be worse--_not_ to have
them upon me--to be left with my devils.

"You all know the immediate cause of the turning of our thoughts in this
direction--the sad case of cruelty that so unexpectedly rushed to light
in Glaston. So shocked was the man in whose house it took place that, as
he drove from his door the unhappy youth who was guilty of the crime,
this testimony, in the righteous indignation of his soul, believing, as
you are aware, in no God and Father of all, broke from him with
curses--'There ought to be a God to punish such cruelty.'--'Begone,' he
said. 'Never would I commit woman or child into the hands of a willful
author of suffering.'

"We are to rule over the animals; the opposite of rule is torture, the
final culmination of anarchy. We slay them, and if with reason, then
with right. Therein we do them no wrong. Yourselves will bear me witness
however and always in this place, I have protested that death is no
evil, save as the element of injustice may be mingled therein. The sting
of death is sin. Death, righteously inflicted, I repeat, is the reverse
of an injury.

"What if there is too much lavishment of human affection upon objects
less than human! it hurts less than if there were none. I confess that
it moves with strange discomfort one who has looked upon swarms of
motherless children, to see in a childless house a ruined dog, overfed,
and snarling with discomfort even on the blessed throne of childhood,
the lap of a woman. But even that is better than that the woman should
love no creature at all--infinitely better! It may be she loves as she
can. Her heart may not yet be equal to the love of a child, may be able
only to cherish a creature whose oppositions are merely amusing, and
whose presence, as doubtless it seems to her, gives rise to no
responsibilities. Let her love her dog--even although her foolish
treatment of him should delay the poor animal in its slow trot towards
canine perfection: she may come to love him better; she may herself
through him advance to the love and the saving of a child--who can tell?
But do not mistake me; there are women with hearts so divinely
insatiable in loving, that in the mere gaps of their untiring
ministration of humanity, they will fondle any living thing capable of
receiving the overflow of their affection. Let such love as they will;
they can hardly err. It is not of such that I have spoken.

"Again, to how many a lonely woman is not life made endurable, even
pleasant, by the possession and the love of a devoted dog! The man who
would focus the burning glass of science upon the animal, may well mock
at such a mission, and speak words contemptuous of the yellow old maid
with her yellow ribbons and her yellow dog. Nor would it change his
countenance or soften his heart to be assured that that withered husk of
womanhood was lovely once, and the heart in it is loving still; that she
was reduced to all but misery by the self-indulgence of a brother, to
whom the desolation of a sister was but a pebble to pave the way to his
pleasures; that there is no one left her now to love, or to be grateful
for her love, but the creature which he regards merely as a box of
nature's secrets, worthy only of being rudely ransacked for what it may
contain, and thrown aside when shattered in the search. A box he is
indeed, in which lies inclosed a shining secret!--a truth too radiant
for the eyes of such a man as he; the love of a living God is in him and
his fellows, ranging the world in broken incarnation, ministering to
forlorn humanity in dumb yet divine service. Who knows, in their great
silence, how germane with ours may not be their share in the groanings
that can not be uttered!

"Friends, there must be a hell. If we leave scripture and human belief
aside, science reveals to us that nature has her catastrophes--that
there is just so much of the failed cycle, of the unrecovered, the
unbalanced, the incompleted, the fallen-short, in her motions, that the
result must be collision, shattering resumption, the rage of unspeakable
fire. Our world and all the worlds of the system, are, I suppose, doomed
to fall back at length into their parent furnace. Then will come one end
and another beginning. There is many an end and many a beginning. At one
of those ends, and that not the furthest, must surely lie a hell, in
which, of all sins, the sin of cruelty, under whatever pretext
committed, will receive its meed from Him with whom there is no respect
of persons, but who giveth to every man according to his works. Nor will
it avail him to plead that in life he never believed in such
retribution; for a cruelty that would have been restrained by a fear of
hell was none the less hellworthy.

"But I will not follow this track. The general conviction of humanity
will be found right against any conclusions calling themselves
scientific, that go beyond the scope or the reach of science. Neither
will I presume to suggest the operation of any _lex talionis_ in respect
of cruelty. I know little concerning the salvation by fire of which St.
Paul writes in his first epistle to the Corinthians; but I say this,
that if the difficulty of curing cruelty be commensurate with the horror
of its nature, then verily for the cruel must the furnace of wrath be
seven times heated. Ah! for them, poor injured ones, the wrong passes
away! Friendly, lovely death, the midwife of Heaven, comes to their
relief, and their pain sinks in precious peace. But what is to be done
for our brother's soul, bespattered with the gore of innocence? Shall
the cries and moans of the torture he inflicted haunt him like an evil
smell? Shall the phantoms of exquisite and sickening pains float
lambent about the fingers, and pass and repass through the heart and
brain, that sent their realities quivering and burning into the souls of
the speechless ones? It has been said somewhere that the hell for the
cruel man would be to have the faces of all the creatures he had wronged
come staring round him, with sad, weary eyes. But must not the divine
nature, the pitiful heart of the universe, have already begun to
reassert itself in him, before that would hurt him? Upon such a man the
justice in my heart desires this retribution--to desire more would be to
be more vile than he; to desire less would not be to love my
brother:--that the soul capable of such deeds shall be compelled to know
the nature of its deeds in the light of the absolute Truth--that the
eternal fact shall flame out from the divine region of its own
conscience until it writhe in the shame of being itself, loathe as
absolute horror the deeds which it would now justify, and long for
deliverance from that which it has made of itself. The moment the
discipline begins to blossom, the moment the man begins to thirst after
confession and reparation, then is he once more my brother; then from an
object of disgust in spite of pity, he becomes a being for all tender,
honest hearts in the universe of God to love, cherish, revere.

"Meantime, you who behold with aching hearts the wrongs done to the
lower brethren that ought to be cherished as those to whom less has been
given, having done all, stand comforted in the thought that not one of
them suffers without the loving, caring, sustaining presence of the
great Father of the universe, the Father of men, the God and Father of
Jesus Christ, the God of the sparrows and the ravens and the oxen--yea,
of the lilies of the field."

As might be expected, Mrs. Ramshorn was indignant. What right had he to
desecrate a pulpit of the Church of England by misusing it for the
publication of his foolish fancies about creatures that had not reason!
Of course nobody would think of being cruel to them, poor things! But
there was that silly man talking about them as if they were better
Christians than any of them! He was intruding into things he had not
seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind.

The last portion of these remarks she made in the hearing of her niece,
who carried it home for the amusement of her husband. He said he could
laugh with a good conscience, for the reading of the passage, according
to the oldest manuscripts we have, was not "the things he hath not
seen," but "the things he hath seen," and he thought it meant--haunting
the visible, the sensuous, the fleshly, so, for, the satisfaction of an
earthly imagination, in love with embodiment for its own sake,
worshiping angels, and not keeping hold of the invisible, the real, the
true--the mind, namely, and spirit of the living Christ, the Head.

"Poor auntie," replied Helen, "would hold herself quite above the
manuscripts. With her it is the merest sectarianism and radicalism to
meddle with the text as appointed to be read in churches. What was good
enough for the dean, must be far more than good enough for an
unbeneficed curate!"

But the rector, who loved dogs and horses, was delighted with the
sermon.

Faber's whole carriage and conduct in regard to the painful matter was
such as to add to Juliet's confidence in him. Somehow she grew more at
ease in his company, and no longer took pains to avoid him.




CHAPTER XXVIII.

COW-LANE-CHAPEL.


By degrees Mr. Drake's mind grew quiet, and accommodated itself to the
condition of the new atmosphere in which at first it was so hard for him
to draw spiritual breath. He found himself again able to pray, and while
he bowed his head lower before God, he lifted up his heart higher toward
him. His uncle's bequest presenting no appropriative difficulties, he at
once set himself to be a faithful and wise steward of the grace of God,
to which holy activity the return of his peace was mainly owing. Now and
then the fear would return that God had sent him the money in
displeasure, that He had handed him over all his principal, and refused
to be his banker any more; and the light-winged, haunting dread took
from him a little even of the blameless pleasure that naturally
belonged to the paying of his debts. Also he now became plainly aware of
a sore fact which he had all his life dimly suspected--namely, that
there was in his nature a spot of the leprosy of avarice, the desire to
accumulate. Hence he grew almost afraid of his money, and his anxiety to
spend it freely and right, to keep it flowing lest it should pile up its
waves and drown his heart, went on steadily increasing. That he could
hoard now if he pleased gave him just the opportunity of burning the
very possibility out of his soul. It is those who are unaware of their
proclivities, and never pray against them, that must be led into
temptation, lest they should forever continue capable of evil. When a
man could do a thing, then first can he abstain from doing it. Now, with
his experience of both poverty and riches, the minister knew that he
must make them both follow like hounds at his heel. If he were not to
love money, if, even in the free use of it, he were to regard it with
honor, fear its loss, forget that it came from God, and must return to
God through holy channels, he must sink into a purely contemptible
slave. Where would be the room for any further repentance? He would have
had every chance, and failed in every trial the most opposed! He must be
lord of his wealth; Mammon must be the slave, not Walter Drake. Mammon
must be more than his brownie, more than his Robin Goodfellow; he must
be the subject Djin of a holy spell--holier than Solomon's wisdom, more
potent than the stamp of his seal. At present he almost feared him as a
Caliban to whom he might not be able to play Prospero, an Ufreet
half-escaped from his jar, a demon he had raised, for whom he must find
work, or be torn by him into fragments. The slave must have drudgery,
and the master must take heed that he never send him alone to do love's
dear service.

"I am sixty," he said, to himself, "and I have learned to begin to
learn." Behind him his public life looked a mere tale that is told; his
faith in the things he had taught had been little better than that which
hangs about an ancient legend. He had been in a measure truthful; he had
endeavored to act upon what he taught; but alas! the accidents of faith
had so often been uppermost with him, instead of its eternal fundamental
truths! How unlike the affairs of the kingdom did all that
church-business look to him now!--the rich men ruling--the poor men
grumbling! In the whole assembly including himself, could he honestly
say he knew more than one man that sought the kingdom of Heaven
_first_? And yet he had been tolerably content, until they began to turn
against himself!--What better could they have done than get rid of him?
The whole history of their relation appeared now as a mess of untruth
shot through with threads of light. Now, now, he would strive to enter
in at the strait gate: the question was not of pushing others in. He
would mortify the spirit of worldly judgments and ambitions: he would be
humble as the servant of Christ.

Dorothy's heart was relieved a little. She could read her father's
feelings better than most wives those of their husbands, and she knew he
was happier. But she was not herself happier. She would gladly have
parted with all the money for a word from any quarter that could have
assured her there was a God in Heaven who _loved_. But the teaching of
the curate had begun to tell upon her. She had begun to have a faint
perception that if the story of Jesus Christ was true, there might be a
Father to be loved, and being might be a bliss. The poorest glimmer of
His loveliness gives a dawn to our belief in a God; and a small amount
indeed of a genuine knowledge of Him will serve to neutralize the most
confident declaration that science is against the idea of a God--an
utterance absolutely false. Scientific men may be unbelievers, but it is
not from the teaching of science. Science teaches that a man must not
say he knows what he does not know; not that what a man does not know he
may say does not exist. I will grant, however, and willingly, that true
science is against Faber's idea of other people's idea of a God. I will
grant also that the tendency of one who exclusively studies science is
certainly to deny what no one has proved, and he is uninterested in
proving; but that is the fault of the man and his lack of science, not
of the science he has. If people understood better the arrogance of
which they are themselves guilty, they would be less ready to imagine
that a strong assertion necessarily implies knowledge. Nothing can be
known except what is true. A negative may be _fact_, but can not be
_known_ except by the knowledge of its opposite. I believe also that
nothing can be really _believed_, except it be true. But people think
they believe many things which they do not and can not in the real
sense.

When, however, Dorothy came to concern herself about the will of God, in
trying to help her father to do the best with their money, she began to
reap a little genuine comfort, for then she found things begin to
explain themselves a little. The more a man occupies himself in doing
the works of the Father--the sort of thing the Father does, the easier
will he find it to believe that such a Father is at work in the world.

In the curate Mr. Drake had found not only a man he could trust, but one
to whom, young as he was, he could look up; and it was a trait in the
minister nothing short of noble, that he did look up to the
curate--perhaps without knowing it. He had by this time all but lost
sight of the fact, once so monstrous, so unchristian in his eyes, that
he was the paid agent of a government-church; the sight of the man's own
house, built on a rock in which was a well of the water of life, had
made him nearly forget it. In his turn he could give the curate much;
the latter soon discovered that he knew a great deal more about Old
Testament criticism, church-history, and theology--understanding by the
last the records of what men had believed and argued about God--than he
did. They often disagreed and not seldom disputed; but while each held
the will and law of Christ as the very foundation of the world, and
obedience to Him as the way to possess it after its idea, how could they
fail to know that they were brothers? They were gentle with each other
for the love of Him whom in eager obedience they called Lord.

The moment his property was his availably, the minister betook himself
to the curate.

"Now," he said--he too had the gift of going pretty straight, though not
quite so straight as the curate--"Now, Mr. Wingfold, tell me plainly
what you think the first thing I ought to do with this money toward
making it a true gift of God. I mean, what can I do with it for somebody
else--some person or persons to whom money in my hands, not in theirs,
may become a small saviour?"

"You want, in respect of your money," rejoined the curate, "to be in the
world as Christ was in the world, setting right what is wrong in ways
possible to you, and not counteracting His? You want to do the gospel as
well as preach it?"

"That is what I mean--or rather what I wish to mean. You have said
it.--What do you count the first thing I should try to set right?"

"I should say _injustice_. My very soul revolts against the talk about
kindness to the poor, when such a great part of their misery comes from
the injustice and greed of the rich."

"I well understand," returned Mr. Drake, "that a man's first business is
to be just to his neighbor, but I do not so clearly see when he is to
interfere to make others just. Our Lord would not settle the division of
the inheritance between the two brothers."

"No, but he gave them a lesson concerning avarice, and left that to
work. I don't suppose any body is unjust for love of injustice. I don't
understand the pure devilish very well--though I have glimpses into it.
Your way must be different from our Lord's in form, that it may be the
same in spirit: you have to work with money; His father had given Him
none. In His mission He was not to use all means--only the best. But
even He did not attack individuals to _make_ them do right; and if you
employ your money in doing justice to the oppressed and afflicted, to
those shorn of the commonest rights of humanity, it will be the most
powerful influence of all to wake the sleeping justice in the dull
hearts of other men. It is the business of any body who can, to set
right what any body has set wrong. I will give you a special instance,
which has been in my mind all the time. Last spring--and it was the same
the spring before, my first in Glaston--the floods brought misery upon
every family in what they call the Pottery here. How some of them get
through any wet season I can not think; but Faber will tell you what a
multitude of sore throats, cases of croup, scarlet-fever, and
diphtheria, he has to attend in those houses every spring and autumn.
They are crowded with laborers and their families, who, since the
railway came, have no choice but live there, and pay a much heavier rent
in proportion to their accommodation than you or I do--in proportion to
the value of the property, immensely heavier. Is it not hard? Men are
their brothers' keepers indeed--but it is in chains of wretchedness they
keep them. Then again--I am told that the owner of these cottages, who
draws a large yearly sum from them, and to the entreaties of his tenants
for really needful repairs, gives nothing but promises, is one of the
most influential attendants of a chapel you know, where, Sunday after
Sunday, the gospel is preached. If this be true, here again is a sad
wrong: what can those people think of religion so represented?"

"I am a sinful man," exclaimed the pastor. "That Barwood is one of the
deacons. He is the owner of the chapel as well as the cottages. I ought
to have spoken to him years ago.--But," he cried, starting to his feet,
"the property is for sale! I saw it in the paper this very morning!
Thank God!"--He caught up his hat.--"I shall have no choice but buy the
chapel too," he added, with a queer, humorous smile; "--it is part of
the property.--Come with me, my dear sir. We must see to it directly.
You will speak: I would rather not appear in the affair until the
property is my own; but I will buy those houses, please God, and make
them such as His poor sons and daughters may live in without fear or
shame."

The curate was not one to give a cold bath to enthusiasm. They went out
together, got all needful information, and within a month the
title-deeds were in Mr. Drake's possession.

When the rumor reached the members of his late congregation that he had
come in for a large property, many called to congratulate him, and such
congratulations are pretty sure to be sincere. But he was both annoyed
and amused when--it was in the morning during business hours--Dorothy
came and told him, not without some show of disgust, that a deputation
from the church in Cow-lane was below.

"We've taken the liberty of calling, in the name of the church, to
congratulate you, Mr. Drake," said their leader, rising with the rest as
the minister entered the dining-room.

"Thank you," returned the minister quietly.

"I fancy," said the other, who was Barwood himself, with a smile such as
heralds the facetious, "you will hardly condescend to receive our little
gratuity now?"

"I shall not require it, gentlemen."

"Of course we should never have offered you such a small sum, if we
hadn't known you were independent of us."

"Why then did you offer it at all?" asked the minister.

"As a token of our regard."

"The regard could not be very lively that made no inquiry as to our
circumstances. My daughter had twenty pounds a year; I had nothing. We
were in no small peril of simple starvation."

"Bless my soul! we hadn't an idea of such a thing, sir! Why didn't you
tell us?"

Mr. Drake smiled, and made no other reply.

"Well, sir," resumed Barwood, after a very brief pause, for he was a
man of magnificent assurance, "as it's all turned out so well, you'll
let bygones be bygones, and give us a hand?"

"I am obliged to you for calling," said Mr. Drake, "--especially to you,
Mr. Barwood, because it gives me an opportunity of confessing a fault of
omission on my part toward you."

Here the pastor was wrong. Not having done his duty when he ought, he
should have said nothing now it was needless for the wronged, and likely
only to irritate the wrong-doer.

"Don't mention it, pray," said Mr. Barwood. "This is a time to forget
every thing."

"I ought to have pointed out to you, Mr. Barwood," pursued the minister,
"both for your own sake and that of those poor families, your tenants,
that your property in this lower part of the town was quite unfit for
the habitation of human beings."

"Don't let your conscience trouble you on the score of that neglect,"
answered the deacon, his face flushing with anger, while he tried to
force a smile: "I shouldn't have paid the least attention to it if you
had. My firm opinion has always been that a minister's duty is to preach
the gospel, not meddle in the private affairs of the members of his
church; and if you knew all, Mr. Drake, you would not have gone out of
your way to make the remark. But that's neither here nor there, for it's
not the business as we've come upon.--Mr. Drake, it's a clear thing to
every one as looks into it, that the cause will never prosper so long as
that's the chapel we've got. We did think as perhaps a younger man might
do something to counteract church-influences; but there don't seem any
sign of betterment yet. In fact, thinks looks worse. No, sir! it's the
chapel as is the stumbling-block. What has religion got to do with
what's ugly and dirty! A place that any lady or gentleman, let he or she
be so much of a Christian, might turn up the nose and refrain the foot
from! No! I say; what we want is a new place of worship. Cow-lane is
behind the age--and _that_ musty! uw!"

"With the words of truth left sticking on the walls?" suggested Mr.
Drake.

"Ha! ha! ha!--Good that!" exclaimed several.

But the pastor's face looked stern, and the voices dropped into rebuked
silence.

"At least you'll allow, sir," persisted Barwood, "that the house of God
ought to be as good as the houses of his people. It stands to reason.
Depend upon it, He won't give us no success till we give Him a decent
house. What! are we to dwell in houses of cedar, and the ark of the Lord
in a tent? That's what it comes to, sir!"

The pastor's spiritual gorge rose at this paganism in Jew clothing.

"You think God loves newness and finery better than the old walls where
generations have worshiped?" he said.

"I make no doubt of it, sir," answered Barwood. "What's generations to
him! He wants the people drawn to His house; and what there is in
Cow-lane to draw is more than I know."

"I understand you wish to sell the chapel," said Mr. Drake. "Is it not
rather imprudent to bring down the value of your property before you
have got rid of it?"

Barwood smiled a superior smile. He considered the bargain safe, and
thought the purchaser a man who was certain to pull the chapel down.

"I know who the intending purchaser is," said Mr. Drake, "and----"

Barwood's countenance changed: he bethought himself that the conveyance
was not completed, and half started from his chair.

"You would never go to do such an unneighborly act," he cried, "as----"

"--As conspire to bring down the value of a property the moment it had
passed out of my hands?--I would not, Mr. Barwood; and this very day the
intending purchaser shall know of your project."

Barwood locked his teeth together, and grinned with rage. He jumped from
his seat, knocked it over in getting his hat from under it, and rushed
out of the house. Mr. Drake smiled, and looking calmly round on the rest
of the deacons, held his peace. It was a very awkward moment for them.
At length one of them, a small tradesman, ventured to speak. He dared
make no allusion to the catastrophe that had occurred. It would take
much reflection to get hold of the true weight and bearing of what they
had just heard and seen, for Barwood was a mighty man among them.

"What we were thinking, sir," he said, "--and you will please to
remember, Mr. Drake, that I was always on your side, and it's better to
come to the point; there's a strong party of us in the church, sir,
that would like to have you back, and we was thinking if you would
condescend to help us, now as you're so well able to, sir, toward a new
chapel, now as you have the means, as well as the will, to do God
service, sir, what with the chapel-building society, and every man-jack
of us setting our shoulder to the wheel, and we should all do our very
best, we should get a nice, new, I won't say showy, but
attractive--that's the word, attractive place--not gaudy, you know, I
never would give in to that, but ornamental too--and in a word,
attractive--that's it--a place to which the people would be drawn by the
look of it outside, and kep' by the look of it inside--a place as would
make the people of Glaston say, 'Come, and let us go up to the house of
the Lord,'--if, with your help, sir, we had such a place, then perhaps
you would condescend to take the reins again, sir, and we should then
pay Mr. Rudd as your assistant, leaving the whole management in your
hands--to preach when you pleased, and leave it alone when you
didn't.--There, sir! I think that's much the whole thing in a
nut-shell."

"And now will you tell me what result you would look for under such an
arrangement?"

"We should look for the blessing of a little success; it's a many years
since we was favored with any."

"And by success you mean----?"

"A large attendance of regular hearers in the morning--not a seat to
let!--and the people of Glaston crowding to hear the word in the
evening, and going away because they can't get a foot inside the place!
That's the success _I_ should like to see."

"What! would you have all Glaston such as yourselves!" exclaimed the
pastor indignantly. "Gentlemen, this is the crowning humiliation of my
life! Yet I am glad of it, because I deserve it, and it will help to
make and keep me humble. I see in you the wood and hay and stubble with
which, alas! I have been building all these years! I have been preaching
dissent instead of Christ, and there you are!--dissenters indeed--but
can I--can I call you Christians? Assuredly do I believe the form of
your church that ordained by the apostles, but woe is me for the
material whereof it is built! Were I to aid your plans with a single
penny in the hope of withdrawing one inhabitant of Glaston from the
preaching of Mr. Wingfold, a man who speaks the truth and fears nobody,
as I, alas! have feared you, because of your dullness of heart and
slowness of understanding, I should be doing the body of Christ a
grievous wrong. I have been as one beating the air in talking to you
against episcopacy when I ought to have been preaching against
dishonesty; eulogizing congregationalism, when I ought to have been
training you in the three abiding graces, and chiefly in the greatest of
them, charity. I have taken to pieces and put together for you the plan
of salvation, when I ought to have spoken only of Him who is the way and
the life. I have been losing my life, and helping you to lose yours. But
go to the abbey church, and there a man will stir you up to lay hold
upon God, will teach you to know Christ, each man for himself and not
for another. Shut up your chapel, put off your scheme for a new one, go
to the abbey church, and be filled with the finest of the wheat. Then
should this man depart, and one of the common episcopal train, whose God
is the church, and whose neighbor is the order of the priesthood, come
to take his place, and preach against dissent as I have so foolishly
preached against the church--then, and not until then, will the time be
to gather together your savings and build yourselves a house to pray in.
Then, if I am alive, as I hope I shall not be, come, and I will aid your
purpose liberally. Do not mistake me; I believe as strongly as ever I
did that the constitution of the Church of England is all wrong; that
the arrogance and assumption of her priesthood is essentially opposed to
the very idea of the kingdom of Heaven; that the Athanasian creed is
unintelligible, and where intelligible, cruel; but where I find my Lord
preached as only one who understands Him can preach Him, and as I never
could preach Him, and never heard Him preached before, even faults great
as those shall be to me as merest accidents. Gentlemen, every thing is
pure loss--chapels and creeds and churches--all is loss that comes
between us and Christ--individually, masterfully. And of unchristian
things one of the most unchristian is to dispute and separate in the
name of Him whose one object was, and whose one victory will be
unity.--Gentlemen, if you should ever ask me to preach to you, I will do
so with pleasure."

They rose as one man, bade him an embarrassed good morning, and walked
from the room, some with their heads thrown back, other hanging them
forward in worshipful shame. The former spread the rumor that the old
minister had gone crazy, the latter began to go now and then to church.

I may here mention, as I shall have no other opportunity, that a new
chapel was not built; that the young pastor soon left the old one; that
the deacons declared themselves unable to pay the rent; that Mr. Drake
took the place into his own hands, and preached there every Sunday
evening, but went always in the morning to hear Mr. Wingfold. There was
kindly human work of many sorts done by them in concert, and each felt
the other a true support. When the pastor and the parson chanced to meet
in some lowly cottage, it was never with embarrassment or apology, as if
they served two masters, but always with hearty and glad greeting, and
they always went away together. I doubt if wickedness does half as much
harm as sectarianism, whether it be the sectarianism of the church or of
dissent, the sectarianism whose virtue is condescension, or the
sectarianism whose vice is pride. Division has done more to hide Christ
from the view of men, than all the infidelity that has ever been spoken.
It is the half-Christian clergy of every denomination that are the main
cause of the so-called failure of the Church of Christ. Thank God, it
has not failed so miserably as to succeed in the estimation or to the
satisfaction of any party in it.

But it was not merely in relation to forms of church government that the
heart of the pastor now in his old age began to widen. It is foolish to
say that after a certain age a man can not alter. That some men can
not--or will not, (God only can draw the line between those two _nots_)
I allow; but the cause is not age, and it is not universal. The man who
does not care and ceases to grow, becomes torpid, stiffens, is in a
sense dead; but he who has been growing all the time need never stop;
and where growth is, there is always capability of change: growth itself
is a succession of slow, melodious, ascending changes.

The very next Sunday after the visit of their deputation to him, the
church in Cow-lane asked their old minister to preach to them. Dorothy,
as a matter of course, went with her father, although, dearly as she
loved him, she would have much preferred hearing what the curate had to
say. The pastor's text was, _Ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin,
and have omitted the weightier matters of the law--judgment, mercy, and
faith_. In his sermon he enforced certain of the dogmas of a theology
which once expressed more truth "than falsehood, but now at least
_conveys_ more falsehood than truth, because of the changed conditions
of those who teach and those who hear it; for, even where his faith had
been vital enough to burst the verbally rigid, formal, and indeed
spiritually vulgar theology he had been taught, his intellect had not
been strong enough to cast off the husks. His expressions, assertions,
and arguments, tying up a bundle of mighty truth with cords taken from
the lumber-room and the ash-pit, grazed severely the tenderer nature of
his daughter. When they reached the house, and she found herself alone
with her father in his study, she broke suddenly into passionate
complaint--not that he should so represent God, seeing, for what she
knew, He might indeed be such, but that, so representing God, he should
expect men to love Him. It was not often that her sea, however troubled
in its depths, rose into such visible storm. She threw herself upon the
floor with a loud cry, and lay sobbing and weeping. Her father was
terribly startled, and stood for a moment as if stunned; then a faint
slow light began to break in upon him, and he stood silent, sad, and
thoughtful. He knew that he loved God, yet in what he said concerning
Him, in the impression he gave of Him, there was that which prevented
the best daughter in the world from loving her Father in Heaven! He
began to see that he had never really thought about these things; he had
been taught them but had never turned them over in the light, never
perceived the fact, that, however much truth might be there, there also
was what at least looked like a fearful lie against God. For a moment he
gazed with keen compassion on his daughter as she lay, actually writhing
in her agony, then kneeled beside her, and laying his hand upon her,
said gently:

"Well, my dear, if those things are not true, my saying them will not
make them so."

She sprung to her feet, threw her arms about his neck, kissed him, and
left the room. The minister remained upon his knees.




CHAPTER XXIX.

THE DOCTOR'S HOUSE.


The holidays came, and Juliet took advantage of them to escape from what
had begun to be a bondage to her--the daily intercourse with people who
disapproved of the man she loved. In her thoughts even she took no
intellectual position against them with regard to what she called
doctrine, and Faber superstition. Her father had believed as they did;
she clung to his memory; perhaps she believed as he did; she could not
tell. There was time yet wherein to make up her mind. She had certainly
believed so once, she said to herself, and she might so believe again.
She would have been at first highly offended, but the next moment a
little pleased at being told that in reality she had never believed one
whit more than Faber, that she was at present indeed incapable of
believing. Probably she would have replied, "Then wherein am I to
blame?" But although a woman who sits with her child in her arms in the
midst of her burning house, half asleep, and half stifled and dazed with
the fierce smoke, may not be to blame, certainly the moment she is able
to excuse herself she is bound to make for the door. So long as men do
not feel that they are in a bad condition and in danger of worse, the
message of deliverance will sound to them as a threat. Yea, the offer of
absolute well-being upon the only possible conditions of the well-being
itself, must, if heard at all, rouse in them a discomfort whose cause
they attribute to the message, not to themselves; and immediately they
will endeavor to justify themselves in disregarding it. There are those
doing all they can to strengthen themselves in unbelief, who, if the
Lord were to appear plainly before their eyes, would tell Him they could
not help it, for He had not until then given them ground enough for
faith, and when He left them, would go on just as before, except that
they would speculate and pride themselves on the vision. If men say, "We
want no such deliverance," then the Maker of them must either destroy
them as vile things for whose existence He is to Himself accountable, or
compel them to change. If they say, "We choose to be destroyed," He, as
their Maker, has a choice in the matter too. Is He not free to say, "You
can not even slay yourselves, and I choose that you shall know the
death of living without Me; you shall learn to choose to live indeed. I
choose that you shall know what _I know_ to be good"? And however much
any individual consciousness may rebel, surely the individual
consciousness which called that other into being, and is the Father of
that being, fit to be such because of Himself He is such, has a right to
object that by rebellion His creature should destroy the very power by
which it rebels, and from a being capable of a divine freedom by
partaking of the divine nature, should make of itself the merest slave
incapable of will of any sort! Is it a wrong to compel His creature to
soar aloft into the ether of its origin, and find its deepest, its only
true self? It is God's knowing choice of life against man's ignorant
choice of death.

But Juliet knew nothing of such a region of strife in the human soul.
She had no suspicion what an awful swamp lay around the prison of her
self-content--no, self-discontent--in which she lay chained. To her the
one good and desirable thing was the love and company of Paul Faber. He
was her saviour, she said to herself, and the woman who could not love
and trust and lean upon such a heart of devotion and unselfishness as
his, was unworthy of the smallest of his thoughts. He was nobility,
generosity, justice itself! If she sought to lay her faults bare to him,
he would but fold her to his bosom to shut them out from her own vision!
He would but lay his hand on the lips of confession, and silence them as
unbelievers in his perfect affection! He was better than the God the
Wingfolds and Drakes believed in, with whom humiliation was a condition
of acceptance!

She told the Drakes that, for the air of Owlkirk, she was going to
occupy her old quarters with Mrs. Puckridge during the holidays. They
were not much surprised, for they had remarked a change in her manner,
and it was not long unexplained: for, walking from the Old House
together one evening rather late, they met her with the doctor in a
little frequented part of the park. When she left them, they knew she
would not return; and her tears betrayed that she knew it also.

Meantime the negotiation for the purchase of the Old House of Glaston
was advancing with slow legal sinuosity. Mr. Drake had offered the full
value of the property, and the tender seemed to be regarded not
unfavorably. But his heart and mind were far more occupied with the
humbler property he had already secured in the town: that was now to be
fortified against the incursions of the river, with its attendant fevers
and agues. A survey of the ground had satisfied him that a wall at a
certain point would divert a great portion of the water, and this wall
he proceeded at once to build. He hoped in the end to inclose the ground
altogether, or at least to defend it at every assailable point, but
there were many other changes imperative, with difficulties such that
they could not all be coped with at once. The worst of the cottages must
be pulled down, and as they were all even over-full, he must contrive to
build first. Nor until that was done, could he effect much toward
rendering the best of them fit for human habitation.

Some of the householders in the lower part of the adjoining street shook
their heads when they saw what the bricklayers were about. They had
reason to fear they were turning the water more upon them; and it seemed
a wrong that the wretched cottages which had from time immemorial been
accustomed to the water, should be now protected from it at the cost of
respectable houses! It did not occur to them that it might be time for
Lady Fortune to give her wheel a few inches of a turn. To common minds,
custom is always right so long as it is on their side.

In the meantime the chapel in the park at Nestley had been advancing,
for the rector, who was by nature no dawdler where he was interested,
had been pushing it on; and at length on a certain Sunday evening in the
autumn, the people of the neighborhood having been invited to attend,
the rector read prayers in it, and the curate preached a sermon. At the
close of the service the congregation was informed that prayers would be
read there every Sunday evening, and that was all. Mrs. Bevis, honest
soul, the green-mantled pool of whose being might well desire a wind, if
only from a pair of bellows, to disturb its repose, for not a fish moved
to that end in its sunless deeps--I say deeps, for such there must have
been, although neither she nor her friends were acquainted with any
thing there but shallows--was the only one inclined to grumble at the
total absence of ceremonial pomp: she did want her husband to have the
credit of the great deed.

About the same time it was that Juliet again sought the cottage at
Owlkirk, with the full consciousness that she went there to meet her
fate. Faber came to see her every day, and both Ruber and Niger began
to grow skinny. But I have already said enough to show the nature and
course of the stream, and am not bound to linger longer over its noise
among the pebbles. Some things are interesting rather for their results
than their process, and of such I confess it is to me the love-making of
these two.--"What! were they not human?" Yes: but with a truncated
humanity--even shorn of its flower-buds, and full only of variegated
leaves. It shall suffice therefore to say that, in a will-less sort of a
way, Juliet let the matter drift; that, although she withheld explicit
consent, she yet at length allowed Faber to speak as if she had given
it; that they had long ceased to talk about God or no God, about life
and death, about truth and superstition, and spoke only of love, and the
days at hand, and how they would spend them; that they poured out their
hearts in praising and worshiping each other; and that, at last, Juliet
found herself as firmly engaged to be Paul's wife, as if she had granted
every one of the promises he had sought to draw from her, but which she
had avoided giving in the weak fancy that thus she was holding herself
free. It was perfectly understood in all the neighborhood that the
doctor and Miss Meredith were engaged. Both Helen and Dorothy felt a
little hurt at her keeping an absolute silence toward them concerning
what the country seemed to know; but when they spoke of it to her, she
pointedly denied any engagement, and indeed although helplessly drifting
toward marriage, had not yet given absolute consent even in her own
mind. She dared not even then regard it as inevitable. Her two friends
came to the conclusion that she could not find the courage to face
disapproval, and perhaps feared expostulation.

"She may well be ashamed of such an unequal yoking!" said Helen to her
husband.

"There is no unequal yoking in it that I see," he returned. "In the
matter of faith, what is there to choose between them? I see nothing.
They may carry the yoke straight enough. If there _be_ one of them
further from the truth than the other, it must be the one who says, _I
go sir_, and goes not. Between _don't believe_ and _don't care, I_ don't
care to choose. Let them marry and God bless them. It will be good for
them--for one thing if for no other--it is sure to bring trouble to
both."

"Indeed, Mr. Wingfold!" returned Helen playfully.

"So that is how you regard marriage!--Sure to bring trouble!"

She laid her head on his shoulder.

"Trouble to every one, my Helen, like the gospel itself; more trouble to
you than to me, but none to either that will not serve to bring us
closer to each other," he answered. "But about those two--well, I am
both doubtful and hopeful. At all events I can not wish them not to
marry. I think it will be for both of them a step nearer to the truth.
The trouble will, perhaps, drive them to find God. That any one who had
seen and loved our Lord, should consent to marry one, whatever that one
was besides, who did not at least revere and try to obey Him, seems to
me impossible. But again I say there is no such matter involved between
them.--Shall I confess to you, that, with all her frankness, all her
charming ways, all the fullness of the gaze with which her black eyes
look into yours, there is something about Juliet that puzzles me? At
times I have thought she must be in some trouble, out of which she was
on the point of asking me to help her; at others I have fancied she was
trying to be agreeable against her inclination, and did not more than
half approve of me. Sometimes, I confess, the shadow of a doubt crosses
me: is she altogether a true woman? But that vanishes the moment she
smiles. I wish she could have been open with me. I could have helped
her, I am pretty sure. As it is, I have not got one step nearer the real
woman than when first I saw her at the rector's."

"I know," said Helen. "But don't you think it may be that she has never
yet come to know any thing about herself--to perceive either fact or
mystery of her own nature? If she is a stranger to herself, she cannot
reveal herself--at least of her own will--to those about her. She is
just what I was, Thomas, before I knew you--a dull, sleepy-hearted thing
that sat on her dignity. Be sure she has not an idea of the divine truth
you have taught me to see underlying creation itself--namely, that every
thing possessed owes its very value as possession to the power which
that possession gives of parting with it."

"You are a pupil worth having, Helen!--even if I had had to mourn all my
days that you would not love me."

"And now you have said your mind about Juliet," Helen went on, "allow me
to say that I trust her more than I do Faber. I do not for a moment
imagine him consciously dishonest, but he makes too much show of his
honesty for me. I can not help feeling that he is selfish--and can a
selfish man be honest?"

"Not thoroughly. I know that only too well, for I at all events am
selfish, Helen."

"I don't see it; but if you are, you know it, and hate it, and strive
against it. I do not think he knows it, even when he says that every
body is selfish. Only, what better way to get rid of it than to love and
marry?"

"Or to confirm it," said Wingfold thoughtfully.

"I shouldn't wonder a bit if they're married already!" said Helen.

She was not far from wrong, although not quite right. Already Faber had
more than hinted at a hurried marriage, as private as could be
compassed. It was impossible of course, to be married at church. That
would be to cast mockery on the marriage itself, as well as on what
Faber called his _beliefs_. The objection was entirely on Faber's side,
but Juliet did not hint at the least difference of feeling in the
matter. She let every thing take its way now.

At length having, in a neighboring town, arranged all the necessary
preliminaries, Faber got one of the other doctors in Glaston to attend
to his practice for three weeks, and went to take a holiday. Juliet left
Owlkirk the same day. They met, were lawfully married, and at the close
of the three weeks, returned together to the doctor's house.

The sort of thing did not please Glaston society, and although Faber was
too popular as a doctor to lose position by it, Glaston was slow in
acknowledging that it knew there was a lady at the head of his house.
Mrs. Wingfold and Miss Drake, however, set their neighbors a good
example, and by degrees there came about a dribbling sort of
recognition. Their social superiors stood the longest aloof--chiefly
because the lady had been a governess, and yet had behaved so like one
of themselves; they thought it well to give her a lesson. Most of them,
however, not willing to offend the leading doctor in the place, yielded
and called. Two elderly spinsters and Mrs. Ramshorn did not. The latter
declared she did not believe they were married. Most agreed they were
the handsomest couple ever seen in that quarter, and looked all right.

Juliet returned the calls made upon her, at the proper retaliatory
intervals, and gradually her mode of existence fell into routine. The
doctor went out every day, and was out most of the day, while she sat at
home and worked or read. She had to amuse herself, and sometimes found
life duller than when she had to earn her bread--when, as she went from
place to place, she might at any turn meet Paul upon Ruber or Niger.
Already the weary weed of the commonplace had begun to show itself in
the marriage garden--a weed which, like all weeds, requires only neglect
for perfect development, when it will drive the lazy Eve who has never
made her life worth _living_, to ask whether life be worth _having_. She
was not a great reader. No book had ever yet been to her a well-spring
of life; and such books as she liked best it was perhaps just as well
that she could not easily procure in Glaston; for, always ready to
appreciate the noble, she had not moral discernment sufficient to
protect her from the influence of such books as paint poor action in
noble color. For a time also she was stinted in her natural nourishment:
her husband had ordered a grand piano from London for her, but it had
not yet arrived; and the first touch she laid on the tall
spinster-looking one that had stood in the drawing-room for fifty years,
with red silk wrinkles radiating from a gilt center, had made her
shriek. If only Paul would buy a yellow gig, like his friend Dr. May of
Broughill, and take her with him on his rounds! Or if she had a friend
or two to go and see when he was out!--friends like what Helen or even
Dorothy might have been: she was not going to be hand-in-glove with any
body that didn't like her Paul! She missed church too--not the prayers,
much; but she did like hearing what she counted a good sermon, that is,
a lively one. Her husband wanted her to take up some science, but if he
had considered that, with all her gift in music, she expressed an utter
indifference to thorough bass, he would hardly have been so foolish.




CHAPTER XXX.

THE PONY-CARRIAGE.


One Saturday morning the doctor was called to a place a good many miles
distant, and Juliet was left with the prospect of being longer alone
than usual. She felt it almost sultry although so late in the season,
and could not rest in the house. She pretended to herself she had some
shopping to do in Pine Street, but it was rather a longing for air and
motion that sent her out. Also, certain thoughts which she did not like,
had of late been coming more frequently, and she found it easier to
avoid them in the street. They were not such as troubled her from being
hard to think out. Properly speaking, she _thought_ less now than ever.
She often said nice things, but they were mostly the mere gracious
movements of a nature sweet, playful, trusting, fond of all beautiful
things, and quick to see artistic relation where her perception reached.

As she turned the corner of Mr. Drew's shop, the house-door opened, and
a lady came out. It was Mr. Drew's lodger. Juliet knew nothing about
her, and was not aware that she had ever seen her; but the lady started
as if she recognized her. To that kind of thing Juliet was accustomed,
for her style of beauty was any thing but common. The lady's regard
however was so fixed that it drew hers, and as their eyes met, Juliet
felt something, almost a physical pain, shoot through her heart. She
could not understand it, but presently began to suspect, and by degrees
became quite certain that she had seen her before, though she could not
tell where. The effect the sight of her had had, indicated some painful
association, which she must recall before she could be at rest. She
turned in the other direction, and walked straight from the town, that
she might think without eyes upon her.

Scene after scene of her life came back as she searched to find some
circumstance associated with that face. Once and again she seemed on the
point of laying hold of something, when the face itself vanished and she
had that to recall, and the search to resume from the beginning. In the
process many painful memories arose, some, connected with her mother,
unhappy in themselves, others, connected with her father, grown unhappy
from her marriage; for thereby she had built a wall between her thoughts
and her memories of him; and, if there should be a life beyond this, had
hollowed a gulf between them forever.

Gradually her thoughts took another direction.--Could it be that already
the glamour had begun to disperse, the roses of love to wither, the
magic to lose its force, the common look of things to return? Paul was
as kind, as courteous, as considerate as ever, and yet there was a
difference. Her heart did not grow wild, her blood did not rush to her
face, when she heard the sound of his horse's hoofs in the street,
though she knew them instantly. Sadder and sadder grew her thoughts as
she walked along, careless whither.

Had she begun to cease loving? No. She loved better than she knew, but
she must love infinitely better yet. The first glow was gone--already:
she had thought it would not go, and was miserable. She recalled that
even her honeymoon had a little disappointed her. I would not be
mistaken as implying that any of these her reflections had their origin
in what was _peculiar_ in the character, outlook, or speculation of
herself or her husband. The passion of love is but the vestibule--the
pylon--to the temple of love. A garden lies between the pylon and the
adytum. They that will enter the sanctuary must walk through the garden.
But some start to see the roses already withering, sit down and weep and
watch their decay, until at length the aged flowers hang drooping all
around them, and lo! their hearts are withered also, and when they rise
they turn their backs on the holy of holies, and their feet toward the
gate.

Juliet was proud of her Paul, and loved him as much as she was yet
capable of loving. But she had thought they were enough for each other,
and already, although she was far from acknowledging it to herself, she
had, in the twilight of her thinking, begun to doubt it. Nor can she be
blamed for the doubt. Never man and woman yet succeeded in being all in
all to each other.

It were presumption to say that a lonely God would be enough for
Himself, seeing that we can know nothing of God but as He is our Father.
What if the Creator Himself is sufficient to Himself in virtue of His
self-existent _creatorship_? Let my reader think it out. The lower we go
in the scale of creation, the more independent is the individual. The
richer and more perfect each of a married pair is in the other relations
of life, the more is each to the other. For us, the children of eternal
love, the very air our spirits breathe, and without which they can not
live, is the eternal life; for us, the brothers and sisters of a
countless family, the very space in which our souls can exist, is the
love of each and every soul of our kind.

Such were not Juliet's thoughts. To her such would have seemed as unreal
as unintelligible. To her they would have looked just what some of my
readers will pronounce them, not in the least knowing what they are. She
was suddenly roused from her painful reverie by the pulling up of
Helen's ponies, with much clatter and wriggling recoil, close beside
her, making more fuss with their toy-carriage than the mightiest of
tractive steeds with the chariot of pomp.

"Jump in, Juliet," cried their driver, addressing her with the greater
_abandon_ that she was resolved no stiffness on her part should deposit
a grain to the silting up of the channel of former affection. She was
one of the few who understand that no being can afford to let the
smallest love-germ die.

Juliet hesitated. She was not a little bewildered with the sudden recall
from the moony plains of memory, and the demand for immediate action.
She answered uncertainly, trying to think what was involved.

"I know your husband is not waiting you at home," pursued Helen. "I saw
him on Ruber, three fields off, riding away from Glaston. Jump in, dear.
You can make up that mind of yours in the carriage as well as upon the
road. I will set you down wherever you please. My husband is out too, so
the slaves can take their pleasure."

Juliet could not resist, had little inclination to do so, yielded
without another word, and took her place beside Helen, a little shy of
being alone with her, yet glad of her company. Away went the ponies, and
as soon as she had got them settled to their work, Helen turned her face
toward Juliet.

"I _am_ so glad to see you!" she said.

Juliet's heart spoke too loud for her throat. It was a relief to her
that Helen had to keep her eyes on her charge, the quickness of whose
every motion rendered watchfulness right needful.

"Have you returned Mrs. Bevis's call yet!" asked Helen.

"No," murmured Juliet. "I haven't been able yet."

"Well, here is a good chance. Sit where you are, and you will be at
Nestley in half an hour, and I shall be the more welcome. You are a
great favorite there!"

"How kind you are!" said Juliet, the tears beginning to rise. "Indeed,
Mrs. Wingfold,----"

"You _used_ to call me Helen!" said that lady, pulling up her ponies
with sudden energy, as they shied at a bit of paper on the road, and
nearly had themselves and all they drew in the ditch.

"May I call you so still?"

"Surely! What else?"

"You are too good to me!" said Juliet, and wept outright.

"My dear Juliet," returned Helen, "I will be quite plain with you, and
that will put things straight in a moment. Your friends understand
perfectly why you have avoided them of late, and are quite sure it is
from no unkindness to any of them. But neither must you imagine we think
hardly of you for marrying Mr. Faber. We detest his opinions so much
that we feel sure if you saw a little further into them, neither of you
would hold them."

"But I don't--that is, I--"

"You don't know whether you hold them or not: I understand quite well.
My husband says in your case it does not matter much; for if you had
ever really believed in Jesus Christ, you could not have done it. At all
events now the thing is done, there is no question about it left. Dear
Juliet, think of us as your friends still, who will always be glad to
see you, and ready to help you where we can."

Juliet was weeping for genuine gladness now. But even as she wept, by
one of those strange movements of our being which those who have been
quickest to question them wonder at the most, it flashed upon her where
she had seen the lady that came from Mr. Drew's house, and her heart
sunk within her, for the place was associated with that portion of her
history which of all she would most gladly hide from herself. During the
rest of the drive she was so silent, that Helen at last gave up trying
to talk to her. Then first she observed how the clouds had risen on all
sides and were meeting above, and that the air was more still and sultry
than ever.

Just as they got within Nestley-gate, a flash of lightning, scarcely
followed by a loud thunder-clap, shot from overhead. The ponies plunged,
reared, swayed asunder from the pole, nearly fell, and recovered
themselves only to dart off in wild terror. Juliet screamed.

"Don't be frightened, child," said Helen. "There is no danger here. The
road is straight and there is nothing on it. I shall soon pull them up.
Only don't cry out: that will be as little to their taste as the
lightning."

Juliet caught at the reins.

"For God's sake, don't do that!" cried Helen, balking her clutch. "You
will kill us both."

Juliet sunk back in her seat. The ponies went at full speed along the
road. The danger was small, for the park was upon both sides, level
with the drive, in which there was a slight ascent. Helen was perfectly
quiet, and went on gradually tightening her pull upon the reins. Before
they reached the house, she had entirely regained her command of them.
When she drew up to the door, they stood quite steady, but panting as if
their little sides would fly asunder. By this time Helen was red as a
rose; her eyes were flashing, and a smile was playing about her mouth;
but Juliet was like a lily on which the rain has been falling all night:
her very lips were bloodless. When Helen turned and saw her, she was far
more frightened than the ponies could make her.

"Why, Juliet, my dear!" she said, "I had no thought you were so
terrified! What would your husband say to me for frightening you so! But
you are safe now."

A servant came to take the ponies. Helen got out first, and gave her
hand to Juliet.

"Don't think me a coward, Helen," she said. "It was the thunder. I never
could bear thunder."

"I should be far more of a coward than you are, Juliet," answered Helen,
"if I believed, or even feared, that just a false step of little Zephyr
there, or one plunge more from Zoe, might wipe out the world, and I
should never more see the face of my husband."

She spoke eagerly, lovingly, believingly. Juliet shivered, stopped, and
laid hold of the baluster rail. Things had been too much for her that
day. She looked so ill that Helen was again alarmed, but she soon came
to herself a little, and they went on to Mrs. Bevis's room. She received
them most kindly, made Mrs. Faber lie on the sofa, covered her over, for
she was still trembling, and got her a glass of wine. But she could not
drink it, and lay sobbing in vain endeavor to control herself.

Meantime the clouds gathered thicker and thicker: the thunder-peal that
frightened the ponies had been but the herald of the storm, and now it
came on in earnest. The rain rushed suddenly on the earth, and as soon
as she heard it, Juliet ceased to sob. At every flash, however, although
she lay with her eyes shut, and her face pressed into the pillow, she
shivered and moaned.--"Why should one," thought Helen, "who is merely
and only the child of Nature, find herself so little at home with her?"
Presently Mr. Bevis came running in from the stable, drenched in
crossing to the house. As he passed to his room, he opened the door of
his wife's, and looked in.

"I am glad to see you safely housed, ladies," he said. "You must make
up your minds to stay where you are. It will not clear before the moon
rises, and that will be about midnight. I will send John to tell your
husbands that you are not cowering under a hedge, and will not be home
to-night."

He was a good weather-prophet. The rain went on. In the evening the two
husbands appeared, dripping. They had come on horseback together, and
would ride home again after dinner. The doctor would have to be out the
greater part of the Sunday, and would gladly leave his wife in such good
quarters; the curate would walk out to his preaching in the evening, and
drive home with Helen after it, taking Juliet, if she should be able to
accompany them.

After dinner, when the ladies had left them, between the two clergymen
and the doctor arose the conversation of which I will now give the
substance, leaving the commencement, and taking it up at an advanced
point.

"Now tell me," said Faber, in the tone of one satisfied he must be
allowed in the right, "which is the nobler--to serve your neighbor in
the hope of a future, believing in a God who will reward you, or to
serve him in the dark, obeying your conscience, with no other hope than
that those who come after you will be the better for you?"

"I allow most heartily," answered Wingfold, "and with all admiration,
that it is indeed grand in one hopeless for himself to live well for the
sake of generations to come, which he will never see, and which will
never hear of him. But I will not allow that there is any thing grand in
being hopeless for one's self, or in serving the Unseen rather than
those about you, seeing it is easier to work for those who can not
oppose you, than to endure the contradiction of sinners. But I know you
agree with me that the best way to assist posterity is to be true to
your contemporaries, so there I need say no more--except that the
hopeless man can do the least for his fellows, being unable to give them
any thing that should render them other than hopeless themselves; and
if, for the grandeur of it, a man were to cast away his purse in order
to have the praise of parting with the two mites left in his pocket, you
would simply say the man was a fool. This much seems to me clear, that,
if there be no God, it may be nobler to be able to live without one;
but, if there be a God, it must be nobler not to be able to live
without Him. The moment, however, that nobility becomes the object in
any action, that moment the nobleness of the action vanishes. The man
who serves his fellow that he may himself be noble, misses the mark. He
alone who follows the truth, not he who follows nobility, shall attain
the noble. A man's nobility will, in the end, prove just commensurate
with his humanity--with the love he bears his neighbor--not the amount
of work he may have done for him. A man might throw a lordly gift to his
fellow, like a bone to a dog, and damn himself in the deed. You may
insult a dog by the way you give him his bone."

"I dispute nothing of all that," said Faber--while good Mr. Bevis sat
listening hard, not quite able to follow the discussion; "but I know you
will admit that to do right from respect to any reward whatever, hardly
amounts to doing right at all."

"I doubt if any man ever did or could do a thing worthy of passing as in
itself good, for the sake of a reward," rejoined Wingfold. "Certainly,
to do good for something else than good, is not good at all. But perhaps
a reward may so influence a low nature as to bring it a little into
contact with what is good, whence the better part of it may make some
acquaintance with good. Also, the desire of the approbation of the
Perfect, might nobly help a man who was finding his duty hard, for it
would humble as well as strengthen him, and is but another form of the
love of the good. The praise of God will always humble a man, I think."

"There you are out of my depth," said Faber. "I know nothing about
that."

"I go on then to say," continued the curate, "that a man may well be
strengthened and encouraged by the hope of being made a better and truer
man, and capable of greater self-forgetfulness and devotion. There is
nothing low in having respect to such a reward as that, is there?"

"It seems to me better," persisted the doctor, "to do right for the sake
of duty, than for the sake of any goodness even that will come thereby
to yourself."

"Assuredly, if self in the goodness, and not the goodness itself be the
object," assented Wingfold. "When a duty lies before one, self ought to
have no part in the gaze we fix upon it; but when thought reverts upon
himself, who would avoid the wish to be a better man? The man who will
not do a thing for duty, will never get so far as to derive any help
from the hope of goodness. But duty itself is only a stage toward
something better. It is but the impulse, God-given I believe, toward a
far more vital contact with the truth. We shall one day forget all about
duty, and do every thing from the love of the loveliness of it, the
satisfaction of the rightness of it. What would you say to a man who
ministered to the wants of his wife and family only from duty? Of course
you wish heartily that the man who neglects them would do it from any
cause, even were it fear of the whip; but the strongest and most
operative sense of duty would not satisfy you in such a relation. There
are depths within depths of righteousness. Duty is the only path to
freedom, but that freedom is the love that is beyond and prevents duty."

"But," said Faber, "I have heard you say that to take from you your
belief in a God would be to render you incapable of action. Now, the
man--I don't mean myself, but the sort of a man for whom I stand
up--does act, does his duty, without the strength of that belief: is he
not then the stronger?--Let us drop the word _noble_."

"In the case supposed, he would be the stronger--for a time at least,"
replied the curate. "But you must remember that to take from me the joy
and glory of my life, namely the belief that I am the child of God, an
heir of the Infinite, with the hope of being made perfectly righteous,
loving like God Himself, would be something more than merely reducing me
to the level of a man who had never loved God, or seen in the
possibility of Him any thing to draw him. I should have lost the mighty
dream of the universe; he would be what and where he chose to be, and
might well be the more capable. Were I to be convinced there is no God,
and to recover by the mere force of animal life from the prostration
into which the conviction cast me, I should, I hope, try to do what duty
was left me, for I too should be filled, for a time at least, with an
endless pity for my fellows; but all would be so dreary, that I should
be almost paralyzed for serving them, and should long for death to do
them and myself the only good service. The thought of the generations
doomed to be born into a sunless present, would almost make me join any
conspiracy to put a stop to the race. I should agree with Hamlet that
the whole thing had better come to an end. Would it necessarily indicate
a lower nature, or condition, or habit of thought, that, having
cherished such hopes, I should, when I lost them, be more troubled than
one who never had had them?"

"Still," said Faber, "I ask you to allow that a nature which can do
without help is greater than a nature which can not."

"If the thing done were the same, I should allow it," answered the
curate; "but the things done will prove altogether different. And
another thing to be noted is, that, while the need of help might
indicate a lower nature, the capacity for receiving it must indicate a
higher. The mere fact of being able to live and act in more meager
spiritual circumstances, in itself proves nothing: it is not the highest
nature that has the fewest needs. The highest nature is the one that has
the most necessities, but the fewest of its own making. He is not the
greatest man who is the most independent, but he who thirsts most after
a conscious harmony with every element and portion of the mighty whole;
demands from every region thereof its influences to perfect his
individuality; regards that individuality as his kingdom, his treasure,
not to hold but to give; sees in his Self the one thing he can devote,
the one precious means of freedom by its sacrifice, and that in no
contempt or scorn, but in love to God and his children, the multitudes
of his kind. By dying ever thus, ever thus losing his soul, he lives
like God, and God knows him, and he knows God. This is too good to be
grasped, but not too good to be true. The highest is that which needs
the highest, the largest that which needs the most; the finest and
strongest that which to live must breath essential life, self-willed
life, God Himself. It follows that it is not the largest or the
strongest nature that will feel a loss the least. An ant will not gather
a grain of corn the less that his mother is dead, while a boy will turn
from his books and his play and his dinner because his bird is dead: is
the ant, therefore, the stronger nature?"

"Is it not weak to be miserable?" said the doctor.

"Yes--without good cause," answered the curate. "But you do not know
what it would be to me to lose my faith in my God. My misery would be a
misery to which no assurance of immortality or of happiness could bring
any thing but tenfold misery--the conviction that I should never be good
myself, never have any thing to love absolutely, never be able to make
amends for the wrongs I had done. Call such a feeling selfish if you
will: I can not help it. I can not count one fit for existence to whom
such things would be no grief. The worthy existence must hunger after
good. The largest nature must have the mightiest hunger. Who calls a
man selfish because he is hungry? He is selfish if he broods on the
pleasures of eating, and would not go without his dinner for the sake of
another; but if he had no hunger, where would be the room for his
self-denial? Besides, in spiritual things, the only way to give them to
your neighbors is to hunger after them yourself. There each man is a
mouth to the body of the whole creation. It can not be selfishness to
hunger and thirst after righteousness, which righteousness is just your
duty to your God and your neighbor. If there be any selfishness in it,
the very answer to your prayer will destroy it."

"There you are again out of my region," said Faber. "But answer me one
thing: is it not weak to desire happiness?"

"Yes; if the happiness is poor and low," rejoined Wingfold. "But the man
who would choose even the grandeur of duty before the bliss of the
truth, must be a lover of himself. Such a man must be traveling the road
to death. If there be a God, truth must be joy. If there be not, truth
may be misery.--But, honestly, I know not one advanced Christian who
tries to obey for the hope of Heaven or the fear of hell. Such ideas
have long vanished from such a man. He loves God; he loves truth; he
loves his fellow, and knows he must love him more. You judge of
Christianity either by those who are not true representatives of it, and
are indeed, less of Christians than yourself; or by others who, being
intellectually inferior, perhaps even stupid, belie Christ with their
dull theories concerning Him. Yet the latter may have in them a noble
seed, urging them up heights to you at present unconceived and
inconceivable; while, in the meantime, some of them serve their
generation well, and do as much for those that are to come after as you
do yourself."

"There is always weight as well as force in what you urge, Wingfold,"
returned Faber. "Still it looks to me just a cunningly devised fable--I
will not say of the priests, but of the human mind deceiving itself with
its own hopes and desires."

"It may well look such to those who are outside of it, and it must at
length appear such to all who, feeling in it any claim upon them, yet do
not put it to the test of their obedience."

"Well, you have had your turn, and now we are having ours--you of the
legends, we of the facts."

"No," said Wingfold, "we have not had our turn, and you have been
having yours for a far longer time than we. But if, as you profess, you
are _doing_ the truth you see, it belongs to my belief that you will
come to see the truth you do not see. Christianity is not a failure; for
to it mainly is the fact owing that here is a class of men which,
believing in no God, yet believes in duty toward men. Look here: if
Christianity be the outcome of human aspiration, the natural growth of
the human soil, is it not strange it should be such an utter failure as
it seems to you? and as such a natural growth, it must be a failure, for
if it were a success, must not you be the very one to see it? If it is
false, it is worthless, or an evil: where then is your law of
development, if the highest result of that development is an evil to the
nature and the race?"

"I do not grant it the highest result," said Faber. "It is a failure--a
false blossom, with a truer to follow."

"To produce a superior architecture, poetry, music?"

"Perhaps not. But a better science."

"Are the architecture and poetry and music parts of the failure?"

"Yes--but they are not altogether a failure, for they lay some truth at
the root of them all. Now we shall see what will come of turning away
from every thing we do not _know_."

"That is not exactly what you mean, for that would be never to know any
thing more. But the highest you have in view is immeasurably below what
Christianity has always demanded of its followers."

"But has never got from them, and never will. Look at the wars, the
hatreds, to which your _gospel_ has given rise! Look at Calvin and poor
Servetus! Look at the strifes and divisions of our own day! Look at the
religious newspapers!"

"All granted. It is a chaos, the motions of whose organization must be
strife. The spirit of life is at war with the spasmatical body of death.
If Christianity be not still in the process of development, it is the
saddest of all failures."

"The fact is, Wingfold, your prophet would have been King of the race if
He had not believed in a God."

"I dare not speak the answer that rises to my lips," said Wingfold. "But
there is more truth in what you say than you think, and more of
essential lie also. My answer is, that the faith of Jesus in His God and
Father is, even now, saving me, setting me free from my one horror,
selfishness; making my life an unspeakable boon to me, letting me know
its roots in the eternal and perfect; giving me such love to my fellow,
that I trust at last to love him as Christ has loved me. But I do not
expect you to understand me. He in whom I believe said that a man must
be born again to enter into the kingdom of Heaven."

The doctor laughed.

"You then _are_ one of the double-born, Wingfold?" he said.

"I believe, I think, I hope so," replied the curate, very gravely.

"And you, Mr. Bevis?"

"I don't know. I wish. I doubt," answered the rector, with equal
solemnity.

"Oh, never fear!" said Faber, with a quiet smile, and rising, left the
clergymen together.

But what a morning it was that came up after the storm! All night the
lightning had been flashing itself into peace, and gliding further and
further away. Bellowing and growling the thunder had crept with it; but
long after it could no more be heard, the lightning kept gleaming up, as
if from a sea of flame behind the horizon. The sun brought a glorious
day, and looked larger and mightier than before. To Helen, as she gazed
eastward from her window, he seemed ascending his lofty pulpit to preach
the story of the day named after him--the story of the Sun-day; the
rising again in splendor of the darkened and buried Sun of the universe,
with whom all the worlds and all their hearts and suns arose. A light
steam was floating up from the grass, and the raindrops were sparkling
everywhere. The day had arisen from the bosom of the night; peace and
graciousness from the bosom of the storm; she herself from the grave of
her sleep, over which had lain the turf of the darkness; and all was
fresh life and new hope. And through it all, reviving afresh with every
sign of Nature's universal law of birth, was the consciousness that her
life, her own self, was rising from the dead, was being new-born also.
She had not far to look back to the time when all was dull and dead in
her being: when the earthquake came, and the storm, and the fire; and
after them the still small voice, breathing rebuke, and hope, and
strength. Her whole world was now radiant with expectation. It was
through her husband the change had come to her, but he was not the rock
on which she built. For his sake she could go to hell--yea, cease to
exist; but there was One whom she loved more than him--the one One whose
love was the self-willed cause of all love, who from that love had sent
forth her husband and herself to love one another; whose heart was the
nest of their birth, the cradle of their growth, the rest of their
being. Yea, more than her husband she loved Him, her elder Brother, by
whom the Father had done it all, the Man who lived and died and rose
again so many hundred years ago. In Him, the perfect One, she hoped for
a perfect love to her husband, a perfect nature in herself. She knew how
Faber would have mocked at such a love, the very existence of whose
object she could not prove, how mocked at the notion that His life even
now was influencing hers. She knew how he would say it was merely love
and marriage that had wrought the change; but while she recognized them
as forces altogether divine, she knew that not only was the Son of Man
behind them, but that it was her obedience to Him and her confidence in
Him that had wrought the red heart of the change in her. She knew that
she would rather break with her husband altogether, than to do one
action contrary to the known mind and will of that Man. Faber would call
her faith a mighty, perhaps a lovely illusion: her life was an active
waiting for the revelation of its object in splendor before the
universe. The world seemed to her a grand march of resurrections--out of
every sorrow springing the joy at its heart, without which it could not
have been a sorrow; out of the troubles, and evils, and sufferings, and
cruelties that clouded its history, ever arising the human race, the
sons of God, redeemed in Him who had been made subject to death that He
might conquer Death for them and for his Father--a succession of mighty
facts, whose meanings only God can evolve, only the obedient heart
behold.

On such a morning, so full of resurrection, Helen was only a little
troubled not to be one of her husband's congregation: she would take her
New Testament, and spend the sunny day in the open air. In the evening
he was coming, and would preach in the little chapel. If only Juliet
might hear him too! But she would not ask her to go.

Juliet was better, for fatigue had compelled sleep. The morning had
brought her little hope, however, no sense of resurrection. A certain
dead thing had begun to move in its coffin; she was utterly alone with
it, and it made the world feel a tomb around her. Not all resurrections
are the resurrection of life, though in the end they will be found, even
to the lowest birth of the power of the enemy, to have contributed
thereto. She did not get up to breakfast; Helen persuaded her to rest,
and herself carried it to her. But she rose soon after, and declared
herself quite well.

The rector drove to Glaston in his dog-cart to read prayers. Helen went
out into the park with her New Testament and George Herbert. Poor Juliet
was left with Mrs. Bevis, who happily could not be duller than usual,
although it was Sunday. By the time the rector returned, bringing his
curate with him, she was bored almost beyond endurance. She had not yet
such a love of wisdom as to be able to bear with folly. The foolish and
weak are the most easily disgusted with folly and weakness which is not
of their own sort, and are the last to make allowances for them. To
spend also the evening with the softly smiling old woman, who would not
go across the grass after such a rain the night before, was a thing not
to be contemplated. Juliet borrowed a pair of galoshes, and insisted on
going to the chapel. In vain the rector and his wife dissuaded her.
Neither Helen nor her husband said a word.




CHAPTER XXXI

A CONSCIENCE.


The chapel in the park at Nestley, having as yet received no color, and
having no organ or choir, was a cold, uninteresting little place. It was
neat, but had small beauty, and no history. Yet even already had begun
to gather in the hearts of two or three of the congregation a feeling of
quiet sacredness about it: some soft airs of the spirit-wind had been
wandering through their souls as they sat there and listened. And a
gentle awe, from old associations with lay worship, stole like a soft
twilight over Juliet as she entered. Even the antral dusk of an old
reverence may help to form the fitting mood through which shall slide
unhindered the still small voice that makes appeal to what of God is yet
awake in the soul. There were present about a score of villagers, and
the party from the house.

Clad in no vestments of office, but holding in his hand the New
Testament, which was always held either there or in his pocket, Wingfold
rose to speak. He read:

"_Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. For
there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that
shall not be know_."

Then at once he began to show them, in the simplest interpretation, that
the hypocrite was one who pretended to be what he was not; who tried or
consented to look other and better than he was. That a man, from
unwillingness to look at the truth concerning himself, might be but
half-consciously assenting to the false appearance, would, he said,
nowise serve to save him from whatever of doom was involved in this
utterance of our Lord concerning the crime. These words of explanation
and caution premised, he began at the practical beginning, and spoke a
few forceful things on the necessity of absolute truth as to fact in
every communication between man and man, telling them that, so far as he
could understand His words recorded, our Lord's objection to swearing
lay chiefly in this, that it encouraged untruthfulness, tending to make
a man's yea less than yea, his nay other than nay. He said that many
people who told lies every day, would be shocked when they discovered
that they were liars; and that their lying must be discovered, for the
Lord said so. Every untruthfulness was a passing hypocrisy, and if they
would not come to be hypocrites out and out, they must begin to avoid it
by speaking every man the truth to his neighbor. If they did not begin
at once to speak the truth, they must grow worse and worse liars. The
Lord called hypocrisy _leaven_, because of its irresistible, perhaps as
well its unseen, growth and spread; he called it the leaven _of the
Pharisees_, because it was the all-pervading quality of their being, and
from them was working moral dissolution in the nation, eating like a
canker into it, by infecting with like hypocrisy all who looked up to
them.

"Is it not a strange drift, this of men," said the curate, "to hide what
is, under the veil of what is not? to seek refuge in lies, as if that
which is not, could be an armor of adamant? to run from the daylight for
safety, deeper into the cave? In the cave house the creatures of the
night--the tigers and hyenas, the serpent and the old dragon of the
dark; in the light are true men and women, and the clear-eyed angels.
But the reason is only too plain; it is, alas! that they are themselves
of the darkness and not of the light. They do not fear their own. They
are more comfortable with the beasts of darkness than with the angels of
light. They dread the peering of holy eyes into their hearts; they feel
themselves naked and fear to be ashamed, therefore cast the garment of
hypocrisy about them. They have that in them so strange to the light
that they feel it must be hidden from the eye of day, as a thing
_hideous_, that is, a thing to be hidden. But the hypocrisy is worse
than all it would hide. That they have to hide again, as a more hideous
thing still.

"God hides nothing. His very work from the beginning is _revelation_--a
casting aside of veil after veil, a showing unto men of truth after
truth. On and on, from fact to fact divine He advances, until at length
in His Son Jesus, He unveils His very face. Then begins a fresh
unveiling, for the very work of the Father is the work the Son Himself
has to do--to reveal. His life was the unveiling of Himself, and the
unveiling of the Son is still going on, and is that for the sake of
which the world exists. When He is unveiled, that is, when we know the
Son, we shall know the Father also. The whole of creation, its growth,
its history, the gathering total of human existence, is an unveiling of
the Father. He is the life, the eternal life, the _Only_. I see it--ah!
believe me--I see it as I can not say it. From month to month it grows
upon me. The lovely home-light, the One essence of peaceful being, is
God Himself.

"He loves light and not darkness, therefore shines, therefore reveals.
True, there are infinite gulfs in Him, into which our small vision can
not pierce, but they are gulfs of light, and the truths there are
invisible only through excess of their own clarity. There is a darkness
that comes of effulgence, and the most veiling of all veils is the
light. That for which the eye exists is light, but _through_ light no
human eye can pierce.--I find myself beyond my depth. I am ever beyond
my depth, afloat in an infinite sea; but the depth of the sea knows me,
for the ocean of my being is God.--What I would say is this, that the
light is not blinding because God would hide, but because the truth is
too glorious for our vision. The effulgence of Himself God veiled that
He might unveil it--in his Son. Inter-universal spaces, aeons,
eternities--what word of vastness you can find or choose--take
unfathomable darkness itself, if you will, to express the infinitude of
God, that original splendor existing only to the consciousness of God
Himself--I say He hides it not, but is revealing it ever, forever, at
all cost of labor, yea of pain to Himself. His whole creation is a
sacrificing of Himself to the being and well-being of His little ones,
that, being wrought out at last into partakers of His divine nature,
that nature may be revealed in them to their divinest bliss. He brings
hidden things out of the light of His own being into the light of ours.

"But see how different _we_ are--until we learn of Him! See the tendency
of man to conceal his treasures, to claim even truth as his own by
discovery, to hide it and be proud of it, gloating over that which he
thinks he has in himself, instead of groaning after the infinite of God!
We would be forever heaping together possessions, dragging things into
the cave of our finitude, our individual self, not perceiving that the
things which pass that dreariest of doors, whatever they may have been,
are thenceforth but 'straws, small sticks, and dust of the floor.' When
a man would have a truth in thither as if it were of private
interpretation, he drags in only the bag which the truth, remaining
outside, has burst and left.

"Nowhere are such children of darkness born as in the caves of
hypocrisy; nowhere else can a man revel with such misshapen hybrids of
religion and sin. But, as one day will be found, I believe, a strength
of physical light before which even solid gold or blackest marble
becomes transparent, so is there a spiritual light before which all
veils of falsehood shall shrivel up and perish and cease to hide; so
that, in individual character, in the facts of being, in the densest of
Pharisaical hypocrisy, there is nothing covered that shall not be
revealed, nothing hid that shall not be known.

"If then, brother or sister, thou hast that which would be hidden, make
haste and drag the thing from its covert into the presence of thy God,
thy Light, thy Saviour, that, if it be in itself good, it may be
cleansed; if evil, it may be stung through and through with the burning
arrows of truth, and perish in glad relief. For the one bliss of an evil
thing is to perish and pass; the evil thing, and that alone, is the
natural food of Death--nothing else will agree with the monster. If we
have such foul things, I say, within the circumference of our known
selves, we must confess the charnel-fact to ourselves and to God; and if
there be any one else who has a claim to know it, to that one also must
we confess, casting out the vile thing that we may be clean. Let us make
haste to open the doors of our lips and the windows of our humility, to
let out the demon of darkness, and in the angels of light--so abjuring
the evil. Be sure that concealment is utterly, absolutely hopeless. If
we do not thus ourselves open our house, the day will come when a
roaring blast of His wind, or the flame of His keen lightning, will
destroy every defense of darkness, and set us shivering before the
universe in our naked vileness; for there is nothing covered that shall
not be revealed, neither hid that shall not be known. Ah! well for man
that he can not hide! What vaults of uncleanness, what sinks of dreadful
horrors, would not the souls of some of us grow! But for every one of
them, as for the universe, comes the day of cleansing. Happy they who
hasten it! who open wide the doors, take the broom in the hand, and
begin to sweep! The dust may rise in clouds; the offense may be great;
the sweeper may pant and choke, and weep, yea, grow faint and sick with
self-disgust; but the end will be a clean house, and the light and wind
of Heaven shining and blowing clear and fresh and sweet through all its
chambers. Better so, than have a hurricane from God burst in doors and
windows, and sweep from his temple with the besom of destruction every
thing that loveth and maketh a lie. Brothers, sisters, let us be clean.
The light and the air around us are God's vast purifying furnace; out
into it let us cast all hypocrisy. Let us be open-hearted, and speak
every man the truth to his neighbor. Amen."

The faces of the little congregation had been staring all the time at
the speaker's, as the flowers of a little garden stare at the sun. Like
a white lily that had begun to fade, that of Juliet had drawn the eyes
of the curate, as the whitest spot always will. But it had drawn his
heart also. Had her troubles already begun, poor girl? he thought. Had
the sweet book of marriage already begun to give out its bitterness?

It was not just so. Marriage was good to her still. Not yet, though but
a thing of this world, as she and her husband were agreed, had it begun
to grow stale and wearisome. She was troubled. It was with no reaction
against the opinions to which she had practically yielded; but not the
less had the serpent of the truth bitten her, for it can bite through
the gauze of whatever opinions or theories. Conscious, persistent wrong
may harden and thicken the gauze to a quilted armor, but even through
that the sound of its teeth may wake up Don Worm, the conscience, and
then is the baser nature between the fell incensed points of mighty
opposites. It avails a man little to say he does not believe this or
that, if the while he can not rest because of some word spoken. True
speech, as well as true scripture, is given by inspiration of God; it
goes forth on the wind of the Spirit, with the ministry of fire. The sun
will shine, and the wind will blow, the floods will beat, and the fire
will burn, until the yielding soul, re-born into childhood, spreads
forth its hands and rushes to the Father.

It was dark, and Juliet took the offered arm of the rector and walked
with him toward the house. Both were silent, for both had been touched.
The rector was busy tumbling over the contents now of this now of that
old chest and cabinet in the lumber-room of his memory, seeking for
things to get rid of by holy confession ere the hour of proclamation
should arrive. He was finding little yet beyond boyish escapades, and
faults and sins which he had abjured ages ago and almost forgotten. His
great sin, of which he had already repented, and was studying more and
more to repent--that of undertaking holy service for the sake of the
loaves and the fishes--then, in natural sequence, only taking the loaves
and the fishes, and doing no service in return, did not come under the
name of hypocrisy, being indeed a crime patent to the universe, even
when hidden from himself. When at length the heavy lids of his honest
sleepy-eyed nature arose, and he saw the truth of his condition, his
dull, sturdy soul had gathered itself like an old wrestler to the
struggle, and hardly knew what was required of it, or what it had to
overthrow, till it stood panting over its adversary.

Juliet also was occupied--with no such search as the rector's, hardly
even with what could be called thought, but with something that must
either soon cause the keenest thought, or at length a spiritual
callosity: somewhere in her was a motion, a something turned and
twisted, ceased and began again, boring like an auger; or was it a
creature that tried to sleep, but ever and anon started awake, and with
fretful claws pulled at its nest in the fibers of her heart?

The curate and his wife talked softly all the way back to the house.

"Do you really think," said Helen, "that every fault one has ever
committed will one day be trumpeted out to the universe?"

"That were hardly worth the while of the universe," answered her
husband. "Such an age-long howling of evil stupidities would be enough
to turn its brain with ennui and disgust. Nevertheless, the hypocrite
will certainly know himself discovered and shamed, and unable any longer
to hide himself from his neighbor. His past deeds also will be made
plain to all who, for further ends of rectification, require to know
them. Shame will then, I trust, be the first approach of his
redemption."

Juliet, for she was close behind them, heard his words and shuddered.

"You are feeling it cold, Mrs. Faber," said the rector, and, with the
fatherly familiarity of an old man, drew her cloak better around her.

"It is not cold," she faltered; "but somehow the night-air always makes
me shiver."

The rector pulled a muffler from his coat-pocket, and laid it like a
scarf on her shoulders.

"How kind you are!" she murmured. "I don't deserve it."

"Who deserves any thing?" said the rector. "I less, I am sure, than any
one I know. Only, if you will believe my curate, you have but to ask,
and have what you need."

"I wasn't the first to say that, sir," Wingfold struck in, turning his
head over his shoulder.

"I know that, my boy," answered Mr. Bevis; "but you were the first to
make me want to find its true.--I say, Mrs. Faber, what if it should
turn out after all, that there was a grand treasure hid in your field
and mine, that we never got the good of because we didn't believe it was
there and dig for it? What if this scatter-brained curate of mine should
be right when he talks so strangely about our living in the midst of
calling voices, cleansing fires, baptizing dews, and _won't_ hearken,
won't be clean, won't give up our sleep and our dreams for the very
bliss for which we cry out in them!"

The old man had stopped, taken off his hat, and turned toward her. He
spoke with such a strange solemnity of voice that it could hardly have
been believed his by those who knew him as a judge of horses and not as
a reader of prayers. The other pair had stopped also.

"I should call it very hard," returned Juliet, "to come so near it and
yet miss it."

"Especially to be driven so near it against one's will, and yet succeed
in getting past without touching it," said the curate, with a flavor of
asperity. His wife gently pinched his arm, and he was ashamed.

When they reached home, Juliet went straight to bed--or at least to her
room for the night.

"I say, Wingfold," remarked the rector, as they sat alone after supper,
"that sermon of yours was above your congregation."

"I am afraid you are right, sir. I am sorry. But if you had seen their
faces as I did, perhaps you would have modified the conclusion."

"I am very glad I heard it, though," said the rector.

They had more talk, and when Wingfold went up stairs, he found Helen
asleep. Annoyed with himself for having spoken harshly to Mrs. Faber,
and more than usually harassed by a sense of failure in his sermon, he
threw himself into a chair, and sat brooding and praying till the light
began to appear. Out of the reeds shaken all night in the wind, rose
with the morning this bird:--

  THE SMOKE.

  Lord, I have laid my heart upon Thy altar,
    But can not get the wood to burn;
  It hardly flares ere it begins to falter,
    And to the dark return.

  Old sap, or night-fallen dew, has damped the fuel;
    In vain my breath would flame provoke;
  Yet see--at every poor attempt's renewal
    To Thee ascends the smoke.

  'Tis all I have--smoke, failure, foiled endeavor,
    Coldness, and doubt, and palsied lack;
  Such as I have I send Thee;--perfect Giver,
    Send Thou Thy lightning back.

In the morning, as soon as breakfast was over, Helen's ponies were
brought to the door, she and Juliet got into the carriage, Wingfold
jumped up behind, and they returned to Glaston. Little was said on the
way, and Juliet seemed strangely depressed. They left her at her own
door.

"What did that look mean?" said Wingfold to his wife, the moment they
were round the corner of Mr. Drew's shop.

"You saw it then?" returned Helen. "I did not think you had been so
quick."

"I saw what I could not help taking for relief," said the curate, "when
the maid told her that her husband was not at home."

They said no more till they reached the rectory, where Helen followed
her husband to his study.

"He can't have turned tyrant already!" she said, resuming the subject of
Juliet's look. "But she's afraid of him."

"It did look like it," rejoined her husband. "Oh, Helen, what a hideous
thing fear of her husband must be for a woman, who has to spend not her
days only in his presence, but her nights by his side! I do wonder so
many women dare to be married. They would need all to have clean
consciences."

"Or no end of faith in their husbands," said Helen. "If ever I come to
be afraid of you, it will be because I have done something very wrong
indeed."

"Don't be too sure of that, Helen," returned Wingfold. "There are very
decent husbands as husbands go, who are yet unjust, exacting, selfish.
The most devoted of wives are sometimes afraid of the men they yet
consider the very models of husbands. It is a brutal shame that a woman
should feel afraid, or even uneasy, instead of safe, beside her
husband."

"You are always on the side of the women, Thomas," said his wife; "and I
love you for it somehow--I can't tell why."

"You make a mistake to begin with, my dear: you don't love me because I
am on the side of the women, but because I am on the side of the
wronged. If the man happened to be the injured party, and I took the
side of the woman, you would be down on me like an avalanche."

"I dare say. But there is something more in it. I don't think I am
altogether mistaken. You don't talk like most men. They have such an
ugly way of asserting superiority, and sneering at women! That you never
do, and as a woman I am grateful for it."

The same afternoon Dorothy Drake paid a visit to Mrs. Faber, and was
hardly seated before the feeling that something was wrong arose in her.
Plainly Juliet was suffering--from some cause she wished to conceal.
Several times she seemed to turn faint, hurriedly fanned herself, and
drew a deep breath. Once she rose hastily and went to the window, as if
struggling with some oppression, and returned looking very pale.

Dorothy was frightened.

"What is the matter, dear?" she said.

"Nothing," answered Juliet, trying to smile. "Perhaps I took a little
cold last night," she added with a shiver.

"Have you told your husband?" asked Dorothy.

"I haven't seen him since Saturday," she answered quietly, but a pallor
almost deathly overspread her face.

"I hope he will soon be home," said Dorothy. "Mind you tell him how you
feel the instant he comes in."

Juliet answered with a smile, but that smile Dorothy never forgot. It
haunted her all the way home. When she entered her chamber, her eyes
fell upon the petal of a monthly rose, which had dropped from the little
tree in her window, and lay streaked and crumpled on the black earth of
the flower-pot: by one of those queer mental vagaries in which the
imagination and the logical faculty seem to combine to make sport of the
reason--"How is it that smile has got here before me?" she said to
herself.

She sat down and thought. Could it be that Juliet had, like herself,
begun to find there could be no peace without the knowledge of an
absolute peace? If it were so, and she would but let her know it, then,
sisters at least in sorrow and search, they would together seek the
Father of their spirits, if haply they might find Him; together they
would cry to Him--and often: it might be He would hear them, and reveal
Himself. Her heart was sore all day, thinking of that sad face. Juliet,
whether she knew it or not, was, like herself, in trouble because she
had no God.

The conclusion shows that Dorothy was far from hopeless. That she could
believe the lack of a God was the cause unknown to herself of her
friend's depression, implies an assurance of the human need of a God,
and a hope there might be One to be found. For herself, if she could but
find Him, she felt there would be nothing but bliss evermore. Dorothy
then was more hopeful than she herself knew. I doubt if absolute
hopelessness is ever born save at the word, _Depart from me_. Hope
springs with us from God Himself, and, however down-beaten, however sick
and nigh unto death, will evermore lift its head and rise again.

She could say nothing to her father. She loved him--oh, how dearly! and
trusted him; where she could trust him at all!--oh, how perfectly! but
she had no confidence in his understanding of herself. The main cause
whence arose his insufficiency and her lack of trust was, that all his
faith in God was as yet scarcely more independent of thought-forms,
word-shapes, dogma and creed, than that of the Catholic or Calvinist.
How few are there whose faith is simple and mighty in the Father of
Jesus Christ, waiting to believe all that He will reveal to them! How
many of those who talk of faith as the one needful thing, will accept as
sufficient to the razing of the walls of partition between you and them,
your heartiest declaration that you believe _in Him_ with the whole
might of your nature, lay your soul bare to the revelation of His
spirit, and stir up your will to obey Him?--And then comes _your_
temptation--to exclude, namely, from your love and sympathy the weak and
boisterous brethren who, after the fashion possible to them, believe in
your Lord, because they exclude you, and put as little confidence in
your truth as in your insight. If you do know more of Christ than they,
upon you lies the heavier obligation to be true to them, as was St. Paul
to the Judaizing Christians, whom these so much resemble, who were his
chief hindrance in the work his Master had given him to do. In Christ we
must forget Paul and Apollos and Cephas, pope and bishop and pastor and
presbyter, creed and interpretation and theory. Care-less of their
opinions, we must be careful of themselves--careful that we have salt in
ourselves, and that the salt lose not its savor, that the old man, dead
through Christ, shall not, vampire-like, creep from his grave and suck
the blood of the saints, by whatever name they be called, or however
little they may yet have entered into the freedom of the gospel that God
is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.

How was Dorothy to get nearer to Juliet, find out her trouble, and
comfort her?

"Alas!" she said to herself, "what a thing is marriage in separating
friends!"




CHAPTER XXXII.

THE OLD HOUSE OF GLASTON.


The same evening Dorothy and her father walked to the Old House. Already
the place looked much changed. The very day the deeds were signed, Mr.
Drake, who was not the man to postpone action a moment after the time
for it was come, had set men at work upon the substantial repairs. The
house was originally so well built that these were not so heavy as might
have been expected, and when completed they made little show of change.
The garden, however, looked quite another thing, for it had lifted
itself up from the wilderness in which it was suffocated, reviving like
a repentant soul reborn. Under its owner's keen watch, its ancient plan
had been rigidly regarded, its ancient features carefully retained. The
old bushes were well trimmed, but as yet nothing live, except weeds, had
been uprooted. The hedges and borders, of yew and holly and box, tall
and broad, looked very bare and broken and patchy; but now that the
shears had, after so long a season of neglect, removed the gathered
shade, the naked stems and branches would again send out the young
shoots of the spring, a new birth would begin everywhere, and the old
garden would dawn anew. For all his lack of sympathy with the older
forms of religious economy in the country, a thing, alas! too easy to
account for, the minister yet loved the past and felt its mystery. He
said once in a sermon--and it gave offense to more than one of his
deacons, for they scented in it _Germanism_,--"The love of the past, the
desire of the future, and the enjoyment of the present, make an
eternity, in which time is absorbed, its lapse lapses, and man partakes
of the immortality of his Maker. In each present personal being, we have
the whole past of our generation inclosed, to be re-developed with
endless difference in each individuality. Hence perhaps it comes that,
every now and then, into our consciousnesses float strange odors of
feeling, strange tones as of bygone affections, strange glimmers as of
forgotten truths, strange mental sensations of indescribable sort and
texture. Friends, I should be a terror to myself, did I not believe that
wherever my dim consciousness may come to itself, God is there."

Dorothy would have hastened the lighter repairs inside the house as
well, so as to get into it as soon as possible; but her father very
wisely argued that it would be a pity to get the house in good
condition, and then, as soon as they went into it, and began to find how
it could be altered better to suit their tastes and necessities, have to
destroy a great part of what had just been done. His plan, therefore,
was to leave the house for the winter, now it was weather-tight, and
with the first of the summer partly occupy it as it was, find out its
faults and capabilities, and have it gradually repaired and altered to
their minds and requirements. There would in this way be plenty of time
to talk about every thing, even to the merest suggestion of fancy, and
discover what they would really like.

But ever since the place had been theirs, Dorothy had been in the habit
of going almost daily to the house, with her book and her work, sitting
now in this, now in that empty room, undisturbed by the noises of the
workmen, chiefly outside: the foreman was a member of her father's
church, a devout man, and she knew every one of his people. She had
taken a strange fancy to those empty rooms: perhaps she felt them like
her own heart, waiting for something to come and fill them with life.
Nor was there any thing to prevent her, though the work was over for a
time, from indulging herself in going there still, as often as she
pleased, and she would remain there for hours, sometimes nearly the
whole day. In her present condition of mind and heart, she desired and
needed solitude: she was one of those who when troubled rush from their
fellows, and, urged by the human instinct after the divine, seek refuge
in loneliness--the cave on Horeb, the top of Mount Sinai, the closet
with shut door--any lonely place where, unseen, and dreading no eye, the
heart may call aloud to the God hidden behind the veil of the things
that do appear.

How different, yet how fit to merge in a mutual sympathy, were the
thoughts of the two, as they wandered about the place that evening!
Dorothy was thinking her commonest thought--how happy she could be if
only she knew there was a Will central to the universe, willing all that
came to her--good or seeming-bad--a Will whom she might love and thank
for _all_ things. He would be to her no God whom she could thank only
when He sent her what was pleasant. She must be able to thank Him for
every thing, or she could thank Him for nothing.

Her father was saying to himself he could not have believed the lifting
from his soul of such a gravestone of debt, would have made so little
difference to his happiness. He fancied honest Jones, the butcher, had
more mere pleasure from the silver snuff-box he had given him, than he
had himself from his fortune. Relieved he certainly was, but the relief
was not happiness. His debt had been the stone that blocked up the gate
of Paradise: the stone was rolled away, but the gate was not therefore
open. He seemed for the first time beginning to understand what he had
so often said, and in public too, and had thought he understood, that
God Himself, and not any or all of His gifts, is the life of a man. He
had got rid of the dread imagination that God had given him the money in
anger, as He had given the Israelites the quails, nor did he find that
the possession formed any barrier between him and God: his danger, now
seemed that of forgetting the love of the Giver in his anxiety to spend
the gift according to His will.

"You and I ought to be very happy, my love," he said, as now they were
walking home.

He had often said so before, and Dorothy had held her peace; but now,
with her eyes on the ground, she rejoined, in a low, rather broken
voice,

"Why, papa?"

"Because we are lifted above the anxiety that was crushing us into the
very mud," he answered, with surprise at her question.

"It never troubled me so much as all that," she answered. "It is a great
relief to see you free from it, father; but otherwise, I can not say
that it has made much difference to me."

"My dear Dorothy," said the minister, "it is time we should understand
each other. Your state of mind has for a long time troubled me; but
while debt lay so heavy upon me, I could give my attention to nothing
else. Why should there be any thing but perfect confidence between a
father and daughter who belong to each other alone in all the world?
Tell me what it is that so plainly oppresses you. What prevents you from
opening your heart to me? You can not doubt my love."

"Never for one moment, father," she answered, almost eagerly, pressing
to her heart the arm on which she leaned. "I know I am safe with you
because I am yours, and yet somehow I can not get so close to you as I
would. Something comes between us, and prevents me."

"What is it, my child? I will do all and every thing I can to remove
it."

"You, dear father! I don't believe ever child had such a father."

"Oh yes, my dear! many have had better fathers, but none better than I
hope one day by the grace of God to be to you. I am a poor creature,
Dorothy, but I love you as my own soul. You are the blessing of my days,
and my thoughts brood over you in the night: it would be in utter
content, if I only saw you happy. If your face were acquainted with
smiles, my heart would be acquainted with gladness."

For a time neither said any thing more. The silent tears were streaming
from Dorothy's eyes. At length she spoke.

"I wonder if I could tell you what it is without hurting you, father!"
she said.

"I can hear any thing from you, my child," he answered. "Then I will
try. But I do not think I shall ever quite know my father on earth, or
be quite able to open my heart to him, until I have found my Father in
Heaven."

"Ah, my child! is it so with you? Do you fear you have not yet given
yourself to the Saviour? Give yourself now. His arms are ever open to
receive you."

"That is hardly the point, father.--Will you let me ask you any question
I please?"

"Assuredly, my child." He always spoke, though quite unconsciously, with
a little of the _ex-cathedral_ tone.

"Then tell me, father, are you just as sure of God as you are of me
standing here before you?"

She had stopped and turned, and stood looking him full in the face with
wide, troubled eyes.

Mr. Drake was silent. Hateful is the professional, contemptible is the
love of display, but in his case they floated only as vapors in the air
of a genuine soul. He was a true man, and as he could not say _yes_,
neither would he hide his _no_ in a multitude of words--at least to his
own daughter: he was not so sure of God as he was of that daughter, with
those eyes looking straight into his! Could it be that he never had
believed in God at all? The thought went through him with a great pang.
It was as if the moon grew dark above him, and the earth withered under
his feet. He stood before his child like one whose hypocrisy had been
proclaimed from the housetop.

"Are you vexed with me, father?" said Dorothy sadly.

"No, my child," answered the minister, in a voice of unnatural
composure. "But you stand before me there like, the very thought started
out of my soul, alive and visible, to question its own origin."

"Ah, father!" cried Dorothy, "let us question our origin."

The minister never even heard the words.

"That very doubt, embodied there in my child, has, I now know, been
haunting me, dogging me behind, ever since I began to teach others," he
said, as if talking in his sleep. "Now it looks me in the face. Am I
myself to be a castaway?--Dorothy, I am _not_ sure of God--not as I am
sure of you, my darling."

He stood silent. His ear expected a low-voiced, sorrowful reply. He
started at the tone of gladness in which Dorothy cried--

"Then, father, there is henceforth no cloud between us, for we are in
the same cloud together! It does not divide us, it only brings us closer
to each other. Help me, father: I am trying hard to find God. At the
same time, I confess I would rather not find Him, than find Him such as
I have sometimes heard you represent Him."

"It may well be," returned her father--the _ex-cathedral_, the
professional tone had vanished utterly for the time, and he spoke with
the voice of an humble, true man--"it may well be that I have done Him
wrong; for since now at my age I am compelled to allow that I am not
sure of Him, what more likely than that I may have been cherishing wrong
ideas concerning Him, and so not looking in the right direction for
finding Him?"

"Where did you get your notions of God, father--those, I mean, that you
took with you to the pulpit?"

A year ago even, if he had been asked the same question, he would at
once have answered, "From the Word of God;" but now he hesitated, and
minutes passed before he began a reply. For he saw now that it was not
from the Bible _he_ had gathered them, whence soever they had come at
first. He pondered and searched--and found that the real answer eluded
him, hiding itself in a time beyond his earliest memory. It seemed
plain, therefore, that the source whence first he began to draw those
notions, right or wrong, must be the talk and behavior of the house in
which he was born, the words and carriage of his father and mother and
their friends. Next source to that came the sermons he heard on Sundays,
and the books given him to read. The Bible was one of those books, but
from the first he read it through the notions with which his mind was
already vaguely filled, and with the comments of his superiors around
him. Then followed the books recommended at college, this author and
that, and the lectures he heard there upon the attributes of God and the
plan of salvation. The spirit of commerce in the midst of which he had
been bred, did not occur to him as one of the sources.

But he had perceived enough. He opened his mouth and bravely answered
her question as well as he could, not giving the Bible as the source
from which he had taken any one of the notions of God he had been in the
habit of presenting.

"But mind," he added, "I do not allow that therefore my ideas must be
incorrect. If they be second-hand, they may yet be true. I do admit that
where they have continued only second-hand, they can have been of little
value to me."

"What you allow, then, father," said Dorothy, "is that you have yourself
taken none of your ideas direct from the fountain-head?"

"I am afraid I must confess it, my child--with this modification, that I
have thought many of them over a good deal, and altered some of them not
a little to make them fit the molds of truth in my mind."

"I am so glad, father!" said Dorothy. "I was positively certain, from
what I knew of you--which is more than any one else in this world, I do
believe--that some of the things you said concerning God never could
have risen in your own mind."

"They might be in the Bible for all that," said the minister, very
anxious to be and speak the right thing. "A man's heart is not to be
trusted for correct notions of God."

"Nor yet for correct interpretation of the Bible, I should think," said
Dorothy.

"True, my child," answered her father with a sigh, "--except as it be
already a Godlike heart. The Lord says a bramble-bush can not bring
forth grapes."

"The notions you gathered of God from other people, must have come out
of their hearts, father?"

"Out of somebody's heart?"

"Just so," answered Dorothy.

"Go on, my child," said her father. "Let me understand clearly your
drift."

"I have heard Mr. Wingfold say," returned Dorothy, "that however men may
have been driven to form their ideas of God before Christ came, no man
can, with thorough honesty, take the name of a Christian, whose ideas of
the Father of men are gathered from any other field than the life,
thought, words, deeds, of the only Son of that Father. He says it is not
from the Bible as a book that we are to draw our ideas of God, but from
the living Man into whose presence that book brings us, Who is alive
now, and gives His spirit that they who read about Him may understand
what kind of being He is, and why He did as He did, and know Him, in
some possible measure, as He knows Himself.--I can only repeat the
lesson like a child."

"I suspect," returned the minister, "that I have been greatly astray.
But after this, we will seek our Father together, in our Brother, Jesus
Christ."

It was the initiation of a daily lesson together in the New Testament,
which, while it drew their hearts closer to each other, drew them, with
growing delight, nearer and nearer to the ideal of humanity, Jesus
Christ, in whom shines the glory of its Father.

A man may look another in the face for a hundred years and not know him.
Men _have_ looked Jesus Christ in the face, and not known either Him or
his Father. It was needful that He should appear, to begin the knowing
of Him, but speedily was His visible presence taken away, that it might
not become, as assuredly it would have become, a veil to hide from men
the Father of their spirits. Do you long for the assurance of some
sensible sign? Do you ask why no intellectual proof is to be had? I tell
you that such would but delay, perhaps altogether impair for you, that
better, that best, that only vision, into which at last your world must
blossom--such a contact, namely, with the heart of God Himself, such a
perception of His being, and His absolute oneness with you, the child of
His thought, the individuality softly parted from His spirit, yet living
still and only by His presence and love, as, by its own radiance, will
sweep doubt away forever. Being then in the light and knowing it, the
lack of intellectual proof concerning that which is too high for it,
will trouble you no more than would your inability to silence a
metaphysician who declared that you had no real existence. It is for the
sake of such vision as God would give that you are denied such vision as
you would have. The Father of our spirits is not content that we should
know Him as we now know each other. There is a better, closer, nearer
than any human way of knowing, and to that He is guiding us across all
the swamps of our unteachableness, the seas of our faithlessness, the
desert of our ignorance. It is so very hard that we should have to wait
for that which we can not yet receive? Shall we complain of the shadows
cast upon our souls by the hand and the napkin polishing their mirrors
to the receiving of the more excellent glory! Have patience, children of
the Father. Pray always and do not faint. The mists and the storms and
the cold will pass--the sun and the sky are for evermore. There were no
volcanoes and no typhoons but for the warm heart of the earth, the soft
garment of the air, and the lordly sun over all. The most loving of you
can not imagine how one day the love of the Father will make you love
even your own.

Much trustful talk passed between father and daughter as they walked
home: they were now nearer to each other than ever in their lives
before.

"You don't mind my coming out here alone, papa?" said Dorothy, as, after
a little chat with the gate-keeper, they left the park. "I have of late
found it so good to be alone! I think I am beginning to learn to think."

"Do in every thing just as you please, my child," said her father. "I
can have no objection to what you see good. Only don't be so late as to
make me anxious."

"I like coming early," said Dorothy. "These lovely mornings make me feel
as if the struggles of life were over, and only a quiet old age were
left."

The father looked anxiously at his daughter. Was she going to leave him?
It smote him to the heart that he had done so little to make her life a
blessed one. How hard no small portion of it had been! How worn and pale
she looked! Why did she not show fresh and bright like other young
women--Mrs. Faber for instance? He had not guided her steps into the way
of peace! At all events he had not led her home to the house of wisdom
and rest! Too good reason why--he had not himself yet found that home!
Henceforth, for her sake as well as his own, he would besiege the
heavenly grace with prayer.

The opening of his heart in confessional response to his daughter,
proved one of those fresh starts in the spiritual life, of which a man
needs so many as he climbs to the heavenly gates.




CHAPTER XXXIII.

PAUL FABER'S DRESSING-ROOM.


Faber did not reach home till a few minutes before the dinner hour. He
rode into the stable-yard, entered the house by the surgery, and went
straight to his dressing-room; for the roads were villianous, and
Ruber's large feet had made a wonderful sight of his master, who
respected his wife's carpet. At the same time he hoped, as it was so
near dinner-time, to find her in her chamber. She had, however, already
made her toilet, and was waiting his return in the drawing-room. Her
heart made a false motion and stung her when she heard his steps pass
the door and go up stairs, for generally he came to greet her the moment
he entered the house.--Had he seen any body!--Had he heard any thing? It
was ten dreadful minutes before he came down, but he entered cheerily,
with the gathered warmth of two days of pent-up affection. She did her
best to meet him as if nothing had happened. For indeed what had
happened--except her going to church? If nothing had taken place since
she saw him--since she knew him--why such perturbation? Was marriage a
slavery of the very soul, in which a wife was bound to confess every
thing to her husband, even to her most secret thoughts and feelings? Or
was a husband lord not only over the present and future of his wife, but
over her past also? Was she bound to disclose every thing that lay in
that past? If Paul made no claim upon her beyond the grave, could he
claim back upon the dead past before he knew her, a period over which
she had now no more control than over that when she would be but a
portion of the material all?

But whatever might be Paul's theories of marriage or claims upon his
wife, it was enough for her miserable unrest that she was what is called
a living soul, with a history, and what has come to be called a
conscience--a something, that is, as most people regard it, which has
the power, and uses it, of making uncomfortable.

The existence of such questions as I have indicated reveals that already
between her and him there showed space, separation, non-contact: Juliet
was too bewildered with misery to tell whether it was a cleft of a
hair's breadth, or a gulf across which no cry could reach; this moment
it seemed the one, the next the other. The knowledge which caused it had
troubled her while he sought her love, had troubled her on to the very
eve of her surrender. The deeper her love grew the more fiercely she
wrestled with the evil fact. A low moral development and the purest
resolve of an honest nature afforded her many pleas, and at length she
believed she had finally put it down. She had argued that, from the
opinions themselves of Faber, the thing could not consistently fail to
be as no thing to him. Even were she mistaken in this conclusion, it
would be to wrong his large nature, his generous love, his unselfish
regard, his tender pitifulness, to fail of putting her silent trust in
him. Besides, had she not read in the newspapers the utterance of a
certain worshipful judge on the bench that no man had any thing to do
with his wife's ante-nuptial history? The contract then was certainly
not retrospective. What in her remained unsatisfied after all her
arguments, reasons, and appeals to common sense and consequences, she
strove to strangle, and thought, hoped, she had succeeded. She willed
her will, made up her mind, yielded to Paul's solicitations, and put the
whole painful thing away from her.

The step taken, the marriage over, nothing could any more affect either
fact. Only, unfortunately for the satisfaction and repose she had
desired and expected, her love to her husband had gone on growing after
they were married. True she sometimes fancied it otherwise, but while
the petals of the rose were falling, its capsule was filling; and
notwithstanding the opposite tendency of the deoxygenated atmosphere in
which their thoughts moved, she had begun already to long after an
absolute union with him. But this growth of her love, and aspiration
after its perfection, although at first they covered what was gone by
with a deepening mist of apparent oblivion, were all the time bringing
it closer to her consciousness--out of the far into the near. And now
suddenly that shape she knew of, lying in the bottom of the darkest pool
of the stagnant Past, had been stung into life by a wind of words that
swept through Nestley chapel, had stretched up a hideous neck and
threatening head from the deep, and was staring at her with sodden eyes:
henceforth she knew that the hideous Fact had its appointed place
between her and her beautiful Paul, the demon of the gulfy cleft that
parted them.

The moment she spoke in reply to his greeting her husband also felt
something dividing them, but had no presentiment of its being any thing
of import.

"You are over-tired, my love," he said, and taking her hand, felt her
pulse. It was feeble and frequent.

"What have they been doing to you, my darling?" he asked. "Those little
demons of ponies running away again?"

"No," she answered, scarce audibly.

"Something has gone wrong with you," he persisted. "Have you caught
cold? None of the old symptoms, I hope?"

"None, Paul. There is nothing the matter," she answered, laying her head
lightly, as if afraid of the liberty she took, upon his shoulder. His
arm went round her waist.

"What is it, then, my wife?" he said tenderly.

"Which would you rather have, Paul--have me die, or do something
wicked?"

"Juliet, this will never do!" he returned quietly but almost severely.
"You have been again giving the reins to a morbid imagination. Weakness
and folly only can come of that. It is nothing better than hysteria."

"No, but tell me, dear Paul," she persisted pleadingly. "Answer my
question. Do, please."

"There is no such question to be answered," he returned. "You are not
going to die, and I am yet more certain you are not going to do any
thing wicked. Are you now?"

"No, Paul. Indeed I am not. But----"

"I have it!" he exclaimed. "You went to church at Nestley last night!
Confound them all with their humbug! You have been letting their
infernal nonsense get a hold of you again! It has quite upset you--that,
and going much too long without your dinner. What _can_ be keeping it?"
He left her hurriedly and rang the bell. "You must speak to the cook, my
love. She is getting out of the good habits I had so much trouble to
teach her. But no--no! you shall not be troubled with _my_ servants. I
will speak to her myself. After dinner I will read you some of my
favorite passages in Montaigne. No, you shall read to me: your French
is so much better than mine."

Dinner was announced and nothing more was said. Paul ate well, Juliet
scarcely at all, but she managed to hide from him the offense. They rose
together and returned to the drawing-room.

The moment Faber shut the door Juliet turned in the middle of the room,
and as he came up to her said, in a voice much unlike her own:

"Paul, if I _were_ to do any thing very bad, as bad as could be, would
you forgive me?"

"Come, my love," expostulated Faber, speaking more gently than before,
for he had had his dinner, "surely you are not going to spoil our
evening with any more such nonsense!"

"Answer me, Paul, or I shall think you do not love me," she said, and
the tone of her entreaty verged upon demand. "Would you forgive me if I
had done something _very_ bad?"

"Of course I should," he answered, with almost irritated haste, "--that
is, if I could ever bring myself to allow any thing you did was wrong.
Only, you would witch me out of opinion and judgment and every thing
else with two words from your dear lips."

"Should I, Paul?" she said; and lifting her face from his shoulder, she
looked up in his from the depths of two dark fountains full of tears.
Never does the soul so nearly identify itself with matter as when
revealing itself through the eyes; never does matter so nearly lose
itself in spiritual absorption, as when two eyes like Juliet's are
possessed and glorified by the rush of the soul through their portals.
Faber kissed eyes and lips and neck in a glow of delight. She was the
vision of a most blessed dream, and she was his, all and altogether his!
He never thought then how his own uncreed and the prayer-book were of
the same mind that Death would one day part them. There is that in every
high and simple feeling that stamps it with eternity. For my own part I
believe that, if life has not long before twinned any twain, Death can
do nothing to divide them. The nature of each and every pure feeling,
even in the man who may sin away the very memory of it, is immortal; and
who knows from under what a depth of ashes the love of the saving God
may yet revive it!

The next moment the doctor was summoned. When he returned, Juliet was in
bed, and pretended to be asleep.

In the morning she appeared at the breakfast table so pale, so worn, so
troubled, that her husband was quite anxious about her. All she would
confess to was, that she had not slept well, and had a headache.
Attributing her condition to a nervous attack, he gave her some
medicine, took her to the drawing-room, and prescribed the new piano,
which he had already found the best of all sedatives for her. She
loathed the very thought of it--could no more have touched it than if
the ivory keys had been white hot steel. She watched him from the window
while he mounted his horse, but the moment the last red gleam of Ruber
vanished, she flung her arms above her head, and with a stifled cry
threw herself on a couch, stuffed her handkerchief into her mouth, and
in fierce dumb agony, tore it to shreds with hands and teeth. Presently
she rose, opened the door almost furtively, and stole softly down the
stair, looking this way and that, like one intent on some evil deed. At
the bottom she pushed a green baize-covered door, peeped into a passage,
then crept on tiptoe toward the surgery. Arrived there she darted to a
spot she knew, and stretched a trembling hand toward a bottle full of a
dark-colored liquid. As instantly she drew it back, and stood listening
with bated breath and terrified look. It _was_ a footstep approaching
the outer door of the surgery! She turned and fled from it, still
noiseless, and never stopped till she was in her own room. There she
shut and locked the door, fell on her knees by the bedside, and pressed
her face into the coverlid. She had no thought of praying. She wanted to
hide, only to hide. Neither was it from old habit she fell upon her
knees, for she had never been given to kneeling. I can not but think,
nevertheless, that there was a dumb germ of prayer at the heart of the
action--that falling upon her knees, and that hiding of her face. The
same moment something took place within her to which she could have
given no name, which she could have represented in no words, a something
which came she knew not whence, was she knew not what, and went she knew
not whither, of which indeed she would never have become aware except
for what followed, but which yet so wrought, that she rose from her
knees saying to herself, with clenched teeth and burning eyes, "I _will_
tell him."

As if she had known the moment of her death near, she began mechanically
to set every thing in order in the room, and as she came to herself she
was saying, "Let him kill me. I wish he would. I am quite willing to
die by his hand. He will be kind, and do it gently. He knows so many
ways!"

It was a terrible day. She did not go out of her room again. Her mood
changed a hundred times. The resolve to confess alternated with wild
mockery and laughter, but still returned. She would struggle to persuade
herself that her whole condition was one of foolish exaggeration, of
senseless excitement about nothing--the merest delirium of feminine
fastidiousness; and the next instant would turn cold with horror at a
fresh glimpse of the mere fact. What could the wretched matter be to him
now--or to her? Who was the worse, or had ever been the worse but
herself? And what did it amount to? What claim had any one, what claim
could even a God, if such a being there were, have upon the past which
had gone from her, was no more in any possible sense within her reach
than if it had never been? Was it not as if it had never been? Was the
woman to be hurled--to hurl herself into misery for the fault of the
girl? It was all nonsense--a trifle at worst--a disagreeable trifle, no
doubt, but still a trifle! Only would to God she had died rather--even
although then she would never have known Paul!--Tut! she would never
have thought of it again but for that horrid woman that lived over the
draper's shop! All would have been well if she had but kept from
thinking about it! Nobody would have been a hair the worse then!--But,
poor Paul!--to be married to such a woman as she!

If she were to be so foolish as let him know, how would it strike Paul?
What would he think of it? Ought she not to be sure of that before she
committed herself--before she uttered the irrevocable words? Would he
call it a trifle, or would he be ready to kill her? True, he had no
right, he _could_ have no right to know; but how horrible that there
should be any thought of right between them! still worse, any thing
whatever between them that he had no right to know! worst of all, that
she did not belong to him so utterly that he must have a right to know
_every_ thing about her! She _would_ tell him all! She would! she would!
she had no choice! she must!--But she need not tell him now. She was not
strong enough to utter the necessary words. But that made the thing very
dreadful! If she could not speak the words, how bad it must really
be!--Impossible to tell her Paul! That was pure absurdity.--Ah, but she
_could_ not! She would be certain to faint--or fall dead at his feet.
That would be well!--Yes! that would do! She would take a wine-glass
full of laudanum just before she told him; then, if he was kind, she
would confess the opium, and he could save her if he pleased; if he was
hard, she would say nothing, and die at his feet. She had hoped to die
in his arms--all that was left of eternity. But her life was his, he had
saved it with his own--oh horror! that it should have been to disgrace
him!--and it should not last a moment longer than it was a pleasure to
him.

Worn out with thought and agony, she often fell asleep--only to start
awake in fresh misery, and go over and over the same torturing round.
Long before her husband appeared, she was in a burning fever. When he
came, he put her at once to bed, and tended her with a solicitude as
anxious as it was gentle. He soothed her to sleep, and then went and had
some dinner.

On his return, finding, as he had expected, that she still slept, he sat
down by her bedside, and watched. Her slumber was broken with now and
then a deep sigh, now and then a moan. Alas, that we should do the
things that make for moan!--but at least I understand why we are left to
do them: it is because we can. A dull fire was burning in her soul, and
over it stood the caldron of her history, and it bubbled in sighs and
moans.

Faber was ready enough to attribute every thing human to a physical
origin, but as he sat there pondering her condition, recalling her
emotion and strange speech of the night before, and watching the state
she was now in, an uneasiness began to gather--undefined, but other than
concerned her health. Something must be wrong somewhere. He kept
constantly assuring himself that at worst it could be but some mere
moleheap, of which her lovelily sensitive organization, under the
influence of a foolish preachment, made a mountain. Still, it was a huge
disorder to come from a trifle! At the same time who knew better than he
upon what a merest trifle nervous excitement will fix the attention! or
how to the mental eye such a speck will grow and grow until it absorb
the universe! Only a certain other disquieting thought, having come
once, would keep returning--that, thoroughly as he believed himself
acquainted with her mind, he had very little knowledge of her history.
He did not know a single friend of hers, had never met a person who knew
any thing of her family, or had even an acquaintance with her earlier
than his own. The thing he most dreaded was, that the shadow of some old
affection had returned upon her soul, and that, in her excessive
delicacy, she heaped blame upon herself that she had not absolutely
forgotten it. He flung from him in scorn every slightest suggestion of
blame. _His_ Juliet! his glorious Juliet! Bah!--But he must get her to
say what the matter was--for her own sake; he must help her to reveal
her trouble, whatever it might be--else how was he to do his best to
remove it! She should find he knew how to be generous!

Thus thinking, he sat patient by her side, watching until the sun of her
consciousness should rise and scatter the clouds of sleep. Hour after
hour he sat, and still she slept, outwearied with the rack of emotion.
Morning had begun to peer gray through the window-curtains, when she
woke with a cry.

She had been dreaming. In the little chapel in Nestley Park, she sat
listening to the curate's denouncement of hypocrisy, when suddenly the
scene changed: the pulpit had grown to a mighty cloud, upon which stood
an archangel with a trumpet in his hand. He cried that the hour of the
great doom had come for all who bore within them the knowledge of any
evil thing neither bemoaned before God nor confessed to man. Then he
lifted the great silver trumpet with a gleam to his lips, and every
fiber of her flesh quivered in expectation of the tearing blast that was
to follow; when instead, soft as a breath of spring from a bank of
primroses, came the words, uttered in the gentlest of sorrowful voices,
and the voice seemed that of her unbelieving Paul: "I will arise and go
to my Father." It was no wonder, therefore, that she woke with a cry. It
was one of indescribable emotion. When she saw his face bending over her
in anxious love, she threw her arms round his neck, burst into a storm
of weeping, and sobbed.

"Oh Paul! husband! forgive me. I have sinned against you terribly--the
worst sin a woman can commit. Oh Paul! Paul! make me clean, or I am
lost."

"Juliet, you are raving," he said, bewildered, a little angry, and at
her condition not a little alarmed. For the confession, it was
preposterous: they had not been many weeks married! "Calm yourself, or
you will give me a lunatic for a wife!" he said. Then changing his tone,
for his heart rebuked him, when he saw the ashy despair that spread over
her face and eyes, "Be still, my precious," he went on. "All is well.
You have been dreaming, and are not yet quite awake. It is the morphia
you had last night! Don't look so frightened. It is only your husband.
No one else is near you."

With the tenderest smile he sought to reassure her, and would have
gently released himself from the agonized clasp of her arms about his
neck, that he might get her something. But she tightened her hold.

"Don't leave me, Paul," she cried. "I was dreaming, but I am wide awake
now, and know only too well what I have done."

"Dreams are nothing. The will is not in them," he said. But the thought
of his sweet wife even dreaming a thing to be repented of in such
dismay, tore his heart. For he was one of the many--not all of the
purest--who cherish an ideal of woman which, although indeed
poverty-stricken and crude, is to their minds of snowy favor, to their
judgment of loftiest excellence. I trust in God that many a woman,
despite the mud of doleful circumstance, yea, even the defilement that
comes first from within, has risen to a radiance of essential innocence
ineffably beyond that whose form stood white in Faber's imagination. For
I see and understand a little how God, giving righteousness, makes pure
of sin, and that verily--by no theological quibble of imputation, by no
play with words, by no shutting of the eyes, no oblivion, willful or
irresistible, but by very fact of cleansing, so that the consciousness
of the sinner becomes glistering as the raiment of the Lord on the mount
of His transfiguration. I do not expect the Pharisee who calls the
sinner evil names, and drags her up to judgment, to comprehend this;
but, woman, cry to thy Father in Heaven, for He can make thee white,
even to the contentment of that womanhood which thou hast thyself
outraged.

Faber unconsciously prided himself on the severity of his requirements
of woman, and saw his own image reflected in the polish of his ideal;
and now a fear whose presence he would not acknowledge began to gnaw at
his heart, a vague suggestion's horrid image, to which he would yield no
space, to flit about his brain.

"Would to God it were a dream, Paul!" answered the stricken wife.

"You foolish child!" returned the nigh trembling husband, "how can you
expect me to believe, married but yesterday, you have already got tired
of me!"

"Tired of you, Paul! I should desire no other eternal paradise than to
lie thus under your eyes forever."

"Then for my sake, my darling wife, send away this extravagance, this
folly, this absurd fancy that has got such a hold of you. It will turn
to something serious if you do not resist it. There can be no truth in
it, and I am certain that one with any strength of character can do much
at least to prevent the deeper rooting of a fixed idea." But as he spoke
thus to her, in his own soul he was as one fighting the demons off with
a fan. "Tell me what the mighty matter is," he went on, "that I may
swear to you I love you the more for the worst weakness you have to
confess."

"Ah, my love!" returned Juliet, "how like you are now to the Paul I have
dreamed of so often! But you will not be able to forgive me. I have read
somewhere that men never forgive--that their honor is before their wives
with them. Paul! if you should not be able to forgive me, you must help
me to die, and not be cruel to me."

"Juliet, I will not listen to any more such foolish words. Either tell
me plainly what you mean, that I may convince you what a goose you are,
or be quiet and go to sleep again."

"_Can_ it be that after all it does not signify so much?" she said
aloud, but only to herself, meditating in the light of a little
glow-worm of hope. "Oh if it could be so! And what is it really so much?
I have not murdered any body!--I _will_ tell you, Paul!"

She drew his head closer down, laid her lips to his ear, gave a great
gasp, and whispered two or three words. He started up, sundering at once
the bonds of her clasped hands, cast one brief stare at her, turned,
walked, with a great quick stride to his dressing-room, entered, and
closed the door.

As if with one rush of a fell wind, they were ages, deserts, empty
star-spaces apart! She was outside the universe, in the cold frenzy of
infinite loneliness. The wolves of despair were howling in her. But Paul
was in the next room! There was only the door between them! She sprung
from her bed and ran to a closet. The next moment she appeared in her
husband's dressing-room.

Paul sat sunk together in his chair, his head hanging forward, his teeth
set, his whole shape, in limb and feature, carrying the show of
profound, of irrecoverable injury. He started to his feet when she
entered. She did not once lift her eyes to his face, but sunk on her
knees before him, hurriedly slipped her night-gown from her shoulders to
her waist, and over her head, bent toward the floor, held up to him a
riding-whip.

They were baleful stars that looked down on that naked world beneath
them.

To me scarce any thing is so utterly pathetic as the back. That of an
animal even is full of sad suggestion. But the human back!--It is the
other, the dark side of the human moon; the blind side of the being,
defenseless, and exposed to every thing; the ignorant side, turned
toward the abyss of its unknown origin; the unfeatured side, eyeless and
dumb and helpless--the enduring animal of the marvelous commonwealth, to
be given to the smiter, and to bend beneath the burden--lovely in its
patience and the tender forms of its strength.

An evil word, resented by the lowest of our sisters, rushed to the man's
lips, but died there in a strangled murmur.

"Paul!" said Juliet, in a voice from whose tone it seemed as if her soul
had sunk away, and was crying out of a hollow place of the earth, "take
it--take it. Strike me."

He made no reply--stood utterly motionless, his teeth clenched so hard
that he could not have spoken without grinding them. She waited as
motionless, her face bowed to the floor, the whip held up over her head.

"Paul!" she said again, "you saved my life once: save my soul now. Whip
me and take me again."

He answered with only a strange unnatural laugh through his teeth.

"Whip me and let me die then," she said.

He spoke no word. She spoke again. Despair gave her both insight and
utterance--despair and great love, and the truth of God that underlies
even despair.

"You pressed me to marry you," she said: "what was I to do? How could I
tell you? And I loved you so! I persuaded myself I was safe with
you--you were so generous. You would protect me from every thing, even
my own past. In your name I sent it away, and would not think of it
again. I said to myself you would not wish me to tell you the evil that
had befallen me. I persuaded myself you loved me enough even for that. I
held my peace trusting you. Oh my husband! my Paul! my heart is crushed.
The dreadful thing has come back. I thought it was gone from me, and
now it will not leave me any more. I am a horror to myself. There is no
one to punish and forgive me but you. Forgive me, my husband. You are
the God to whom I pray. If you pardon me I shall be content even with
myself. I shall seek no other pardon; your favor is all I care for. If
you take me for clean, I _am_ clean for all the world. You can make me
clean--you only. Do it, Paul; do it, husband. Make me clean that I may
look women in the face. Do, Paul, take the whip and strike me. I long
for my deserts at your hand. Do comfort me. I am waiting the sting of
it, Paul, to know that you have forgiven me. If I should cry out, it
will be for gladness.--Oh, my husband,"--here her voice rose to an agony
of entreaty--"I was but a girl--hardly more than a child in knowledge--I
did not know what I was doing. He was much older than I was, and I
trusted him!--O my God! I hardly know what I knew and what I did not
know: it was only when it was too late that I woke and understood. I
hate myself. I scorn myself. But am I to be wretched forever because of
that one fault, Paul? Will you not be my saviour and forgive me my sin?
Oh, do not drive me mad. I am only clinging to my reason. Whip me and I
shall be well. Take me again, Paul. I will not, if you like, even fancy
myself your wife any more. I will be your slave. You shall do with me
whatever you will. I will obey you to the very letter. Oh beat me and
let me go."

She sunk prone on the floor, and clasped and kissed his feet.

He took the whip from her hand.

Of course a man can not strike a woman! He may tread her in the mire; he
may clasp her and then scorn her; he may kiss her close, and then dash
her from him into a dung-heap, but he must not strike her--that would be
unmanly! Oh! grace itself is the rage of the pitiful Othello to the
forbearance of many a self-contained, cold-blooded, self-careful slave,
that thinks himself a gentleman! Had not Faber been even then full of
his own precious self, had he yielded to her prayer or to his own wrath,
how many hours of agony would have been saved them both!--"What! would
you have had him really strike her?" I would have had him do _any thing_
rather than choose himself and reject his wife: make of it what you
will. Had he struck once, had he seen the purple streak rise in the
snow, that instant his pride-frozen heart would have melted into a
torrent of grief; he would have flung himself on the floor beside her,
and in an agony of pity over her and horror at his own sacrilege, would
have clasped her to his bosom, and baptized her in the tears of remorse
and repentance; from that moment they would have been married indeed.

When she felt him take the whip, the poor lady's heart gave a great
heave of hope; then her flesh quivered with fear. She closed her teeth
hard, to welcome the blow without a cry. Would he give her many stripes?
Then the last should be welcome as the first. Would it spoil her skin?
What matter if it was his own hand that did it!

A brief delay--long to her! then the hiss, as it seemed, of the coming
blow! But instead of the pang she awaited, the sharp ring of breaking
glass followed: he had thrown the whip through the window into the
garden. The same moment he dragged his feet rudely from her embrace, and
left the room. The devil and the gentleman had conquered. He had spared
her, not in love, but in scorn. She gave one great cry of utter loss,
and lay senseless.




CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE BOTTOMLESS POOL.


She came to herself in the gray dawn. She was cold as ice--cold to the
very heart, but she did not feel the cold: there was nothing in her to
compare it against; her very being was frozen. The man who had given her
life had thrown her from him. He cared less for her than for the
tortured dog. She was an outcast, defiled and miserable. Alas! alas!
this was what came of speaking the truth--of making confession! The
cruel scripture had wrought its own fulfillment, made a mock of her, and
ruined her husband's peace. She knew poor Paul would never be himself
again! She had carried the snake so long harmless in her bosom only to
let it at last creep from her lips into her husband's ear, sting the
vital core of her universe, and blast it forever! How foolish she had
been!--What was left her to do? What would her husband have her to do?
Oh misery! he cared no more what she did or did not do. She was
alone--utterly alone! But she need not live.

Dimly, vaguely, the vapor of such thoughts as these passed through her
despairing soul, as she lifted herself from the floor and tottered back
to her room. Yet even then, in the very midst of her freezing misery,
there was, although she had not yet begun to recognize it, a nascent
comfort in that she had spoken and confessed. She would not really have
taken back her confession. And although the torture was greater, yet was
it more endurable than that she had been suffering before. She had told
him who had a right to know.--But, alas! what a deception was that dream
of the trumpet and the voice! A poor trick to entrap a helpless sinner!

Slowly, with benumbed fingers and trembling hands, she dressed herself:
that bed she would lie in no more, for she had wronged her husband.
Whether before or after he was her husband, mattered nothing. To have
ever called him husband was the wrong. She had seemed that she was not,
else he would never have loved or sought her; she had outraged his
dignity, defiled him; he had cast her off, and she could not, would not
blame him. Happily for her endurance of her misery, she did not turn
upon her idol and cast him from his pedestal; she did not fix her gaze
upon his failure instead of her own; she did not espy the contemptible
in his conduct, and revolt from her allegiance.

But was such a man then altogether the ideal of a woman's soul? Was he a
fit champion of humanity who would aid only within the limits of his
pride? who, when a despairing creature cried in soul-agony for help,
thought first and only of his own honor? The notion men call their honor
is the shadow of righteousness, the shape that is where the light is
not, the devil that dresses as nearly in angel-fashion as he can, but is
none the less for that a sneak and a coward.

She put on her cloak and bonnet: the house was his, not hers. He and she
had never been one: she must go and meet her fate. There was one power,
at least, the key to the great door of liberty, which the weakest as
well as the strongest possessed: she could die. Ah, how welcome would
Death be now! Did he ever know or heed the right time to come, without
being sent for--without being compelled? In the meantime her only
anxiety was to get out of the house: away from Paul she would understand
more precisely what she had to do. With the feeling of his angry
presence, she could not think. Yet how she loved him--strong in his
virtue and indignation! She had not yet begun to pity herself, or to
allow to her heart that he was hard upon her.

She was leaving the room when a glitter on her hand caught her eye: the
old diamond disk, which he had bought of her in her trouble, and
restored to her on her wedding-day, was answering the herald of the
sunrise. She drew it off: he must have it again. With it she drew off
also her wedding-ring. Together she laid them on the dressing table,
turned again, and with noiseless foot and desert heart went through the
house, opened the door, and stole into the street. A thin mist was
waiting for her. A lean cat, gray as the mist, stood on the steps of the
door opposite. No other living thing was to be seen. The air was chill.
The autumn rains were at hand. But her heart was the only desolation.

Already she knew where she was going. In the street she turned to the
left.

Shortly before, she had gone with Dorothy, for the first time, to see
the Old House, and there had had rather a narrow escape. Walking down
the garden they came to the pond or small lake, so well known to the
children of Glaston as bottomless. Two stone steps led from the end of
the principal walk down to the water, which was, at the time, nearly
level with the top of the second. On the upper step Juliet was standing,
not without fear, gazing into the gulf, which was yet far deeper than
she imagined, when, without the smallest preindication, the lower step
suddenly sank. Juliet sprung back to the walk, but turned instantly to
look again. She saw the stone sinking, and her eyes opened wider and
wider, as it swelled and thinned to a great, dull, wavering mass, grew
dimmer and dimmer, then melted away and vanished utterly. With "stricken
look," and fright-filled eyes, she turned to Dorothy, who was a little
behind her, and said,

"How will you be able to sleep at night? I should be always fancying
myself sliding down into it through the darkness."

To this place of terror she was now on the road. When consciousness
returned to her as she lay on the floor of her husband's dressing-room,
it brought with it first the awful pool and the sinking stone. She
seemed to stand watching it sink, lazily settling with a swing this way
and a sway that, into the bosom of the earth, down and down, and still
down. Nor did the vision leave her as she came more to herself. Even
when her mental eyes were at length quite open to the far more frightful
verities of her condition, half of her consciousness was still watching
the ever sinking stone; until at last she seemed to understand that it
was showing her a door out of her misery, one easy to open.

She went the same way into the park that Dorothy had then taken
her--through a little door of privilege which she had shown her how to
open, and not by the lodge. The light was growing fast, but the sun was
not yet up. With feeble steps but feverous haste she hurried over the
grass. Her feet were wet through her thin shoes. Her dress was fringed
with dew. But there was no need for taking care of herself now; she felt
herself already beyond the reach of sickness. The still pond would soon
wash off the dew.

Suddenly, with a tremor of waking hope, came the thought that, when she
was gone from his sight, the heart of her husband would perhaps turn
again toward her a little. For would he not then be avenged? would not
his justice be satisfied? She had been well drilled in the theological
lie, that punishment is the satisfaction of justice.

"Oh, now I thank you, Paul!" she said, as she hastened along. "You
taught me the darkness, and made me brave to seek its refuge. Think of
me sometimes, Paul. I will come back to you if I can--but no, there is
no coming back, no greeting more, no shadows even to mingle their loves,
for in a dream there is but one that dreams. I shall be the one that
does not dream. There is nothing where I am going--not even the
darkness--nothing but nothing. Ah, would I were in it now! Let me make
haste. All will be one, for all will be none when I am there. Make you
haste too, and come into the darkness, Paul. It is soothing and soft and
cool. It will wash away the sin of the girl and leave you a----nothing."

While she was hurrying toward the awful pool, her husband sat in his
study, sunk in a cold fury of conscious disgrace--not because of his
cruelty, not because he had cast a woman into hell--but because his
honor, his self-satisfaction in his own fate, was thrown to the worms.
Did he fail thus in consequence of having rejected the common belief?
No; something far above the _common_ belief it must be, that would have
enabled him to act otherwise. But had he _known_ the Man of the gospel,
he could not have left her. He would have taken her to his sorrowful
bosom, wept with her, forgotten himself in pitiful grief over the spot
upon her whiteness; he would have washed her clean with love and
husband-power. He would have welcomed his shame as his hold of her
burden, whereby to lift it, with all its misery and loss, from her heart
forever. Had Faber done so as he was, he would have come close up to the
gate of the kingdom of Heaven, for he would have been like-minded with
Him who sought not His own. His honor, forsooth! Pride is a mighty
honor! His pride was great indeed, but it was not grand! Nothing
reflected, nothing whose object is self, has in it the poorest element
of grandeur. Our selves are ours that we may lay them on the altar of
love. Lying there, bound and bleeding and burning if need be, they are
grand indeed--for they are in their noble place, and rejoicing in their
fate. But this man was miserable, because, the possessor of a priceless
jewel, he had found it was not such as would pass for flawless in the
judgment of men--judges themselves unjust, whose very hearts were full
of bribes. He sat there an injured husband, a wronged, woman-cheated,
mocked man--he in whose eyes even a smutch on her face would have
lowered a woman--who would not have listened to an angel with a broken
wing-feather!

Let me not be supposed to make a little of Juliet's loss! What that
amounted to, let Juliet feel!--let any woman say, who loves a man, and
would be what that man thinks her! But I read, and think I understand,
the words of the perfect Purity: "Neither do I condemn thee: go and sin
no more."




CHAPTER XXXV.

A HEART.


If people were both observant and memorious, they would cease, I fancy,
to be astonished at coincidences. Rightly regarded, the universe is but
one coincidence--only where will has to be developed, there is need for
human play, and room for that must be provided in its spaces. The works
of God being from the beginning, and all his beginnings invisible either
from greatness or smallness or nearness or remoteness, numberless
coincidences may pass in every man's history, before he becomes capable
of knowing either the need or the good of them, or even of noting them.

The same morning there was another awake and up early. When Juliet was
about half-way across the park, hurrying to the water, Dorothy was
opening the door of the empty house, seeking solitude that she might
find the one Dweller therein. She went straight to one of the upper
rooms looking out upon the garden, and kneeling prayed to her Unknown
God. As she kneeled, the first rays of the sunrise visited her face.
That face was in itself such an embodied prayer, that had any one seen
it, he might, when the beams fell upon it, have imagined he saw prayer
and answer meet. It was another sunrise Dorothy was looking for, but she
started and smiled when the warm rays touched her; they too came from
the home of answers. As the daisy mimics the sun, so is the central fire
of our system but a flower that blossoms in the eternal effulgence of
the unapproachable light.

The God to whom we pray is nearer to us than the very prayer itself ere
it leaves the heart; hence His answers may well come to us through the
channel of our own thoughts. But the world too being itself one of His
thoughts, He may also well make the least likely of His creatures an
angel of His own will to us. Even the blind, if God be with him, that
is, if he knows he is blind and does not think he sees, may become a
leader of the blind up to the narrow gate. It is the blind who says _I
see_, that leads his fellow into the ditch.

The window near which Dorothy kneeled, and toward which in the instinct
for light she had turned her face, looked straight down the garden, at
the foot of which the greater part of the circumference of the pond was
visible. But Dorothy, busy with her prayers, or rather with a weight of
hunger and thirst, from which like a burst of lightning skyward from the
overcharged earth, a prayer would now and then break and rush
heavenward, saw nothing of the outer world: between her and a sister
soul in mortal agony, hung the curtains of her eyelids. But there were
no shutters to her ears, and in at their portals all of a sudden darted
a great and bitter cry, as from a heart in the gripe of a fierce terror.
She had been so absorbed, and it so startled and shook her, that she
never could feel certain whether the cry she heard was of this world or
not. Half-asleep one hears such a cry, and can not tell whether it
entered his consciousness by the ear, or through some hidden channel of
the soul. Assured that waking ears heard nothing, he remains, it may be,
in equal doubt, whether it came from the other side of life or was the
mere cry of a dream. Before Dorothy was aware of a movement of her will,
she was on her feet, and staring from the window. Something was lying on
the grass beyond the garden wall, close to the pond: it looked like a
woman. She darted from the house, out of the garden, and down the other
side of the wall. When she came nearer she saw it was indeed a woman,
evidently insensible. She was bare-headed. Her bonnet was floating in
the pond; the wind had blown it almost to the middle of it. Her face was
turned toward the water. One hand was in it. The bank overhung the pond,
and with a single movement more she would probably have been beyond help
from Dorothy. She caught her by the arm, and dragged her from the brink,
before ever she looked in her face. Then to her amazement she saw it was
Juliet. She opened her eyes, and it was as if a lost soul looked out of
them upon Dorothy--a being to whom the world was nothing, so occupied
was it with some torment, which alone measured its existence--far away,
although it hung attached to the world by a single hook of brain and
nerve.

"Juliet, my darling!" said Dorothy, her voice trembling with the love
which only souls that know trouble can feel for the troubled, "come with
me. I will take care of you."

At the sound of her voice, Juliet shuddered. Then a better light came
into her eyes, and feebly she endeavored to get up. With Dorothy's help
she succeeded, but stood as if ready to sink again to the earth. She
drew her cloak about her, turned and stared at the water, turned again
and stared at Dorothy, at last threw herself into her arms, and sobbed
and wailed. For a few moments Dorothy held her in a close embrace. Then
she sought to lead her to the house, and Juliet yielded at once. She
took her into one of the lower rooms, and got her some water--it was all
she could get for her, and made her sit down on the window-seat. It
seemed a measureless time before she made the least attempt to speak;
and again and again when she began to try, she failed. She opened her
mouth, but no sounds would come. At length, interrupted with choking
gasps, low cries of despair, and long intervals of sobbing, she said
something like this:

"I was going to drown myself. When I came in sight of the water, I fell
down in a half kind of faint. All the time I lay, I felt as if some one
was dragging me nearer and nearer to the pool. Then something came and
drew me back--and it was you, Dorothy. But you ought to have left me. I
am a wretch. There is no room for me in this world any more." She
stopped a moment, then fixing wide eyes on Dorothy's, said, "Oh Dorothy,
dear! there are awful things in the world! as awful as any you ever read
in a book!"

"I know that, dear. But oh! I am sorry if any of them have come your
way. Tell me what is the matter. I _will_ help you if I can."

"I dare not; I dare not! I should go raving mad if I said a word about
it."

"Then don't tell me, my dear. Come with me up stairs; there is a warmer
room there--full of sunshine; you are nearly dead with cold. I came here
this morning, Juliet, to be alone and pray to God; and see what He has
sent me! You, dear! Come up stairs. Why, you are quite wet! You will get
your death of cold!"

"Then it would be all right. I would rather not kill myself if I could
die without. But it must be somehow."

"We'll talk about it afterward. Come now."

With Dorothy's arm round her waist, Juliet climbed trembling to the
warmer room. On a rickety wooden chair, Dorothy made her sit in the
sunshine, while she went and gathered chips and shavings and bits of
wood left by the workmen. With these she soon kindled a fire in the
rusty grate. Then she took off Juliet's shoes and stockings, and put her
own upon her. She made no resistance, only her eyes followed Dorothy's
bare feet going to and fro, as if she felt something was wrong, and had
not strength to inquire into it.

But Dorothy's heart rebuked her for its own lightness. It had not been
so light for many a day. It seemed as if God was letting her know that
He was there. She spread her cloak on a sunny spot of the floor, made
Juliet lie down upon it, put a bundle of shavings under her head,
covered her with her own cloak, which she had dried at the fire, and was
leaving the room.

"Where are you going, Dorothy?" cried Juliet, seeming all at once to
wake up.

"I am going to fetch your husband, dear," answered Dorothy.

She gave a great cry, rose to her knees, and clasped Dorothy round
hers.

"No, no, no!" she screamed. "You shall not. If you do, I swear I will
run straight to the pond."

Notwithstanding the wildness of her voice and look, there was an evident
determination in both.

"I will do nothing you don't like, dear," said Dorothy. "I thought that
was the best thing I could do for you."

"No! no! no! any thing but that!"

"Then of course I won't. But I must go and get you something to eat."

"I could not swallow a mouthful; it would choke me. And where would be
the good of it, when life is over!"

"Don't talk like that, dear. Life can't be over till it is taken from
us."

"Ah, you would see it just as I do, if you knew all!"

"Tell me all, then."

"Where is the use, when there is no help?"

"No help!" echoed Dorothy.--The words she had so often uttered in her
own heart, coming from the lips of another, carried in them an
incredible contradiction.--Could God make or the world breed the
irreparable?--"Juliet," she went on, after a little pause, "I have often
said the same myself, but--"

"You!" interrupted Juliet; "you who always professed to believe!"

Dorothy's ear could not distinguish whether the tone was of indignation
or of bitterness.

"You never heard me, Juliet," she answered, "profess any thing. If my
surroundings did so for me, I could not help that. I never dared say I
believed any thing. But I hope--and, perhaps," she went on with a smile,
"seeing Hope is own sister to Faith, she may bring me to know her too
some day. Paul says----"

Dorothy had been brought up a dissenter, and never said _St._ this one
or that, any more than the Christians of the New Testament.

At the sound of the name, Juliet burst into tears, the first she shed,
for the word _Paul_, like the head of the javelin torn from the wound,
brought the whole fountain after it. She cast herself down again, and
lay and wept. Dorothy kneeled beside her, and laid a hand on her
shoulder. It was the only way she could reach her at all.

"You see," she said at last, for the weeping went on and on, "there is
nothing will do you any good but your husband."

"No, no; he has cast me from him forever!" she cried, in a strange wail
that rose to a shriek.

"The wretch!" exclaimed Dorothy, clenching a fist whose little bones
looked fierce through the whitened skin.

"No," returned Juliet, suddenly calmed, in a voice almost severe; "it is
I who am the wretch, to give you a moment in which to blame him. He has
done nothing but what is right."

"I don't believe it."

"I deserved it."

"I am sure you did not. I would believe a thousand things against him
before I would believe one against you, my poor white queen!" cried
Dorothy, kissing her hand.

She snatched it away, and covered her face with both hands.

"I should only need to tell you one thing to convince you," she sobbed
from behind them.

"Then tell it me, that I may not be unjust to him."

"I can not."

"I won't take your word against yourself," returned Dorothy
determinedly. "You will have to tell me, or leave me to think the worst
of him." She was moved by no vulgar curiosity: how is one to help
without knowing? "Tell me, my dear," she went on after a little; "tell
me all about it, and in the name of the God in whom I hope to believe, I
promise to give myself to your service."

Thus adjured, Juliet found herself compelled. But with what
heart-tearing groans and sobs, with what intervals of dumbness, in which
the truth seemed unutterable for despair and shame, followed by what
hurrying of wild confession, as if she would cast it from her, the sad
tale found its way into Dorothy's aching heart, I will not attempt to
describe. It is enough that at last it was told, and that it had entered
at the wide-open, eternal doors of sympathy. If Juliet had lost a
husband, she had gained a friend, and that was something--indeed no
little thing--for in her kind the friend was more complete than the
husband. She was truer, more entire--in friendship nearly perfect. When
a final burst of tears had ended the story of loss and despair, a
silence fell.

"Oh, those men! those men!" said Dorothy, in a low voice of bitterness,
as if she knew them and their ways well, though never had kiss of man
save her father lighted on her cheek. "--My poor darling!" she said
after another pause, "--and he cast you from him!--I suppose a woman's
heart," she went on after a third pause, "can never make up for the loss
of a man's, but here is mine for you to go into the very middle of, and
lie down there."

Juliet had, as she told her story, risen to her knees. Dorothy was on
hers too, and as she spoke she opened wide her arms, and clasped the
despised wife to her bosom. None but the arms of her husband, Juliet
believed, could make her alive with forgiveness, yet she felt a strange
comfort in that embrace. It wrought upon her as if she had heard a
far-off whisper of the words: _Thy sins be forgiven thee_. And no
wonder: there was the bosom of one of the Lord's clean ones for her to
rest upon! It was her first lesson in the mighty truth that sin of all
things is mortal, and purity alone can live for evermore.




CHAPTER XXXVI.

TWO MORE MINDS.


Nothing makes a man strong like a call upon him for help--a fact which
points at a unity more delicate and close and profound than heart has
yet perceived. It is but "a modern instance" how a mother, if she be but
a hen, becomes bold as a tigress for her periled offspring. A stranger
will fight for the stranger who puts his trust in him. The most foolish
of men will search his musty brain to find wise saws for his boy. An
anxious man, going to his friend to borrow, may return having lent him
instead. The man who has found nothing yet in the world save food for
the hard, sharp, clear intellect, will yet cast an eye around the
universe to see if perchance there may not be a God somewhere for the
hungering heart of his friend. The poor, but lovely, the doubting, yet
living faith of Dorothy arose, stretched out its crippled wings, and
began to arrange and straighten their disordered feathers. It is a fair
sight, any creature, be it but a fly, dressing its wings! Dorothy's were
feeble, ruffled, their pen-feathers bent and a little crushed; but
Juliet's were full of mud, paralyzed with disuse, and grievously singed
in the smoldering fire of her secret. A butterfly that has burned its
wings is not very unlike a caterpillar again.

"Look here, Juliet," said Dorothy: "there must be some way out of it, or
there is no saving God in the universe.--Now don't begin to say there
isn't, because, you see, it is your only chance. It would be a pity to
make a fool of yourself by being over-wise, to lose every thing by
taking it for granted there is no God. If after all there should be one,
it would be the saddest thing to perish for want of Him. I won't say I
am as miserable as you, for I haven't a husband to trample on my heart;
but I am miserable enough, and want dreadfully to be saved. I don't call
this life worth living. Nothing is right, nothing goes well--there is no
harmony in me. I don't call it life at all. I want music and light in
me. I want a God to save me out of this wretchedness. I want health."

"I thought you were never ill, Dorothy," murmured Juliet listlessly.

"Is it possible you do not know what I mean?" returned Dorothy. "Do you
never feel wretched and sick in your very soul?--disgusted with
yourself, and longing to be lifted up out of yourself into a region of
higher conditions altogether?"

That kind of thing Juliet had been learning to attribute to the state of
her health--had partly learned: it is hard to learn any thing false
_thoroughly_, for it _can not_ so be learned. It is true that it is
often, perhaps it is generally, in troubled health, that such thoughts
come first; but in nature there are facts of color that the cloudy day
reveals. So sure am I that many things which illness has led me to see
are true, that I would endlessly rather never be well than lose sight of
them. "So would any madman say of his fixed idea." I will keep my
madness, then, for therein most do I desire the noble: and to desire
what I desire, if it be but to desire, is better than to have all you
offer us in the name of truth. Through such desire and the hope of its
attainment, all greatest things have been wrought in the earth: I too
have my unbelief as well as you--I can not believe that a lie on the
belief of which has depended our highest development. You may say you
have a higher to bring in. But that higher you have become capable of by
the precedent lie. Yet you vaunt truth! You would sink us low indeed,
making out falsehood our best nourishment--at some period of our
history at least. If, however, what I call true and high, you call false
and low--my assertion that you have never seen that of which I so speak
will not help--then is there nothing left us but to part, each go his
own road, and wait the end--which according to my expectation will show
the truth, according to yours, being nothing, will show nothing.

"I can not help thinking, if we could only get up there," Dorothy went
on,--"I mean into a life of which I can at least dream--if I could but
get my head and heart into the kingdom of Heaven, I should find that
every thing else would come right. I believe it is God Himself I
want--nothing will do but Himself in me. Mr. Wingfold says that we find
things all wrong about us, that they keep going against our will and our
liking, just to drive things right inside us, or at least to drive us
where we can get them put right; and that, as soon as their work is
done, the waves will lie down at our feet, or if not, we shall at least
walk over their crests."

"It sounds very nice, and would comfort any body that wasn't in
trouble," said Juliet; "but you wouldn't care one bit for it all any
more than I do, if you had pain and love like mine pulling at your
heart."

"I have seen a mother make sad faces enough over the baby at her
breast," said Dorothy. "Love and pain seem so strangely one in this
world, the wonder is how they will ever get parted. What God must feel
like, with this world hanging on to Him with all its pains and cries--!"

"It's His own fault," said Juliet bitterly. "Why did He make us--or why
did He not make us good? I'm sure I don't know where was the use of
making me!"

"Perhaps not much yet," replied Dorothy, "but then He hasn't made you,
He hasn't done with you yet. He is making you now, and you don't like
it."

"No, I don't--if you call this making. Why does He do it? He could have
avoided all this trouble by leaving us alone."

"I put something like the same question once to Mr. Wingfold," said
Dorothy, "and he told me it was impossible to show any one the truths of
the kingdom of Heaven; he must learn them for himself. 'I can do little
more,' he said, 'than give you my testimony that it seems to me all
right. If God has not made you good, He has made you with the feeling
that you ought to be good, and at least a half-conviction that to Him
you have to go for help to become good. When you are good, then you will
know why He did not make you good at first, and will be perfectly
satisfied with the reason, because you will find it good and just and
right--so good that it was altogether beyond the understanding of one
who was not good. I don't think,' he said, 'you will ever get a
thoroughly satisfactory answer to any question till you go to Himself
for it--and then it may take years to make you fit to receive, that is
to understand the answer.' Oh Juliet! sometimes I have felt in my heart
as if--I am afraid to say it, even to you,--"

"_I_ shan't be shocked at any thing; I am long past that," sighed
Juliet.

"It is not of you I am afraid," said Dorothy. "It is a kind of awe of
the universe I feel. But God is the universe; His is the only ear that
will hear me; and He knows my thoughts already. Juliet, I feel sometimes
as if I _must_ be good for God's sake; as if I was sorry for Him,
because He has such a troublesome nursery of children, that will not or
can not understand Him, and will not do what He tells them, and He all
the time doing the very best for them He can."

"It may be all very true, or all great nonsense, Dorothy, dear; I don't
care a bit about it. All I care for is--I don't know what I care for--I
don't care for any thing any more--there is nothing left to care for. I
love my husband with a heart like to break--oh, how I wish it would! He
hates and despises me and I dare not wish that he wouldn't. If he were
to forgive me quite, I should yet feel that he ought to despise me, and
that would be all the same as if he did, and there is no help. Oh, how
horrid I look to him! I _can't_ bear it. I fancied it was all gone; but
there it is, and there it must be forever. I don't care about a God. If
there were a God, what would He be to me without my Paul?"

"I think, Juliet, you will yet come to say, 'What would my Paul be to me
without my God?' I suspect we have no more idea than that lonely fly on
the window there, what it would be _to have a God_."

"I don't care. I would rather go to hell with my Paul than go to Heaven
without him," moaned Juliet.

"But what if God should be the only where to find your Paul?" said
Dorothy. "What if the gulf that parts you is just the gulf of a God not
believed in--a universe which neither of you can cross to meet the
other--just because you do not believe it is there at all?"

Juliet made no answer--Dorothy could not tell whether from feeling or
from indifference. The fact was, the words conveyed no more meaning to
Juliet than they will to some of my readers. Why do I write them then?
Because there are some who will understand them at once, and others who
will grow to understand them. Dorothy was astonished to find herself
saying them. The demands of her new office of comforter gave shape to
many half-formed thoughts, substance to many shadowy perceptions,
something like music to not a few dim feelings moving within her; but
what she said hardly seemed her own at all.

Had it not been for Wingfold's help, Dorothy might not have learned
these things in this world; but had it not been for Juliet, they would
have taken years more to blossom in her being, and so become her own.
Her faint hope seemed now to break forth suddenly into power. Whether or
not she was saying such things as were within the scope of Juliet's
apprehension, was a matter of comparatively little moment. As she lay
there in misery, rocking herself from side to side on the floor, she
would have taken hold of nothing. But love is the first comforter, and
where love and truth speak, the love will be felt where the truth is
never perceived. Love indeed is the highest in all truth; and the
pressure of a hand, a kiss, the caress of a child, will do more to save
sometimes than the wisest argument, even rightly understood. Love alone
is wisdom, love alone is power; and where love seems to fail it is where
self has stepped between and dulled the potency of its rays.

Dorothy thought of another line of expostulation.

"Juliet," she said, "suppose you were to drown yourself and your husband
were to repent?"

"That is the only hope left me. You see yourself I have no choice."

"You have no pity, it seems; for what then would become of him? What if
he should come to himself in bitter sorrow, in wild longing for your
forgiveness, but you had taken your forgiveness with you, where he had
no hope of ever finding it? Do you want to punish him? to make him as
miserable as yourself? to add immeasurably to the wrong you have done
him, by going where no word, no message, no letter can pass, no cry can
cross? No, Juliet--death can set nothing right. But if there be a God,
then nothing can go wrong but He can set it right, and set it right
better than it was before."

"He could not make it better than it was."

"What!--is that your ideal of love--a love that fails in the first
trial? If He could not better that, then indeed He were no God worth the
name."

"Why then did He make us such--make such a world as is always going
wrong?"

"Mr. Wingfold says it is always going righter the same time it is going
wrong. I grant He would have had no right to make a world that might go
further wrong than He could set right at His own cost. But if at His own
cost He turn its ills into goods? its ugliness into favor? Ah, if it
should be so, Juliet! It _may_ be so. I do not know. I have not found
Him yet. Help me to find Him. Let us seek Him together. If you find Him
you can not lose your husband. If Love is Lord of the world, love must
yet be Lord in his heart. It will wake, if not sooner, yet when the
bitterness has worn itself out, as Mr. Wingfold says all evil must,
because its heart is death and not life."

"I don't care a straw for life. If I could but find my husband, I would
gladly die forever in his arms. It is not true that the soul longs for
immortality. I don't. I long only for love--for forgiveness--for my
husband."

"But would you die so long as there was the poorest chance of regaining
your place in his heart?"

"No. Give me the feeblest chance of that, and I will live. I could live
forever on the mere hope of it."

"I can't give you any hope, but I have hope of it in my own heart."

Juliet rose on her elbow.

"But I am disgraced!" she said, almost indignantly. "It would be
disgrace to him to take me again! I remember one of the officers'
wives----. No, no! he hates and despises me. Besides I could never look
one of his friends in the face again. Every body will say I ran away
with some one--or that he sent me away because I was wicked. You all had
a prejudice against me from the very first."

"Yes, in a way," confessed Dorothy. "It always seemed as if we did not
know you and could not get at you, as if you avoided us--with your
heart, I mean;--as if you had resolved we should not know you--as if you
had something you were afraid we should discover."

"Ah, there it was, you see!" cried Juliet. "And now the hidden thing is
revealed! That was it: I never could get rid of the secret that was
gnawing at my life. Even when I was hardly aware of it, it was there.
Oh, if I had only been ugly, then Paul would never have thought of me!"

She threw herself down again and buried her face.

"Hide me; hide me," she went on, lifting to Dorothy her hands clasped in
an agony, while her face continued turned from her. "Let me stay here.
Let me die in peace. Nobody would ever think I was here."

"That is just what has been coming and going in my mind," answered
Dorothy. "It is a strange old place: you might be here for months and
nobody know."

"Oh! wouldn't you mind it? I shouldn't live long. I couldn't, you know!"

"I will be your very sister, if you will let me," replied Dorothy; "only
then you must do what I tell you--and begin at once by promising not to
leave the house till I come back to you."

As she spoke she rose.

"But some one will come," said Juliet, half-rising, as if she would run
after her.

"No one will. But if any one should--come here, I will show you a place
where nobody would find you."

She helped her to rise, and led her from the room to a door in a rather
dark passage. This she opened, and, striking a light, showed an ordinary
closet, with pegs for hanging garments upon. The sides of it were
paneled, and in one of them, not readily distinguishable, was another
door. It opened into a room lighted only by a little window high up in a
wall, through whose dusty, cobwebbed panes, crept a modicum of
second-hand light from a stair.

"There!" said Dorothy. "If you should hear any sound before I come back,
run in here. See what a bolt there is to the door. Mind you shut both.
You can close that shutter over the window too if you like--only nobody
can look in at it without getting a ladder, and there isn't one about
the place. I don't believe any one knows of this room but myself."

Juliet was too miserable to be frightened at the look of it--which was
wretched enough. She promised not to leave the house, and Dorothy went.
Many times before she returned had Juliet fled from the sounds of
imagined approach, and taken refuge in the musty dusk of the room
withdrawn. When at last Dorothy came, she found her in it trembling.

She came, bringing a basket with every thing needful for breakfast. She
had not told her father any thing: he was too simple, she said to
herself, to keep a secret with comfort; and she would risk any thing
rather than discovery while yet she did not clearly know what ought to
be done. Her version of the excellent French proverb--_Dans le doute,
abstiens-toi_--was, _When you are not sure, wait_--which goes a little
further, inasmuch as it indicates expectation, and may imply faith. With
difficulty she prevailed upon her to take some tea, and a little bread
and butter, feeding her like a child, and trying to comfort her with
hope. Juliet sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, the very
picture of despair, white like alabaster, rather than marble--with a
bluish whiteness. Her look was of one utterly lost.

"We'll let the fire out now," said Dorothy; "for the sun is shining in
warm, and there had better be no smoke. The wood is rather scarce too. I
will get you some more, and here are matches: you can light it again
when you please."

She then made her a bed on the floor with a quantity of wood shavings,
and some shawls she had brought, and when she had lain down upon it,
kneeled beside her, and covering her face with her hands, tried to pray.
But it seemed as if all the misery of humanity was laid upon her, and
God would not speak: not a sound would come from her throat, till she
burst into tears and sobs. It struck a strange chord in the soul of the
wife to hear the maiden weeping over her. But it was no private trouble,
it was the great need common to all men that opened the fountain of her
tears. It was hunger after the light that slays the darkness, after a
comfort to confront every woe, a life to lift above death, an antidote
to all wrong. It was one of the groanings of the spirit that can not be
uttered in words articulate, or even formed into thoughts defined. But
Juliet was filled only with the thought of herself and her husband, and
the tears of her friend but bedewed the leaves of her bitterness, did
not reach the dry roots of her misery.

Dorothy's spirit revived when she found herself once more alone in the
park on her way home the second time. She must be of better courage, she
said to herself. Struggling in the Slough of Despond, she had come upon
one worse mired than she, for whose sake she must search yet more
vigorously after the hidden stepping-stones--the peaks whose bases are
the center of the world.

"God help me!" she said ever and anon as she went, and every time she
said it, she quickened her pace and ran.

It was just breakfast-time when she reached the house. Her father was
coming down the stair.

"Would you mind, father," she said as they sat, "if I were to make a
room at the Old House a little comfortable?"

"I mind nothing you please to do, Dorothy," he answered. "But you must
not become a recluse. In your search for God, you must not forsake your
neighbor."

"If only I could find my neighbor!" she returned, with a rather sad
smile. "I shall never be able even to look for him, I think, till I have
found One nearer first."

"You have surely found your neighbor when you have found his wounds, and
your hand is on the oil-flask," said her father, who knew her
indefatigable in her ministrations.

"I don't feel it so," she answered. "When I am doing things for people,
my arms seem to be miles long."

As soon as her father left the table, she got her basket again, filled
it from the larder and store-room, laid a book or two on the top, and
telling Lisbeth she was going to the Old House for the rest of the day,
set out on her third journey thither. To her delight she found Juliet
fast asleep. She sat down, rather tired, and began to reflect. Her great
fear was that Juliet would fall ill, and then what was to be done? How
was she to take the responsibility of nursing her? But she remembered
how the Lord had said she was to take no thought for the morrow; and
therewith she began to understand the word. She saw that one can not
_do_ any thing in to-morrow, and that all care which can not be put into
the work of to-day, is taken out of it. One thing seemed clear--that, so
long as it was Juliet's desire to remain concealed from her husband, she
had no right to act against that desire. Whether Juliet was right or
wrong, a sense of security was for the present absolutely necessary to
quiet her mind. It seemed therefore, the first thing she had to do was
to make that concealed room habitable for her. It was dreadful to think
of her being there alone at night, but her trouble was too great to
leave much room for fear--and anyhow there was no choice. So while
Juliet slept, she set about cleaning it, and hard work she found it.
Great also was the labor afterward, when, piece by piece, at night or in
the early morning, she carried thither every thing necessary to make
abode in it clean and warm and soft.

The labor of love is its own reward, but Dorothy received much more.
For, in the fresh impulse and freedom born of this service, she soon
found, not only that she thought better and more clearly on the points
that troubled her, but that, thus spending herself, she grew more able
to believe there must be One whose glory is perfect ministration. Also,
her anxious concentration of thought upon the usurping thoughts of
others, with its tendency to diseased action in the logical powers, was
thereby checked, much to her relief. She was not finding an atom of what
is called proof; but when the longing heart finds itself able to hope
that the perfect is the fact, that the truth is alive, that the lovely
is rooted in eternal purpose, it can go on without such proof as belongs
to a lower stratum of things, and can not be had in these. When we rise
into the mountain air, we require no other testimony than that of our
lungs that we are in a healthful atmosphere. We do not find it necessary
to submit it to a quantitative analysis; we are content that we breathe
with joy, that we grow in strength, become lighter-hearted and
better-tempered. Truth is a very different thing from fact; it is the
loving contact of the soul with spiritual fact, vital and potent. It
does its work in the soul independently of all faculty or qualification
there for setting it forth or defending it. Truth in the inward parts is
a power, not an opinion. It were as poor a matter as any held by those
who deny it, if it had not its vitality in itself, if it depended upon
any buttressing of other and lower material.

How should it be otherwise? If God be so near as the very idea of Him
necessitates, what other availing proof of His existence can there be,
than such _awareness_ as must come of the developing relation between
Him and us? The most satisfying of intellectual proofs, if such were to
be had, would be of no value. God would be no nearer to us for them all.
They would bring about no blossoming of the mighty fact. While He was in
our very souls, there would yet lie between Him and us a gulf of misery,
of no-knowledge.

Peace is for those who _do_ the truth, not those who opine it. The true
man troubled by intellectual doubt, is so troubled unto further health
and growth. Let him be alive and hopeful, above all obedient, and he
will be able to wait for the deeper content which must follow with
completer insight. Men may say such a man but deceives himself, that
there is nothing of the kind he pleases himself with imagining; but this
is at least worth reflecting upon--that while the man who aspires fears
he may be deceiving himself, it is the man who does not aspire who
asserts that he is. One day the former may be sure, and the latter may
cease to deny, and begin to doubt.




CHAPTER XXXVII.

THE DOCTOR'S STUDY.


Paul Faber's condition, as he sat through the rest of that night in his
study, was about as near absolute misery as a man's could well be, in
this life, I imagine. The woman he had been watching through the first
part of it as his essential bliss, he had left in a swoon, lying naked
on the floor, and would not and did not go near her again. How could he?
Had he not been duped, sold, married to----?--That way madness lay! His
pride was bitterly wounded. Would it had been mortally! but pride seems
in some natures to thrive upon wounds, as in others does love. Faber's
pride grew and grew as he sat and brooded, or, rather, was brooded upon.

He, Paul Faber, who knew his own worth, his truth, his love, his
devotion--he, with his grand ideas of woman and purity and unity,
conscious of deserving a woman's best regards--he, whose love (to speak
truly his unworded, undefined impression of himself) any woman might be
proud to call hers--he to be thus deceived! to have taken to his bosom
one who had before taken another to hers, and thought it yet good enough
for him! It would not bear thinking! Indignation and bitterest sense of
wrong almost crazed him. For evermore he must be a hypocrite, going
about with the knowledge of that concerning himself which he would not
have known by others! This was how the woman, whom he had brought back
from death with the life of his own heart, had served him! Years ago she
had sacrificed her bloom to some sneaking wretch who flattered a God
with prayers, then enticed and bewitched and married _him_!

In all this thinking there was no thought but for himself--not one for
the woman whose agony had been patent even to his wrath-blinded eyes. In
what is the wretchedness of our condition more evident than in this,
that the sense of wrong always makes us unjust? It is a most humbling
thought. God help us. He forgot how she had avoided him, resisted him,
refused to confess the love which his goodness, his importunities, his
besieging love had compelled in her heart. It was true she ought either
to have refused him absolutely and left him, or confessed and left the
matter with him; but he ought to have remembered for another, if ever he
had known it for himself, the hardness of some duties; and what duty
could be more torturing to a delicate-minded woman than either of
those--to leave the man she loved in passionate pain, sore-wounded with
a sense of undeserved cruelty, or to give him the strength to send her
from him by confessing to his face what she could not recall in the
solitude of her own chamber but the agony would break out wet on her
forehead! We do our brother, our sister, grievous wrong, every time
that, in our selfish justice, we forget the excuse that mitigates the
blame. That God never does, for it would be to disregard the truth. As
He will never admit a false excuse, so will He never neglect a true one.
It may be He makes excuses which the sinner dares not think of; while
the most specious of false ones shrivel into ashes before Him. A man is
bound to think of all just excuse for his offender, for less than the
righteousness of God will not serve his turn.

I would not have my reader set Faber down as heartless, His life showed
the contrary. But his pride was roused to such furious self-assertion,
that his heart lay beaten down under the sweep of its cyclone. Its turn
was only delayed. The heart is always there, and rage is not. The heart
is a constant, even when most intermittent force. It can bide its time.
Nor indeed did it now lie quite still; for the thought of that white,
self-offered sacrifice, let him rave as he would against the
stage-trickery of the scene, haunted him so, that once and again he had
to rouse an evil will to restrain him from rushing to clasp her to his
bosom.

Then there was the question: why now had she told him all--if indeed she
had made a clean breast of it? Was it from love to him, or reviving
honesty in herself? From neither, he said. Superstition alone was at the
root of it. She had been to church, and the preaching of that honest
idiotic enthusiast, Wingfold, had terrified her.--Alas! what refuge in
her terror had she found with her husband?

Before morning he had made up his mind as to the course he would pursue.
He would not publish his own shame, but neither would he leave the
smallest doubt in her mind as to what he thought of her, or what he felt
toward her. All should be utterly changed between them. He would behave
to her with extreme, with marked politeness; he would pay her every
attention woman could claim, but her friend, her husband, he would be no
more. His thoughts of vengeance took many turns, some of them childish.
He would always call her _Mrs. Faber_. Never, except they had friends,
would he sit in the same room with her. To avoid scandal, he would dine
with her, if he could not help being at home, but when he rose from the
table, it would be to go to his study. If he happened at any time to be
in the room with her when she rose to retire, he would light her candle,
carry it up stairs for her, open the door, make her a polite bow, and
leave her. Never once would he cross the threshold of her bedroom. She
should have plenty of money; the purse of an adventuress was a greedy
one, but he would do his best to fill it, nor once reproach her with
extravagance--of which fault, let me remark, she had never yet shown a
sign. He would refuse her nothing she asked of him--except it were in
any way himself. As soon as his old aunt died, he would get her a
brougham, but never would he sit in it by her side. Such, he thought,
would be the vengeance of a gentleman. Thus he fumed and raved and
trifled, in an agony of selfish suffering--a proud, injured man; and all
the time the object of his vengeful indignation was lying insensible on
the spot where she had prayed to him, her loving heart motionless within
a bosom of ice.

In the morning he went to his dressing-room, had his bath, and went down
to breakfast, half-desiring his wife's appearance, that he might begin
his course of vindictive torture. He could not eat, and was just rising
to go out, when the door opened, and the parlor-maid, who served also as
Juliet's attendant, appeared.

"I can't find mis'ess nowhere, sir," she said. Faber understood at once
that she had left him, and a terror, neither vague nor ill-founded,
possessed itself of him. He sprung from his seat, and darted up the
stair to her room. Little more than a glance was necessary to assure him
that she had gone deliberately, intending it should be forever. The
diamond ring lay on her dressing-table, spending itself in flashing back
the single ray of the sun that seemed to have stolen between the
curtains to find it; her wedding ring lay beside it, and the sparkle of
the diamonds stung his heart like a demoniacal laughter over it, the
more horrible that it was so silent and so lovely: it was but three days
since, in his wife's presence, he had been justifying suicide with every
argument he could bring to bear. It was true he had insisted on a proper
regard to circumstances, and especially on giving due consideration to
the question, whether the act would hurt others more than it would
relieve the person contemplating it; but, after the way he had treated
her, there could be no doubt how Juliet, if she thought of it at all,
was compelled to answer it. He rushed to the stable, saddled Ruber, and
galloped wildly away. At the end of the street he remembered that he had
not a single idea to guide him. She was lying dead somewhere, but
whether to turn east or west or north or south to find her, he had not
the slightest notion. His condition was horrible. For a moment or two he
was ready to blow his brains out: that, if the orthodox were right, was
his only chance for over-taking her. What a laughing-stock he would then
be to them all! The strangest, wildest, maddest thoughts came and went
as of themselves, and when at last he found himself seated on Ruber in
the middle of the street, an hour seemed to have passed. It was but a
few moments, and the thought that roused him was: could she have betaken
herself to her old lodging at Owlkirk? It was not likely; it was
possible: he would ride and see.

"They will say I murdered her," he said to himself as he rode--so little
did he expect ever to see her again. "I don't care. They may prove it if
they can, and hang me. I shall make no defense. It will be but a fit end
to the farce of life."

He laughed aloud, struck his spurs in Ruber's flanks, and rode wildly.
He was desperate. He knew neither what he felt nor what he desired. If
he had found her alive, he would, I do not doubt, have behaved to her
cruelly. His life had fallen in a heap about him; he was ruined, and
she had done it, he said, he thought, he believed. He was not aware how
much of his misery was occasioned by a shrinking dread of the judgments
of people he despised. Had he known it, he would have been yet more
miserable, for he would have scorned himself for it. There is so much in
us that is beyond our reach!

Before arriving at Owlkirk, he made up his mind that, if she were not
there, he would ride to the town of Broughill--not in the hope of any
news of her, but because there dwelt the only professional friend he had
in the neighborhood--one who sympathized with his view of things, and
would not close his heart against him because he did not believe that
this horrid, ugly, disjointed thing of a world had been made by a God of
love. Generally, he had been in the habit of dwelling on the loveliness
of its developments, and the beauty of the gradual adaptation of life to
circumstance; but now it was plainer to him than ever, that, if made at
all, it was made by an evil being; "--for," he said, and said truly, "a
conscious being without a heart must be an evil being." This was the
righteous judgment of a man who could, by one tender, consoling word,
have made the sun rise upon a glorious world of conscious womanhood, but
would not say that word, and left that world lying in the tortured chaos
of a slow disintegration. This conscious being with a heart, this Paul
Faber, who saw that a God of love was the only God supposable, set his
own pride so far above love, that his one idea was, to satisfy the
justice of his outraged dignity by the torture of the sinner!--even
while all the time dimly aware of rebuke in his soul. If she should have
destroyed herself, he said once and again as he rode, was it more than a
just sacrifice to his wronged honor? As such he would accept it. If she
had, it was best--best for her, and best for him! What so much did it
matter! She was very lovely!--true--but what was the quintessence of
dust to him? Where either was there any great loss? He and she would
soon be wrapped up in the primal darkness, the mother and grave of all
things, together!--no, not together; not even in the dark of nothingness
could they two any more lie together! Hot tears forced their way into
his eyes, whence they rolled down, the lava of the soul, scorching his
cheeks. He struck his spurs into Ruber fiercely, and rode madly on.

At length he neared the outskirts of Broughill. He had ridden at a
fearful pace across country, leaving all to his horse, who had carried
him wisely as well as bravely. But Ruber, although he had years of good
work left in him, was not in his first strength, and was getting
exhausted with his wild morning. For, all the way, his master,
apparently unconscious of every thing else, had been immediately aware
of the slightest slackening of muscle under him, the least faltering of
the onward pace, and, in the temper of the savage, which wakes the
moment the man of civilization is hard put to it, the moment he flagged,
still drove the cruel spurs into his flanks, when the grand, unresenting
creature would rush forward at straining speed--not, I venture to think,
so much in obedience to the pain, as in obedience to the will of his
master, fresh recognized through the pain.

Close to the high road, where they were now approaching it through the
fields, a rail-fence had just been put up, inclosing a piece of ground
which the owner wished to let for building. That the fact might be
known, he was about to erect a post with a great board announcing it.
For this post a man had dug the hole, and then gone to his dinner. The
inclosure lay between Faber and the road, in the direct line he was
taking. On went Ruber blindly--more blindly than his master knew, for,
with the prolonged running, he had partially lost his sight, so that he
was close to the fence before he saw it. But he rose boldly, and cleared
it--to light, alas! on the other side with a foreleg in the hole. Down
he came with a terrible crash, pitched his master into the road upon his
head, and lay groaning with a broken leg. Faber neither spoke nor moved,
but lay as he fell. A poor woman ran to his assistance, and finding she
could do nothing for him, hurried to the town for help. His friend, who
was the first surgeon in the place, flew to the spot, and had him
carried to his house. It was a severe case of concussion of the brain.

Poor old Ruber was speedily helped to a world better than this for
horses, I trust.

Meantime Glaston was in commotion. The servants had spread the frightful
news that their mistress had vanished, and their master ridden off like
a madman. "But he won't find her alive, poor lady! I don't think," was
the general close of their communication, accompanied by a would-be
wise and really sympathetic shake of the head. In this conclusion most
agreed, for there was a general impression of something strange about
her, partly occasioned by the mysterious way in which Mrs. Puckridge had
spoken concerning her illness and the marvelous thing the doctor had
done to save her life. People now supposed that she had gone suddenly
mad, or, rather, that the latent madness so plain to read in those
splendid eyes of hers had been suddenly developed, and that under its
influence she had rushed away, and probably drowned herself. Nor were
there wanting, among the discontented women of Glaston, some who
regarded the event--vaguely to their own consciousness, I gladly
admit--as _almost a judgment_ upon Faber for marrying a woman of whom
nobody knew any thing.

Hundreds went out to look for the body down the river. Many hurried to
an old quarry, half full of water, on the road to Broughill, and peered
horror-stricken over the edge, but said nothing. The boys of Glaston
were mainly of a mind that the pond at the Old House was of all places
the most likely to attract a suicide, for with the fascination of its
horrors they were themselves acquainted. Thither therefore they sped;
and soon Glaston received its expected second shock in the tidings that
a lady's bonnet had been found floating in the frightful pool: while in
the wet mass the boys brought back with them, some of her acquaintance
recognized with certainty a bonnet they had seen Mrs. Faber wear. There
was no room left for doubt; the body of the poor lady was lying at the
bottom of the pool! A multitude rushed at once to the spot, although
they knew it was impossible to drag the pool, so deep was it, and for
its depth so small. Neither would she ever come to the surface, they
said, for the pikes and eels would soon leave nothing but the skeleton.
So Glaston took the whole matter for ended, and began to settle down
again to its own affairs, condoling greatly with the poor gentleman,
such a favorite! who, so young, and after such a brief experience of
marriage, had lost, in such a sad way, a wife so handsome, so amiable,
so clever. But some said a doctor ought to have known better than marry
such a person, however handsome, and they hoped it would be a lesson to
him. On the whole, so sorry for him was Glaston, that, if the doctor
could then have gone about it invisible, he would have found he had more
friends and fewer enemies than he had supposed.

For the first two or three days no one was surprised that he did not
make his appearance. They thought he was upon some false trail. But when
four days had elapsed and no news was heard of him, for his friend knew
nothing of what had happened, had written to Mrs. Faber, and the letter
lay unopened, some began to hint that he must have had a hand in his
wife's disappearance, and to breathe a presentiment that he would never
more be seen in Glaston. On the morning of the fifth day, however, his
accident was known, and that he was lying insensible at the house of his
friend, Dr. May; whereupon, although here and there might be heard the
expression of a pretty strong conviction as to the character of the
visitation, the sympathy both felt and uttered was larger than before.
The other medical men immediately divided his practice amongst them, to
keep it together against his possible return, though few believed he
would ever again look on scenes darkened by the memory of bliss so
suddenly blasted.

For weeks his recovery was doubtful, during which time, even if they had
dared, it would have been useless to attempt acquainting him with what
all believed the certainty of his loss. But when at length he woke to a
memory of the past, and began to desire information, his friend was
compelled to answer his questions. He closed his lips, bowed his head on
his breast, gave a great sigh, and held his peace. Every one saw that he
was terribly stricken.




CHAPTER XXXVIII.

THE MIND OF JULIET.


There was one, however, who, I must confess, was not a little relieved
at the news of what had befallen Faber. For, although far from desiring
his death, which indeed would have ruined some of her warmest hopes for
Juliet, Dorothy greatly dreaded meeting him. She was a poor dissembler,
hated even the shadow of a lie, and here was a fact, which, if truth
could conceal it, must not be known. Her dread had been, that, the first
time she saw Faber, it would be beyond her power to look innocent, that
her knowledge would be legible in her face; and much she hoped their
first encounter might be in the presence of Helen or some other ignorant
friend, behind whose innocent front she might shelter her conscious
secrecy. To truth such a silence must feel like a culpable deception,
and I do not think such a painful position can ever arise except from
wrong somewhere. Dorothy could not tell a lie. She could not try to tell
one; and if she had tried, she would have been instantly discovered
through the enmity of her very being to the lie she told; from her lips
it would have been as transparent as the truth. It is no wonder
therefore that she felt relieved when first she heard of the durance in
which Faber was lying. But she felt equal to the withholding from Juliet
of the knowledge of her husband's condition for the present. She judged
that, seeing she had saved her friend's life, she had some right to
think and choose for the preservation of that life.

Meantime she must beware of security, and cultivate caution; and so
successful was she, that weeks passed, and not a single doubt associated
Dorothy with knowledge where others desired to know. Not even her father
had a suspicion in the direction of the fact. She knew he would one day
approve both of what she did, and of her silence concerning it. To tell
him, thoroughly as he was to be trusted, would be to increase the risk;
and besides, she had no right to reveal a woman's secret to a man.

It was a great satisfaction, however, notwithstanding her dread of
meeting him, to hear that Faber had at length returned to Glaston; for
if he had gone away, how could they have ever known what to do? For one
thing, if he were beyond their knowledge, he might any day, in full
confidence, go and marry again.

Her father not unfrequently accompanied her to the Old House, but Juliet
and she had arranged such signals, and settled such understandings, that
the simple man saw nothing, heard nothing, forefelt nothing. Now and
then a little pang would quaver through Dorothy's bosom, when she caught
sight of him peering down into the terrible dusk of the pool, or heard
him utter some sympathetic hope for the future of poor Faber; but she
comforted herself with the thought of how glad he would be when she was
able to tell him all, and how he would laugh over the story of their
precautions against himself.

Her chief anxiety was for Juliet's health, even more for the sake of
avoiding discovery, than for its own. When the nights were warm she
would sometimes take her out in the park, and every day, one time or
another, would make her walk in the garden while she kept watch on the
top of the steep slope. Her father would sometimes remark to a friend
how Dorothy's love of solitude seemed to grow upon her; but the remark
suggested nothing, and slowly Juliet was being forgotten at Glaston.

It seemed to Dorothy strange that she did not fall ill. For the first
few days she was restless and miserable as human being could be. She had
but one change of mood: either she would talk feverously, or sit in the
gloomiest silence, now and then varied with a fit of abandoned weeping.
Every time Dorothy came from Glaston, she would overwhelm her with
questions--which at first Dorothy could easily meet, for she spoke
absolute fact when she said she knew nothing concerning her husband.
When at length the cause of his absence was understood, she told her he
was with his friend, Dr. May, at Broughill. Knowing the universal belief
that she had committed suicide, nothing could seem more natural. But
when, day after day, she heard the same thing for weeks, she began to
fear he would never be able to resume his practice, at least at Glaston,
and wept bitterly at the thought of the evil she had brought upon him
who had given her life, and love to boot. For her heart was a genuine
one, and dwelt far more on the wrong her too eager love had done him,
than on the hardness with which he had resented it. Nay, she admired him
for the fierceness of his resentment, witnessing, in her eyes, to the
purity of the man whom his neighbors regarded as wicked.

After the first day, she paid even less heed to any thing of a religious
kind with which Dorothy, in the strength of her own desire after a
perfect stay, sought to rouse or console her. When Dorothy ventured on
such ground, which grew more and more seldom, she would sit listless,
heedless, with a far-away look. Sometimes when Dorothy fancied she had
been listening a little, her next words would show that her thoughts had
been only with her husband. When the subsiding of the deluge of her
agony, allowed words to carry meaning to her, any hint at supernal
consolation made her angry, and she rejected every thing Dorothy said,
almost with indignation. To seem even to accept such comfort, she would
have regarded as traitorous to her husband. Not the devotion of the
friend who gave up to her all of her life she could call her own,
sufficed to make her listen even with a poor patience. So absorbed was
she in her trouble, that she had no feeling of what poor Dorothy had
done for her. How can I blame her, poor lady! If existence was not a
thing to be enjoyed, as for her it certainly was not at present, how was
she to be thankful for what seemed its preservation? There was much
latent love to Dorothy in her heart; I may go further and say there was
much latent love to God in her heart, only the latter was very latent as
yet. When her heart was a little freer from grief and the agony of loss,
she would love Dorothy; but God must wait with his own patience--wait
long for the child of His love to learn that her very sorrow came of His
dearest affection. Who wants such affection as that? says the unloving.
No one, I answer; but every one who comes to know it, glorifies it as
the only love that ever could satisfy his being.

Dorothy, who had within her the chill of her own doubt, soon yielded to
Juliet's coldness, and ceased to say anything that could be called
religious. She saw that it was not the time to speak; she must content
herself with being. Nor had it ever been any thing very definite she
could say. She had seldom gone beyond the expression of her own hope,
and the desire that her friend would look up. She could say that all the
men she knew, from books or in life, of the most delicate honesty, the
most genuine repentance, the most rigid self-denial, the loftiest
aspiration, were Christian men; but she could neither say her knowledge
of history or of life was large, nor that, of the men she knew who
professed to believe, the greater part were honest, or much ashamed, or
rigid against themselves, or lofty toward God. She saw that her part was
not instruction, but ministration, and that in obedience to Jesus in
whom she hoped to believe. What matter that poor Juliet denied Him? If
God commended His love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners
Christ died for us,' He would be pleased with the cup of cold water
given to one that was not a disciple. Dorothy dared not say she was a
disciple herself; she dared only say that right gladly would she become
one, if she could. If only the lovely, the good, the tender, the pure,
the grand, the adorable, were also the absolutely true!--true not in the
human idea only, but in absolute fact, in divine existence! If the story
of Jesus was true, then joy to the universe, for all was well! She
waited, and hoped, and prayed and ministered.

There is a great power in quiet, for God is in it. Not seldom He seems
to lay His hand on one of His children, as a mother lays hers on the
restless one in the crib, to still him. Then the child sleeps, but the
man begins to live up from the lower depths of his nature. So the
winter comes to still the plant whose life had been rushing to blossom
and fruit. When the hand of God is laid upon a man, vain moan, and
struggle and complaint, it may be indignant outcry follows; but when,
outwearied at last, he yields, if it be in dull submission to the
inexorable, and is still, then the God at the heart of him, the God that
is there or the man could not be, begins to grow. This point Juliet had
not yet reached, and her trouble went on. She saw no light, no possible
outlet. Her cries, her longings, her agonies, could not reach even the
ears, could never reach the heart of the man who had cast her off. He
believed her dead, might go and marry another, and what would be left
her then? Nothing but the death from which she now restrained herself,
lest, as Dorothy had taught her, she should deny him the fruits of a
softening heart and returning love. The moment she heard that he sought
another, she would seek Death and assuredly find him. One letter she
would write to leave behind her, and then go. He should see and
understand that the woman he despised for the fault of the girl, was yet
capable of the noblest act of a wife: she would die that he might
live--that it might be well with her husband. Having entertained,
comprehended and settled this idea in her mind, she became quieter.
After this, Dorothy might have spoken without stirring up so angry an
opposition. But it was quite as well she did not know it, and did not
speak.

I have said that Dorothy wondered she did not fall ill. There was a hope
in Juliet's mind of which she had not spoken, but upon which, though
vaguely, she built further hope, and which may have had part in her
physical endurance: the sight of his baby might move the heart of her
husband to pardon her!

But the time, even with the preoccupation of misery, grew very dreary.
She had never had any resources in herself except her music, and even if
here she had had any opportunity of drawing upon that, what is music but
a mockery to a breaking heart? Was music ever born of torture, of
misery? It is only when the cloud of sorrow is sinking in the sun-rays,
that the song-larks awake and ascend. A glory of some sort must fringe
the skirts of any sadness, the light of the sorrowing soul itself must
be shed upon it, and the cloud must be far enough removed to show the
reflected light, before it will yield any of the stuff of which songs
are made. And this light that gathers in song, what is it but hope
behind the sorrow--hope so little recognized as such, that it is often
called despair? It is reviving and not decay that sings even the saddest
of songs.

Juliet had had little consciousness of her own being as an object of
reflection. Joy and sorrow came and went; she had never brooded. Never
until now, had she known any very deep love. Even that she bore her
father had not ripened into the grand love of the woman-child. She
forgot quickly; she hoped easily; she had had some courage, and
naturally much activity; she faced necessity by instinct, and took
almost no thought for the morrow--but this after the fashion of the
birds, not after the fashion required of those who can consider the
birds; it is one thing to take no thought, for want of thought, and
another to take no thought, from sufficing thought, whose flower is
confidence. The one way is the lovely way of God in the birds--the
other, His lovelier way in his men and women. She had in her the making
of a noble woman--only that is true of every woman; and it was no truer
of her than of every other woman, that, without religion, she could
never be, in any worthy sense, a woman at all. I know how narrow and
absurd this will sound to many of my readers, but such simply do not
know what religion means, and think I do not know what a woman means.
Hitherto her past had always turned to a dream as it glided away from
her; but now, in the pauses of her prime agony, the tide rose from the
infinite sea to which her river ran, and all her past was borne back
upon her, even to her far-gone childish quarrels with her silly mother,
and the neglect and disobedience she had too often been guilty of toward
her father. And the center of her memories was the hot coal of that one
secret; around that they all burned and hissed. Now for the first time
her past _was_, and she cowered and fled from it, a slave to her own
history, to her own deeds, to her own concealment. Alas, like many
another terror-stricken child, to whom the infinite bosom of tenderness
and love stretches out arms of shelter and healing and life, she turned
to the bosom of death, and imagined there a shelter of oblivious
darkness! For life is a thing so deep, so high, so pure, so far above
the reach of common thought, that, although shadowed out in all the
harmonic glories of color, and speech, and song, and scent, and motion,
and shine, yea, even of eyes and loving hands, to common minds--and the
more merely intellectual, the commoner are they--it seems but a
phantasm. To unchildlike minds, the region of love and worship, to
which lead the climbing stairs of duty, is but a nephelocockygia; they
acknowledge the stairs, however, thank God, and if they will but climb,
a hand will be held out to them. Now, to pray to a God, the very thought
of whose possible existence might seem enough to turn the coal of a dead
life into a diamond of eternal radiance, is with many such enough to
stamp a man a fool. It will surprise me nothing in the new world to hear
such men, finding they are not dead after all, begin at once to argue
that they were quite right in refusing to act upon any bare
possibility--forgetting that the questioning of possibilities has been
the source of all scientific knowledge. They may say that to them there
seemed no possibility; upon which will come the question--whence arose
their incapacity for seeing it? In the meantime, that the same condition
which constitutes the bliss of a child, should also be the essential
bliss of a man, is incomprehensible to him in whom the child is dead, or
so fast asleep that nothing but a trumpet of terror can awake him. That
the rules of the nursery--I mean the nursery where the true mother is
the present genius, not the hell at the top of a London house--that the
rules of the nursery over which broods a wise mother with outspread
wings of tenderness, should be the laws also of cosmic order, of a
world's well-being, of national greatness, and of all personal dignity,
may well be an old-wives'-fable to the man who dabbles at saving the
world by science, education, hygiene and other economics. There is a
knowledge that will do it, but of that he knows so little, that he will
not allow it to be a knowledge at all. Into what would he save the
world? His paradise would prove a ten times more miserable condition
than that out of which he thought to rescue it.

But any thing that gives objectivity to trouble, that lifts the cloud so
far that, if but for a moment, it shows itself a cloud, instead of being
felt an enveloping, penetrating, palsying mist--setting it where the
mind can in its turn prey upon it, can play with it, paint it, may come
to sing of it, is a great help toward what health may yet be possible
for the troubled soul. With a woman's instinct, Dorothy borrowed from
the curate a volume of a certain more attractive edition of Shakespeare
than she herself possessed, and left it in Juliet's way, so arranged
that it should open at the tragedy of Othello. She thought that, if she
could be drawn into sympathy with suffering like, but different and
apart from her own, it would take her a little out of herself, and
might lighten the pressure of her load. Now Juliet had never read a play
of Shakespeare in her life, and knew Othello only after the vulgar
interpretation, as the type, that is, of jealousy; but when, in a pause
of the vague reverie of feeling which she called thought, a touch of
ennui supervening upon suffering, she began to read the play, the
condition of her own heart afforded her the insight necessary for
descrying more truly the Othello of Shakespeare's mind. She wept for
Desdemona's innocence and hard fate; but she pitied more the far harder
fate of Othello, and found the death of both a consolation for the
trouble their troubles had stirred up in her.

The curate was in the habit of scribbling on his books, and at the end
of the play, which left a large blank on the page, had written a few
verses: as she sat dreaming over the tragedy, Juliet almost
unconsciously took them in. They were these:

  In the hot hell o'
  Jealousy shines Othello--
  Love in despair,
  An angel in flames!
  While pure Desdemona
  Waits him alone, a
  Ghost in the air,
  White with his blames.

Becoming suddenly aware of their import, she burst out weeping afresh,
but with a very different weeping--Ah, if it might be so! Soon then had
the repentant Othello, rushing after his wife, explained all, and
received easiest pardon: he had but killed her. Her Paul would not even
do that for her! He did not love her enough for that. If she had but
thrown herself indeed into the lake, then perhaps--who could tell!--she
might now be nearer to him than she should ever be in this world.

All the time, Dorothy was much and vainly exercised as to what might
become possible for the bringing of them together again. But it was not
as if any misunderstanding had arisen between them: such a difficulty
might any moment be removed by an explanation. The thing that divided
them was the original misunderstanding, which lies, deep and black as
the pit, between every soul and the soul next it, where self and not God
is the final thought. The gulf is forever crossed by "bright shoots of
everlastingness," the lightnings of involuntary affection; but nothing
less than the willed love of an infinite devotion will serve to close
it; any moment it may be lighted up from beneath, and the horrible
distance between them be laid bare. Into this gulf it was that, with
absolute gift of himself, the Lord, doing like his Father, cast Himself;
and by such devotion alone can His disciples become fellow-workers with
Him, help to slay the evil self in the world, and rouse the holy self to
like sacrifice, that the true, the eternal life of men, may arise
jubilant and crowned. Then is the old man of claims and rights and
disputes and fears, re-born a child whose are all things and who claims
and fears nothing.

In ignorance of Faber's mood, whether he mourned over his harshness, or
justified himself in resentment, Dorothy could but wait, and turned
herself again to think what could be done for the consolation of her
friend.

Could she, knowing her prayer might be one which God would not grant,
urge her to pray! For herself, she knew, if there was a God, what she
desired must be in accordance with His will; but if Juliet cried to him
to give her back her husband, and He did not, would not the silent
refusal, the deaf ear of Heaven, send back the cry in settled despair
upon her spirit? With her own fear Dorothy feared for her friend. She
had not yet come to see that, in whatever trouble a man may find
himself, the natural thing being to make his request known, his brother
may heartily tell him to pray. Why, what can a man do but pray? He is
here--helpless; and his Origin, the breather of his soul, his God, may
be somewhere. And what else should he pray about but the thing that
troubles him? Not surely the thing that does not trouble him? What is
the trouble there for, but to make him cry? It is the pull of God at his
being. Let a man only pray. Prayer is the sound to which not merely is
the ear of the Father open, but for which that ear is listening. Let him
pray for the thing he thinks he needs: for what else, I repeat, can he
pray? Let a man cry for that in whose loss life is growing black: the
heart of the Father is open. Only let the man know that, even for his
prayer, the Father will not give him a stone. But let the man pray, and
let God see to it how to answer him. If in his childishness and
ignorance he should ask for a serpent, he will not give him a serpent.
But it may yet be the Father will find some way of giving him his
heart's desire. God only knows how rich God is in power of gift. See
what He has done to make Himself able to give to His own heart's desire.
The giving of His Son was as the knife with which He would divide
Himself amongst His children. He knows, He only, the heart, the needs,
the deep desires, the hungry eternity, of each of them all. Therefore
let every man ask of God, Who giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth
not--and see at least what will come of it.

But he will speak like one of the foolish if he say thus: "Let God hear
me, and give me my desire, and I will trust in Him." That would be to
tempt the Lord his God. If a father gives his children their will
instead of his, they may well turn on him again and say: "Was it then
the part of a father to give me a scorpion because, not knowing what it
was, I asked for it? I besought him for a fancied joy, and lo! it is a
sorrow for evermore!"

But it may be that sometimes God indeed does so, and to such a possible
complaint has this reply in Himself: "I gave thee what thou wouldst,
because not otherwise could I teach the stiff-necked his folly. Hadst
thou been patient, I would have made the thing a joy ere I gave it thee;
I would have changed the scorpion into a golden beetle, set with rubies
and sapphires. Have thou patience now."

One thing is clear, that poor Juliet, like most women, and more men,
would never have begun to learn any thing worth learning, if she had not
been brought into genuine, downright trouble. Indeed I am not sure but
some of those who seem so good as to require no trouble, are just those
who have already been most severely tried.




CHAPTER XXXIX.

ANOTHER MIND.


But while the two ladies were free of all suspicion of danger, and
indeed were quite safe, they were not alone in the knowledge of their
secret. There was one who, for some time, had been on the track of it,
and had long ago traced it with certainty to its covert: indeed he had
all but seen into it from the first. But, although to his intimate
friends known as a great and indeed wonderful talker, he was generally
regarded as a somewhat silent man, and in truth possessed to perfection
the gift of holding his tongue. Except that his outward insignificance
was so great as to pass the extreme, he was not one to attract
attention; but those who knew Wingfold well, heard him speak of Mr.
Polwarth, the gate-keeper, oftener than of any other; and from what she
heard him say, Dorothy had come to have a great reverence for the man,
although she knew him very little.

In returning from Nestley with Juliet by her side, Helen had taken the
road through Osterfield Park. When they reached Polwarth's gate, she
had, as a matter of course, pulled up, that they might have a talk with
the keeper. He had, on the few occasions on which he caught a passing
glimpse of Miss Meredith, been struck with a something in her that to
him seemed to take from her beauty--that look of strangeness, namely,
which every one felt, and which I imagine to have come of the
consciousness of her secret, holding her back from blending with the
human wave; and now, therefore, while the carriage stood, he glanced
often at her countenance.

From long observation, much silence and gentle pondering; from constant
illness, and frequent recurrence of great suffering; from loving
acceptance of the same, and hence an overflowing sympathy with every
form of humanity, even that more dimly revealed in the lower animals,
and especially suffering humanity; from deep acquaintance with the
motions of his own spirit, and the fullest conviction that one man is as
another; from the entire confidence of all who knew him, and the results
of his efforts to help them; above all, from persistently dwelling in
the secret place of the Most High, and thus entering into the hidden
things of life from the center whence the issues of them diverged--from
all these had been developed in him, through wisest use, an insight into
the natures of men, a power of reading the countenance, an apprehension
of what was moving in the mind, a contact, almost for the moment a
junction with the goings on of their spirits, which at times revealed to
him not only character, and prevailing purpose or drift of nature, but
even the main points of a past moral history. Sometimes indeed he would
recoil with terror from what seemed the threatened dawn in him of a
mysterious power, probably latent in every soul, of reading the future
of a person brought within certain points of spiritual range. What
startled him, however, may have been simply an involuntary conclusion,
instantaneously drawn, from the plain convergence of all the forces in
and upon the individual toward a point of final deliverance or of near
catastrophe: when "the mortal instruments" are steadily working for
evil, the only hope of deliverance lies in catastrophe.

When Polwarth had thus an opportunity of reading Juliet's countenance,
it was not wearing its usual expression: the ferment set at work in her
mind by the curate's sermon had intensified the strangeness of it, even
to something almost of definement; and it so arrested him that after the
ponies had darted away like birds, he stood for a whole minute in the
spot and posture in which they had left him.

"I never saw Polwarth look _distrait_ before," said the curate, and was
about to ask Juliet whether she had not been bewitching him, when the
far-away, miserable look of her checked him, and he dropped back into
his seat in silence.

But Polwarth had had no sudden insight into Juliet's condition; all he
had seen was, that she was strangely troubled--and that with no single
feeling; that there was an undecided contest in her spirit; that
something was required of her which she had not yet resolved to yield.
Almost the moment she vanished from his sight, it dawned upon him that
she had a secret. As one knows by the signs of the heavens that the
matter of a storm is in them and must break out, so Polwarth had read in
Juliet's sky the inward throes of a pent convulsion.

He knew something of the doctor, for he had met him again and again
where he himself was trying to serve; but they had never had
conversation together. Faber had not an idea of what was in the creature
who represented to him one of Nature's failures at man-making; while
Polwarth, from what he heard and saw of the doctor, knew him better than
he knew himself; and although the moment when he could serve him had not
begun to appear, looked for such a moment to come. There was so much
good in the man, that his heart longed to give him something worth
having. How Faber would have laughed at the notion! But Polwarth felt
confident that one day the friendly doctor would be led out of the
miserable desert where he cropped thistles and sage and fancied himself
a hero. And now in the drawn look of his wife's face, in the broken
lights of her eye, in the absorption and the start, he thought he
perceived the quarter whence unwelcome deliverance might be on its way,
and resolved to keep attention awake for what might appear. In his
inmost being he knew that the mission of man is to help his neighbors.
But in as much as he was ready to help, he recoiled from meddling. To
meddle is to destroy the holy chance. Meddlesomeness is the very
opposite of helpfulness, for it consists in forcing your self into
another self, instead of opening your self as a refuge to the other.
They are opposite extremes, and, like all extremes, touch. It is not
correct that extremes meet; they lean back to back. To Polwarth, a human
self was a shrine to be approached with reverence, even when he bore
deliverance in his hand. Anywhere, everywhere, in the seventh heaven or
the seventh hell, he could worship God with the outstretched arms of
love, the bended knees of joyous adoration, but in helping his fellow,
he not only worshiped but served God--ministered, that is, to the wants
of God--doing it unto Him in the least of His. He knew that, as the
Father unresting works for the weal of men, so every son, following the
Master-Son, must work also. Through weakness and suffering he had
learned it. But he never doubted that his work as much as his bread
would be given him, never rushed out wildly snatching at something to do
for God, never helped a lazy man to break stones, never preached to
foxes. It was what the Father gave him to do that he cared to do, and
that only. It was the man next him that he helped--the neighbor in need
of the help he had. He did not trouble himself greatly about the
happiness of men, but when the time and the opportunity arrived in which
to aid the struggling birth of the eternal bliss, the whole strength of
his being responded to the call. And now, having felt a thread vibrate,
like a sacred spider he sat in the center of his web of love, and waited
and watched.

In proportion as the love is pure, and only in proportion to that, can
such be a pure and real calling. The least speck of self will defile
it--a little more may ruin its most hopeful effort.

Two days after, he heard, from some of the boys hurrying to the pond,
that Mrs. Faber was missing. He followed them, and from a spot beyond
the house, looking down upon the lake, watched their proceedings. He
saw them find her bonnet--a result which left him room to doubt. Almost
the next moment a wavering film of blue smoke rising from the Old House
caught his eye. It did not surprise him, for he knew Dorothy Drake was
in the habit of going there--knew also by her face for what she went:
accustomed to seek solitude himself, he knew the relations of it. Very
little had passed between them. Sometimes two persons are like two drops
running alongside of each other down a window-pane: one marvels how it
is they can so long escape running together. Persons fit to be bosom
friends will meet and part for years, and never say much beyond
good-morning and good-night.

But he bethought him that he had not before known her light a fire, and
the day certainly was not a cold one. Again, how was it that with the
cries of the boys in her ears, searching for a sight of the body in her
very garden, she had never come from the house, or even looked from a
window? Then it came to his mind what a place for concealment the Old
House was: he knew every corner of it; and thus he arrived at what was
almost the conviction that Mrs. Faber was there. When a day or two had
passed, he was satisfied that, for some reason or other, she was there
for refuge. The reason must be a good one, else Dorothy would not be
aiding--and it must of course have to do with her husband.

He next noted how, for some time, Dorothy never went through his gate,
although he saw reason to believe she went to the Old House every day.
After a while, however, she went through it every day. They always
exchanged a few words as she passed, and he saw plainly enough that she
carried a secret. By and by he began to see the hover of words unuttered
about her mouth; she wished to speak about something but could not quite
make up her mind to it. He would sometimes meet her look with the
corresponding look of "Well, what is it?" but thereupon she would
invariably seem to change her mind, would bid him good morning, and pass
on.




CHAPTER XL.

A DESOLATION.


When Faber at length returned to Glaston, his friends were shocked at
his appearance. Either the hand of the Lord, or the hand of crushing
chance, had been heavy upon him. A pale, haggard, worn, enfeebled man,
with an eye of suffering, and a look that shrunk from question, he
repaired to his desolate house. In the regard of his fellow-townsmen he
was as Job appeared to the eyes of his friends; and some of them, who
knew no more of religion than the sound of its name, pitied him that he
had not the comfort of it. All Glaston was tender to him. He walked
feebly, seldom showed the ghost of a smile, and then only from kindness,
never from pleasure. His face was now almost as white as that of his
lost Juliet. His brother doctors behaved with brotherly truth. They had
attended to all his patients, poor as well as rich, and now insisted
that he should resume his labors gradually, while they fulfilled his
lack. So at first he visited only his patients in the town, for he was
unable to ride; and his grand old horse, Ruber, in whom he trusted, and
whom he would have ventured sooner to mount than Niger, was gone! For
weeks he looked like a man of fifty; and although by degrees the
restorative influences of work began to tell upon him, he never
recovered the look of his years. Nobody tried to comfort him. Few dared,
for very reverence, speak to the man who carried in him such an awful
sorrow. Who would be so heartless as counsel him to forget it? and what
other counsel was there for one who refused like him? Who could have
brought himself to say to him--"There is loveliness yet left, and within
thy reach: take the good, etc.; forget the nothing that has been, in the
something that may yet for awhile avoid being nothing too; comfort thy
heart with a fresh love: the time will come to forget both, in the
everlasting tomb of the ancient darkness"? Few men would consent to be
comforted in accordance with their professed theories of life; and more
than most would Faber, at this period of his suffering, have scorned
such truth for comfort. As it was, men gave him a squeeze of the hand,
and women a tearful look; but from their sympathy he derived no
faintest pleasure, for he knew he deserved nothing that came from heart
of tenderness. Not that he had begun to condemn himself for his hardness
to the woman who, whatever her fault, yet honored him by confessing it,
or to bemoan her hard fate to whom a man had not been a hiding-place
from the wind, a covert from the tempest of life, a shadow-shelter from
the scorching of her own sin. As he recovered from the double shock,
and, his strength slowly returning, his work increased, bringing him
again into the run of common life, his sense of desolation increased. As
his head ached less, his heart ached the more, nor did the help he
ministered to his fellows any longer return in comfort to himself.
Hitherto his regard of annihilation had been as of something so distant,
that its approach was relatively by degrees infinitesimal, but as the
days went on, he began to derive a gray consolation from the thought
that he must at length cease to exist. He would not hasten the end; he
would be brave, and see the play out. Only it was all so dull! If a
woman looked kindly at him, if for a moment it gave him pleasure, the
next it was as an arrow in his heart. What a white splendor was vanished
from his life! Where were those great liquid orbs of radiating
darkness?--where was that smile with its flash of whiteness?--that form
so lithe, yet so stately, so perfect in modulation?--where were those
hands and feet that spoke without words, and took their own way with his
heart?--those arms--? His being shook to its center. One word of
tenderness and forgiveness, and all would have been his own still!--But
on what terms?--Of dishonor and falsehood, he said, and grew hard again.
He was sorry for Juliet, but she and not he was to blame. She had ruined
his life, as well as lost her own, and his was the harder case, for he
had to live on, and she had taken with her all the good the earth had
for him. She had been the sole object of his worship; he had
acknowledged no other divinity; she was the loveliness of all things;
but she had dropped from her pedestal, and gone down in the sea that
flows waveless and windless and silent around the worlds. Alas for life!
But he would bear on till its winter came. The years would be as tedious
as hell; but nothing that ends can be other than brief. Not willingly
even yet would he fail of what work was his. The world was bad enough;
he would not leave it worse than he had found it. He would work life
out, that he might die in peace. Fame truly there was none for him, but
his work would not be lost. The wretched race of men would suffer a
little the less that he had lived. Poor comfort, if more of health but
ministered to the potency of such anguish as now burrowed in him like a
mole of fire!

There had been a time when, in the young pathos of things, he would shut
his eyes that the sunset might not wound him so sore; now, as he rode
homeward into the fronting sunset, he felt nothing, cared for nothing,
only ached with a dull aching through body and soul. He was still kind
to his fellows, but the glow of the kindness had vanished, and truest
thanks hardly waked the slightest thrill.

He very seldom saw Wingfold now, and less than ever was inclined toward
his doctrine; for had it not been through him this misery had come upon
him? Had he not, with the confidence of all the sciences, uttered the
merest dreams as eternal truths? How could poor Juliet help supposing he
knew the things he asserted, and taking them for facts? The human heart
was the one unreasonable thing, sighing ever after that which is not!
Sprung from nothing, it yet desired a creator!--at least some hearts did
so: his did not; he knew better!

There was of course no reason in this. Was the thing not a fact which
she had confessed? was he not a worshiper of fact? did he not even
dignify it with the name of truth? and could he wish his wife had kept
the miserable fact to herself, leaving him to his fools'-paradise of
ignorance? Why then should he feel resentment against the man whose
teaching had only compelled her to confess it?--But the thing was out of
the realm of science and its logic.

Sometimes he grew fierce, and determined to face every possible agony,
endure all, and dominate his misery; but ever and anon it returned with
its own disabling sickness, bringing the sense of the unendurable. Of
his own motion he saw nobody except in his practice. He studied hard,
even to weariness and faintness, contrived strange experiments, and
caught, he believed, curious peeps into the house of life. Upon them he
founded theories as wild as they were daring, and hob-nobbed with death
and corruption. But life is at the will of the Maker, and misery can not
kill it. By degrees a little composure returned, and the old keen look
began to revive. But there were wrinkles on the forehead that had
hitherto been smooth as ivory; furrows, the dry water-courses of sorrow,
appeared on his cheeks, and a few silvery threads glinted in his hair.
His step was heavy, and his voice had lost its ring--the cheer was out
of it. He no more obtruded his opinions, for, as I have said, he shrunk
from all interchange, but he held to them as firmly as ever. He was not
to be driven from the truth by suffering! But there was a certain
strange movement in his spirit of which he took no note--a feeling of
resentment, as if against a God that yet did not exist, for making upon
him the experiment whether he might not, by oppression, be driven to
believe in Him.

When Dorothy knew of his return, and his ways began to show that he
intended living just as before his marriage, the time seemed come for
telling Juliet of the accident and his recovery from the effects of it.
She went into violent hysterics, and the moment she could speak, blamed
Dorothy bitterly for not having told her before.

"It is all your lying religion!" she said.

"Your behavior, Juliet," answered Dorothy, putting on the matron, and
speaking with authority, "shows plainly how right I was. You were not to
be trusted, and I knew it. Had I told you, you would have rushed to him,
and been anything but welcome. He would not even have known you; and you
would have been two on the doctor's hands. You would have made
everything public, and when your husband came to himself, would probably
have been the death of him after all."

"He may have begun to think more kindly of me by that time," said
Juliet, humbled a little.

"We must not act on _may-haves_," answered Dorothy.

"You say he looks wretched now," suggested Juliet.

"And well he may, after concussion of the brain, not to mention what
preceded it," said Dorothy.

She had come to see that Juliet required very plain speaking. She had so
long practiced the art of deceiving herself that she was skillful at it.
Indeed, but for the fault she had committed, she would all her life long
have been given to petting and pitying, justifying and approving of
herself. One can not help sometimes feeling that the only chance for
certain persons is to commit some fault sufficient to shame them out of
the self-satisfaction in which they burrow. A fault, if only it be great
and plain enough to exceed their powers of self-justification, may then
be, of God's mercy, not indeed an angel of light to draw them, but
verily a goblin of darkness to terrify them out of themselves. For the
powers of darkness are His servants also, though incapable of knowing
it: He who is first and last can, even of those that love the lie, make
slaves of the truth. And they who will not be sons shall be slaves, let
them rant and wear crowns as they please in the slaves' quarters.

"You must not expect him to get over such a shock all at once," said
Dorothy. "--It may be," she continued, "that you were wrong in running
away from him. I do not pretend to judge between you, but, perhaps,
after the injury you had done him, you ought to have left it with him to
say what you were to do next. By taking it in your own hands, you may
have only added to the wrong."

"And who helped me?" returned Juliet, in a tone of deep reproach.

"Helped you to run from him, Juliet!--Really, if you were in the habit
of behaving to your husband as you do to me--!" She checked herself, and
resumed calmly--"You forget the facts of the case, my dear. So far from
helping you to run from him, I stopped you from running so far that
neither could he find you, nor you return to him again. But now we must
make the best of it by waiting. We must find out whether he wants you
again, or your absence is a relief to him. If I had been a man, I should
have been just as wild as he."

She had seen in Juliet some signs that self-abhorrence was wanting, and
self-pity reviving, and she would connive at no unreality in her
treatment of herself. She was one thing when bowed to the earth in
misery and shame, and quite another if thinking herself hardly used on
all sides.

It was a strange position for a young woman to be in--that of watcher
over the marriage relations of two persons, to neither of whom she could
be a friend otherwise than _ab extra_. Ere long she began almost to
despair. Day after day she heard or saw that Faber continued sunk in
himself, and how things were going there she could not tell. Was he
thinking about the wife he had lost, or brooding over the wrong she had
done him? There was the question--and who was to answer it? At the same
time she was all but certain, that, things being as they were, any
reconciliation that might be effected would owe itself merely to the
raising, as it were of the dead, and the root of bitterness would soon
trouble them afresh. If but one of them had begun the task of
self-conquest, there would be hope for both. But of such a change there
was in Juliet as yet no sign.

Dorothy then understood her position--it was wonderful with what
clearness, but solitary necessity is a hot sun to ripen. What was she to
do? To what quarter--could she to any quarter look for help? Naturally
she thought first of Mr. Wingfold. But she did not feel at all sure that
he would consent to receive a communication upon any other understanding
than that he was to act in the matter as he might see best; and would it
be right to acquaint him with the secret of another when possibly he
might feel bound to reveal it? Besides, if he kept it hid, the result
might be blame to him; and blame, she reasoned, although a small matter
in regard to one like herself, might in respect of a man in the curate's
position involve serious consequences. While she thus reflected, it came
into her mind with what enthusiasm she had heard him speak of Mr.
Polwarth, attributing to him the beginnings of all enlightenment he had
himself ever received. Without this testimony, she would not have once
thought of him. Indeed she had been more than a little doubtful of him,
for she had never felt attracted to him, and from her knowledge of the
unhealthy religious atmosphere of the chapel, had got unreasonably
suspicious of cant. She had not had experience enough to distinguish
with any certainty the speech that comes from the head and that which
comes out of the fullness of the heart. A man must talk out of that
which is in him; his well must give out the water of its own spring; but
what seems a well maybe only a cistern, and the water by no means living
water. What she had once or twice heard him say, had rather repelled
than drawn her; but Dorothy had faith, and Mr. Wingfold had spoken.
Might she tell him? Ought she not to seek his help? Would he keep the
secret? Could he help if he would? Was he indeed as wise as they said?

In the meantime, little as she thought it, Polwarth had been awaiting a
communication from her; but when he found that the question whose
presence was so visible in her whole bearing, neither died nor bore
fruit, he began to think whether he might not help her to speak. The
next time, therefore, that he opened the gate to her, he held in his
hand a little bud he had just broken from a monthly rose. It was a hard
little button, upon which the green leaves of its calyx clung as if
choking it.

"What is the matter with this bud, do you think, Miss Drake?" he asked.

"That you have plucked it," she answered sharply, throwing a suspicious
glance in his face.

"No; that can not be it," he answered with a quiet smile of
intelligence. "It has been just as you see it for the last three days. I
only plucked it the moment I saw you coming."

"Then the frost has caught it."

"The frost _has_ caught it," he answered; "but I am not quite sure
whether the cause of its death was not rather its own life than the
frost."

"I don't see what you mean by that, Mr. Polwarth," said Dorothy,
doubtfully, and with a feeling of discomfort.

"I admit it sounds paradoxical," returned the little man. "What I mean
is, that the struggle of the life in it to unfold itself, rather than
any thing else, was the cause of its death."

"But the frost was the cause of its not being able to unfold itself,"
said Dorothy.

"That I admit," said Polwarth; "and perhaps a weaker life in the flower
would have yielded sooner. I may have carried too far an analogy I was
seeking to establish between it and the human heart, in which repression
is so much more dangerous than mere oppression. Many a heart has
withered like my poor little bud, because it did not know its friend
when it saw him."

Dorothy was frightened. He knew something! Or did he only suspect?
Perhaps he was merely guessing at her religious troubles, wanting to
help her. She must answer carefully.

"I have no doubt you are right, Mr. Polwarth," she said; "but there are
some things it is not wise, and other things it would not be right to
speak about."

"Quite true," he answered. "I did not think it wise to say any thing
sooner, but now I venture to ask how the poor lady does?"

"What lady?" returned Dorothy, dreadfully startled, and turning white.

"Mrs. Faber," answered Polwarth, with the utmost calmness. "Is she not
still at the Old House?"

"Is it known, then?" faltered Dorothy.

"To nobody but myself, so far as I am aware," replied the gatekeeper.

"And how long have you known it?"

"From the very day of her disappearance, I may say."

"Why didn't you let me know sooner?" said Dorothy, feeling aggrieved,
though she would have found it hard to show wherein lay the injury.

"For more reasons than one," answered Polwarth; "but one will be enough:
you did not trust me. It was well therefore to let you understand I
could keep a secret. I let you know now only because I see you are
troubled about her. I fear you have not got her to take any comfort,
poor lady!"

Dorothy stood silent, gazing down with big, frightened eyes at the
strange creature who looked steadfastly up at her from under what seemed
a huge hat--for his head was as large as that of a tall man. He seemed
to be reading her very thoughts.

"I can trust you, Miss Drake," he resumed. "If I did not, I should have
at once acquainted the authorities with my suspicions; for, you will
observe, you are hiding from a community a fact which it has a right to
know. But I have faith enough in you to believe that you are only
waiting a fit time, and have good reasons for what you do. If I can give
you any help, I am at your service."

He took off his big hat, and turned away into the house.

Dorothy stood fixed for a moment or two longer, then walked slowly away,
with her eyes on the ground. Before she reached the Old House, she had
made up her mind to tell Polwarth as much as she could without betraying
Juliet's secret, and to ask him to talk to her, for which she would
contrive an opportunity.

For some time she had been growing more anxious every day. No sign of
change showed in any quarter; no way opened through the difficulties
that surrounded them, while these were greatly added to by the
likelihood appearing that another life was on its way into them. What
was to be done? How was she in her ignorance so to guard the hopeless
wife that motherhood might do something to console her? She had two
lives upon her hands, and did indeed want counsel. The man who knew
their secret already--the minor prophet, she had heard the curate call
him--might at least help her to the next step she must take.

Juliet's mental condition was not at all encouraging. She was often
ailing and peevish, behaving as if she owed Dorothy grudge instead of
gratitude. And indeed to herself Dorothy would remark that if nothing
more came out of it than seemed likely now, Juliet would be under no
very ponderous obligation to her. She found it more and more difficult
to interest her in any thing. After Othello she did not read another
play. Nothing pleased her but to talk about her husband. If Dorothy had
seen him, Juliet had endless questions to put to her about him; and when
she had answered as many of them as she could, she would put them all
over again afresh. On one occasion when Dorothy could not say she
believed he was, when she saw him, thinking about his wife, Juliet went
into hysterics. She was growing so unmanageable that if Dorothy had not
partially opened her mind to Polwarth, she must at last have been
compelled to give her up. The charge was wearing her out; her strength
was giving way, and her temper growing so irritable that she was ashamed
of herself--and all without any good to Juliet. Twice she hinted at
letting her husband know where she was, but Juliet, although, on both
occasions, she had a moment before been talking as if Dorothy alone
prevented her from returning to him, fell on her knees in wild distress,
and entreated her to bear with her. At the smallest approach of the idea
toward actuality, the recollection rushed scorching back--of how she had
implored him, how she had humbled herself soul and body before him, how
he had turned from her with loathing, would not put forth a hand to lift
her from destruction and to restore her to peace, had left her naked on
the floor, nor once returned "to ask the spotted princess how she
fares"--and she shrunk with agony from any real thought of again
supplicating his mercy.

Presently another difficulty began to show in the near distance: Mr.
Drake, having made up his mind as to the alterations he would have
effected, had begun to think there was no occasion to put off till the
spring, and talked of commencing work in the house at no distant day.
Dorothy therefore proposed to Juliet that, as it was impossible to
conceal her there much longer, she should go to some distant part of the
country, where she would contrive to follow her. But the thought of
moving further from her husband, whose nearness, though she dared not
seek him, seemed her only safety, was frightful to Juliet. The wasting
anxiety she caused Dorothy did not occur to her. Sorrow is not selfish,
but many persons are in sorrow entirely selfish. It makes them so
important in their own eyes, that they seem to have a claim upon all
that people can do for them.

To the extent therefore, of what she might herself have known without
Juliet's confession, Dorothy, driven to her wits' end, resolved to open
the matter to the gatekeeper; and accordingly, one evening on her way
home, called at the lodge, and told Polwarth where and in what condition
she had found Mrs. Faber, and what she had done with her; that she did
not think it the part of a friend to advise her return to her husband at
present; that she would not herself hear of returning; that she had no
comfort, and her life was a burden to her; and that she could not
possibly keep her concealed much longer, and did not know what next to
do.

Polwarth answered only that he must make the acquaintance of Mrs. Faber.
If that could be effected, he believed he should be able to help them
out of their difficulties. Between them, therefore, they must arrange a
plan for his meeting her.




CHAPTER XLI.

THE OLD GARDEN.


The next morning, Juliet, walking listlessly up and down the garden,
turned the corner of a yew hedge, and came suddenly upon a figure that
might well have appeared one of the kobolds of German legend. He was
digging slowly but steadily, crooning a strange song--so low that, until
she saw him she did not hear him.

She started back in dismay. The kobold neither raised his head nor
showed other sign than the ceasing of his song that he was aware of her
presence. Slowly and steadily he went on with his work. He was trenching
the ground deep, still throwing the earth from the bottom to the top.
Juliet, concluding he was deaf, and the ceasing of his song accidental,
turned softly, and would have retreated. But Polwarth, so far from being
deaf, heard better than most people. His senses, indeed, had been
sharpened by his infirmities--all but those of taste and smell, which
were fitful, now dull and now exquisitely keen. At the first movement
breaking the stillness into which consternation had cast her, he spoke.

"Can you guess what I am doing, Mrs. Faber?" he said, throwing up a
spadeful and a glance together, like a man who could spare no time from
his work.

Juliet's heart got in the way, and she could not answer him. She felt
much as a ghost, wandering through a house, might feel, if suddenly
addressed by the name she had borne in the old days, while yet she was
clothed in the garments of the flesh. Could it be that this man led such
a retired life that, although living so near Glaston, and seeing so many
at his gate, he had yet never heard that she had passed from the ken of
the living? Or could it be that Dorothy had betrayed her? She stood
quaking. The situation was strange. Before her was a man who did not
seem to know that what he knew concerning her was a secret from all the
world besides! And with that she had a sudden insight into the
consequence of the fact of her existence coming to her husband's
knowledge: would it not add to his contempt and scorn to know that she
was not even dead? Would he not at once conclude that she had been
contriving to work on his feelings, that she had been speculating on his
repentance, counting upon and awaiting such a return of his old
fondness, as would make him forget all her faults, and prepare him to
receive her again with delight?--But she must answer the creature! Ill
could she afford to offend him! But what was she to say? She had utterly
forgotten what he had said to her. She stood staring at him, unable to
speak. It was but for a few moments, but they were long as minutes. And
as she gazed, it seemed as if the strange being in the trench had dug
his way up from the lower parts of the earth, bringing her secret with
him, and come to ask her questions. What an earthy yet unearthly look he
had! Almost for the moment she believed the ancient rumors of other
races than those of mankind, that shared the earth with them, but led
such differently conditioned lives, that, in the course of ages, only a
scanty few of the unblending natures crossed each other's path, to stand
astare in mutual astonishment.

Polwarth went on digging, nor once looked up. After a little while he
resumed, in the most natural way, speaking as if he had known her well:

"Mr. Drake and I were talking, some weeks ago, about a certain curious
little old-fashioned flower in my garden at the back of the lodge. He
asked me if I could spare him a root of it. I told him I could spare him
any thing he would like to have, but that I would gladly give him every
flower in my garden, roots and all, if he would but let me dig three
yards square in his garden at the Old House, and have all that came up
of itself for a year."

He paused again. Juliet neither spoke nor moved. He dug rather feebly
for a gnome, with panting, asthmatic breath.

"Perhaps you are not aware, ma'am," he began again, and ceasing his
labor stood up leaning on the spade, which was nearly as high as
himself, "that many of the seeds which fall upon the ground do not grow,
yet, strange to tell, retain the power of growth. I suspect myself, but
have not had opportunity of testing the conjecture, that such fall in
their pods, or shells, and that before these are sufficiently decayed to
allow the sun and moisture and air to reach them, they have got covered
up in the soil too deep for those same influences. They say fishes a
long time bedded in ice will come to life again: I can not tell about
that, but it is well enough known that if you dig deep in any old
garden, such as this, ancient, perhaps forgotten flowers, will appear.
The fashion has changed, they have been neglected or uprooted, but all
the time their life is hid below. And the older they are, the nearer
perhaps to their primary idea!"

By this time she was far more composed, though not yet had she made up
her mind what to say, or how to treat the dilemma in which she found
herself.

After a brief pause therefore, he resumed again:

"I don't fancy," he said, with a low, asthmatic laugh, "that we shall
have many forgotten weeds come up. They all, I suspect, keep pretty well
in the sun. But just think how the fierce digging of the crisis to which
the great Husbandman every now and then leads a nation, brings back to
the surface its old forgotten flowers. What virtues, for instance, the
Revolution brought to light as even yet in the nature of the corrupted
nobility of France!"

"What a peculiar goblin it is!" thought Juliet, beginning to forget
herself a little in watching and listening to the strange creature. She
had often seen him before, but had always turned from him with a kind of
sympathetic shame: of course the poor creature could not bear to be
looked at; he must know himself improper!

"I have sometimes wondered," Polwarth yet again resumed, "whether the
troubles without end that some people seem born to--I do not mean those
they bring upon themselves--may not be as subsoil plows, tearing deep
into the family mold, that the seeds of the lost virtues of their race
may in them be once more brought within reach of sun and air and dew. It
would be a pleasant, hopeful thought if one might hold it. Would it not,
ma'am?"

"It would indeed," answered Juliet with a sigh, which rose from an
undefined feeling that if some hidden virtue would come up in her, it
would be welcome. How many people would like to be good, if only they
might be good without taking trouble about it! They do not like goodness
well enough to hunger and thirst after it, or to sell all that they have
that they may buy it; they will not batter at the gate of the kingdom of
Heaven; but they look with pleasure on this or that aerial castle of
righteousness, and think it would be rather nice to live in it! They do
not know that it is goodness all the time their very being is pining
after, and that they are starving their nature of its necessary food.
Then Polwarth's idea turned itself round in Juliet's mind, and grew
clearer, but assumed reference to weeds only, and not flowers. She
thought how that fault of hers had, like the seed of a poison-plant,
been buried for years, unknown to one alive, and forgotten almost by
herself--so diligently forgotten indeed, that it seemed to have
gradually slipped away over the horizon of her existence; and now here
it was at the surface again in all its horror and old reality! nor that
merely, for already it had blossomed and borne its rightful fruit of
dismay--an evil pod, filled with a sickening juice, and swarming with
gray flies.--But she must speak, and, if possible, prevent the odd
creature from going and publishing in Glaston that he had seen Mrs.
Faber, and she was at the Old House.

"How did you know I was here?" she asked abruptly.

"How do you know that I knew, ma'am?" returned Polwarth, in a tone which
took from the words all appearance of rudeness.

"You were not in the least surprised to see me," she answered.

"A man," returned the dwarf, "who keeps his eyes open may almost cease
to be surprised at any thing. In my time I have seen so much that is
wonderful--in fact every thing seems to me so wonderful that I hardly
expect to be surprised any more."

He said this, desiring to provoke conversation. But Juliet took the
answer for an evasive one, and it strengthened her suspicion of Dorothy.
She was getting tired of her! Then there was only one thing left!--The
minor prophet had betaken himself again to his work, delving deeper, and
throwing slow spadeful after spadeful to the surface.

"Miss Drake told you I was here!" said Juliet.

"No, indeed, Mrs. Faber. No one told me," answered Polwarth. "I learned
it for myself. I could hardly help finding it out."

"Then--then--does every body know it?" she faltered, her heart sinking
within her at the thought.

"Indeed, ma'am, so far as I know, not a single person is aware you are
alive except Miss Drake and myself. I have not even told my niece who
lives with me, and who can keep a secret as well as myself."

Juliet breathed a great sigh of relief.

"Will you tell me why you have kept it so secret?" she asked.

"Because it was your secret, ma'am, not mine."

"But you were under no obligation to keep my secret."

"How do you justify such a frightful statement as that, ma'am?"

"Why, what could it matter to you?"

"Every thing."

"I do not understand. You have no interest in me. You could have no
inducement."

"On the contrary, I had the strongest inducement: I saw that an
opportunity might come of serving you."

"But that is just the unintelligible thing to me. There is no reason why
you should wish to serve me!" said Juliet, thinking to get at the bottom
of some design.

"There you mistake, ma'am. I am under the most absolute and imperative
obligation to serve you--the greatest under which any being can find
himself."

"What a ridiculous, crooked little monster!" said Juliet to herself. But
she began the same moment to think whether she might not turn the
creature's devotion to good account. She might at all events insure his
silence.

"Would you be kind enough to explain yourself?" she said, now also
interested in the continuance of the conversation.

"I would at once," replied Polwarth, "had I sufficient ground for hoping
you would understand my explanation."

"I do not know that I am particularly stupid," she returned, with a wan
smile.

"I have heard to the contrary," said Polwarth. "Yet I can not help
greatly doubting whether you will understand what I am now going to tell
you. For I will tell you--on the chance: I have no secrets--that is, of
my own.--I am one of those, Mrs. Faber," he went on after a moment's
pause, but his voice neither became more solemn in tone, nor did he
cease his digging, although it got slower, "who, against the
_non-evidence_ of their senses, believe there is a Master of men, the
one Master, a right perfect Man, who demands of them, and lets them know
in themselves the rectitude of the demand that they also shall be right
and true men, that is, true brothers to their brothers and sisters of
mankind. It is recorded too, and I believe it, that this Master said
that any service rendered to one of His people was rendered to Himself.
Therefore, for love of His will, even if I had no sympathy with you,
Mrs. Faber, I should feel bound to help you. As you can not believe me
interested in yourself, I must tell you that to betray your secret for
the satisfaction of a love of gossip, would be to sin against my highest
joy, against my own hope, against the heart of God, from which your
being and mine draws the life of its every moment."

Juliet's heart seemed to turn sick at the thought of such a creature
claiming brotherhood with her. That it gave ground for such a claim,
seemed for the moment an irresistible argument against the existence of
a God.

In her countenance Polwarth read at once that he had blundered, and a
sad, noble, humble smile irradiated his. It had its effect on Juliet.
She would be generous and forgive his presumption: she knew dwarfs were
always conceited--that wise Nature had provided them with high thoughts
wherewith to add the missing cubit to their stature. What repulsive
things Christianity taught! Her very flesh recoiled from the poor ape!

"I trust you are satisfied, ma'am," the kobold added, after a moment's
vain expectation of a word from Juliet, "that your secret is safe with
me."

"I am," answered Juliet, with a condescending motion of her stately
neck, saying to herself in feeling if not in conscious thought,--"After
all he is hardly human! I may accept his devotion as I would that of a
dog!"

The moment she had thus far yielded, she began to long to speak of her
husband. Perhaps he can tell her something of him! At least he could
talk about him. She would have been eager to look on his reflection, had
it been possible, in the mind of a dog that loved him. She would turn
the conversation in a direction that might find him.

"But I do not see," she went on, "how you, Mr. Polwarth--I think that is
your name--how you can, consistently with your principles,--"

"Excuse me, ma'am: I can not even, by silence, seem to admit that you
know any thing whatever of my principles."

"Oh!" she returned, with a smile of generous confession, "I was brought
up to believe as you do."

"That but satisfies me that for the present you are incapable of knowing
any thing of my principles."

"I do not wonder at your thinking so," she returned, with the
condescension of superior education, as she supposed, and yet with the
first motion of an unconscious respect for the odd little monster.--He,
with wheezing chest, went on throwing up the deep, damp, fresh earth, to
him smelling of marvelous things. Ruth would have ached all over to see
him working so hard!--"Still," Juliet went on, "supposing your judgment
of me correct, that only makes it the stranger you should imagine that
in serving such a one, you are pleasing Him you call your Master. He
says whosoever denies Him before men He will deny before the angels of
God."

"What my Lord says He will do, He will do, as He meant it when He said
it: what He tells me to do, I try to understand and do. Now He has told
me of all things not to say that good comes of evil. He condemned that
in the Pharisees as the greatest of crimes. When, therefore, I see a man
like your husband, helping his neighbors near and far, being kind,
indeed loving, and good-hearted to all men,"--Here a great sigh, checked
and broken into many little ones, came in a tremulous chain from the
bosom of the wife--"I am bound to say that man is not scattering his
Master abroad. He is indeed opposing Him in words: he speaks against the
Son of Man; but that the Son of Man Himself says shall be forgiven him.
If I mistake in this, to my own Master I stand or fall."

"How can He be his Master if he does not acknowledge Him?"

"Because the very tongue with which he denies Him is yet His. I am the
master of the flowers that will now grow by my labor, though not one of
them will know me--how much more must He be the Master of the men He
has called into being, though they do not acknowledge Him! If the story
of the gospel be a true one, as with my heart and soul and all that is
in me I believe it is, then Jesus of Nazareth is Lord and Master of Mr.
Faber, and for him not to acknowledge it is to fall from the summit of
his being. To deny one's Master, is to be a slave."

"You are very polite!" said Mrs. Faber, and turned away. She recalled
her imaginary danger, however, and turning again, said, "But though I
differ from you in opinion, Mr. Polwarth, I quite recognize you as no
common man, and put you upon your honor with regard to my secret."

"Had you entrusted me with your secret, ma'am, the phrase would have had
more significance. But, obeying my Master, I do not require to think of
my own honor. Those who do not acknowledge their Master, can not afford
to forget it. But if they do not learn to obey Him, they will find by
the time they have got through what they call life, they have left
themselves little honor to boast of."

"He has guessed my real secret!" thought poor Juliet, and turning away
in confusion, without a word of farewell, went straight into the house.
But before Dorothy, who had been on the watch at the top of the slope,
came in, she had begun to hope that the words of the forward,
disagreeable, conceited dwarf had in them nothing beyond a general
remark.

When Dorothy entered, she instantly accused her of treachery. Dorothy,
repressing her indignation, begged she would go with her to Polwarth.
But when they reached the spot, the gnome had vanished.

He had been digging only for the sake of the flowers buried in Juliet,
and had gone home to lie down. His bodily strength was exhausted, but
will and faith and purpose never forsook the soul cramped up in that
distorted frame. When greatly suffering, he would yet suffer with his
will--not merely resigning himself to the will of God, but desiring the
suffering that God willed. When the wearied soul could no longer keep
the summit of the task, when not strength merely, but the consciousness
of faith and duty failed him, he would cast faith and strength and duty,
all his being, into the gulf of the Father's will, and simply suffer, no
longer trying to feel any thing--waiting only until the Life should send
him light.

Dorothy turned to Juliet.

"You might have asked Mr. Polwarth, Juliet, whether I had betrayed
you," she said.

"Now I think of it, he did say you had not told him. But how was I to
take the word of a creature like that?"

"Juliet," said Dorothy, very angry, "I begin to doubt if you were worth
taking the trouble for!"

She turned from her, and walked toward the house. Juliet rushed after
her and caught her in her arms.

"Forgive me, Dorothy," she cried. "I am not in my right senses, I do
believe. What _is_ to be done now this--man knows it?"

"Things are no worse than they were," said Dorothy, as quickly appeased
as angered. "On the contrary, I believe we have the only one to help us
who is able to do it. Why, Juliet, why what am I to do with you when my
father sends the carpenters and bricklayers to the house? They will be
into every corner! He talks of commencing next week, and I am at my
wits' end."

"Oh! don't forsake me, Dorothy, after all you have done for me," cried
Juliet. "If you turn me out, there never was creature in the world so
forlorn as I shall be--absolutely helpless, Dorothy!"

"I will do all I can for you, my poor Juliet; but if Mr. Polwarth do not
think of some way, I don't know what will become of us. You don't know
what you are guilty of in despising him. Mr. Wingfold speaks of him as
far the first man in Glaston."

Certainly Mr. Wingfold, Mr. Drew, and some others of the best men in the
place, did think him, of those they knew, the greatest in the kingdom of
Heaven. Glaston was altogether of a different opinion. Which was the
right opinion, must be left to the measuring rod that shall finally be
applied to the statures of men.

The history of the kingdom of Heaven--need I say I mean a very different
thing from what is called _church-history?_--is the only history that
will ever be able to show itself a history--that can ever come to be
thoroughly written, or to be read with a clear understanding; for it
alone will prove able to explain itself, while in doing so it will
explain all other attempted histories as well. Many of those who will
then be found first in the eternal record, may have been of little
regard in the eyes of even their religious contemporaries, may have been
absolutely unknown to generations that came after, and were yet the men
of life and potency, working as light, as salt, as leaven, in the
world. When the real worth of things is, over all, the measure of their
estimation, then is the kingdom of our God and His Christ.




CHAPTER XLII.

THE POTTERY.


It had been a very dry autumn, and the periodical rains had been long
delayed, so that the minister had been able to do much for the houses he
had bought, called the Pottery. There had been but just rain enough to
reveal the advantage of the wall he had built to compel the water to
keep the wider street. Thoroughly dry and healthy it was impossible to
make them, at least in the time; but it is one thing to have the water
all about the place you stand on, and another to be up to the knees in
it. Not at that point only, however, but at every spot where the water
could enter freely, he had done what he could provisionally for the
defense of his poor colony--for alas! how much among the well-to-do, in
town or city, are the poor like colonists only!--and he had great hopes
of the result. Stone and brick and cement he had used freely, and one or
two of the people about began to have a glimmering idea of the use of
money after a gospel fashion--that is, for thorough work where and
_because_ it was needed. The curate was full of admiration and sympathy.
But the whole thing gave great dissatisfaction to others not a few. For,
as the currents of inundation would be somewhat altered in direction and
increased in force by his obstructions, it became necessary for several
others also to add to the defenses of their property, and this of course
was felt to be a grievance. Their personal inconveniences were like the
shilling that hides the moon, and, in the resentment they occasioned,
blinded their hearts to the seriousness of the evils from which their
merely temporary annoyance was the deliverance of their neighbors. A
fancy of prescriptive right in their own comforts outweighed all the
long and heavy sufferings of the others. Why should not their neighbors
continue miserable, when they had been miserable all their lives
hitherto? Those who, on the contrary, had been comfortable all their
lives, and liked it so much, ought to continue comfortable--even at
their expense. Why not let well alone? Or if people would be so
unreasonable as to want to be comfortable too, when nobody cared a straw
about them, let them make themselves comfortable without annoying those
superior beings who had been comfortable all the time!--Persons who,
consciously or unconsciously, reason thus, would do well to read with a
little attention the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, wherein it
seems recognized that a man's having been used to a thing may be just
the reason, not for the continuance, but for the alteration of his
condition. In the present case the person who most found himself
aggrieved, was the dishonest butcher. A piece of brick wall which the
minister had built in contact with the wall of his yard, would
indubitably cause such a rise in the water at the descent into the area
of his cellar, that, in order to its protection in a moderate flood--in
a great one the cellar was always filled--the addition to its defense of
two or three more rows of bricks would be required, carrying a
correspondent diminution of air and light. It is one of the punishments
overtaking those who wrong their neighbors, that not only do they feel
more keenly than others any injury done to themselves, but they take
many things for injuries that do not belong to the category. It was but
a matter of a few shillings at the most, but the man who did not scruple
to charge the less careful of his customers for undelivered ounces,
gathering to pounds and pounds of meat, resented bitterly the necessity
of the outlay. He knew, or ought to have known, that he had but to
acquaint the minister with the fact, to have the thing set right at
once; but the minister had found him out, and he therefore much
preferred the possession of his grievance to its removal. To his friends
he regretted that a minister of the gospel should be so corrupted by the
mammon of unrighteousness as to use it against members of his own
church: that, he said, was not the way to make friends with it. But on
the pretense of a Christian spirit, he avoided showing Mr. Drake any
sign of his resentment; for the face of his neighbors shames a man whose
heart condemns him but shames him not. He restricted himself to
grumbling, and brooded to counterplot the mischiefs of the minister.
What right had he to injure him for the sake of the poor? Was it not
written in the Bible: Thou shall not favor the poor man in his cause?
Was it not written also: For every man shall bear his own burden? That
was common sense! He did his share in supporting the poor that were
church-members, but was he to suffer for improvements on Drake's
property for the sake of a pack of roughs! Let him be charitable at his
own cost! etc., etc. Self is prolific in argument.

It suited Mr. Drake well, notwithstanding his church republican
theories, against which, in the abstract, I could ill object, seeing the
whole current of Bible teaching is toward the God-inspired ideal
commonwealth--it suited a man like Mr. Drake well, I say, to be an
autocrat, and was a most happy thing for his tenants, for certainly no
other system of government than a wise autocracy will serve in regard to
the dwellings of the poor. And already, I repeat, he had effected not a
little. Several new cottages had been built, and one incorrigible old
one pulled down. But it had dawned upon him that, however desirable it
might be on a dry hill-side, on such a foundation as this a cottage was
the worst form of human dwelling that could be built. For when the whole
soil was in time of rain like a full sponge, every room upon it was
little better than a hollow in a cloud, and the right thing must be to
reduce contact with the soil as much as possible. One high house,
therefore, with many stories, and stone feet to stand upon, must be the
proper kind of building for such a situation. He must lift the first
house from the water, and set as many more houses as convenient upon it.

He had therefore already so far prepared for the building of such a
house as should lift a good many families far above all deluge; that is,
he had dug the foundation, and deep, to get at the more solid ground. In
this he had been precipitate, as not unfrequently in his life; for while
he was yet meditating whether he should not lay the foundation
altogether solid, of the unporous stone of the neighborhood, the rains
began, and there was the great hole, to stand all the winter full of
water, in the middle of the cottages!

The weather cleared again, but after a St. Martin's summer unusually
prolonged, the rain came down in terrible earnest. Day after day, the
clouds condensed, grew water, and poured like a squeezed sponge. A wet
November indeed it was--wet overhead--wet underfoot--wet all round! and
the rivers rose rapidly.

When the Lythe rose beyond a certain point, it overflowed into a hollow,
hardly a valley, and thereby a portion of it descended almost straight
to Glaston. Hence it came that in a flood the town was invaded both by
the rise of the river from below, and by this current from above, on its
way to rejoin the main body of it, and the streets were soon turned into
canals. The currents of the slowly swelling river and of its temporary
branch then met in Pine street, and formed not a very rapid, but a heavy
run at ebb tide; for Glaston, though at some distance from the mouth of
the river, measuring by its course, was not far from the sea, which was
visible across the green flats, a silvery line on the horizon. Landward,
beyond the flats, high ground rose on all sides, and hence it was that
the floods came down so deep upon Glaston.

On a certain Saturday it rained all the morning heavily, but toward the
afternoon cleared a little, so that many hoped the climax had been
reached, while the more experienced looked for worse. After sunset the
clouds gathered thicker than before, and the rain of the day was as
nothing to the torrent descending with a steady clash all night. When
the slow, dull morning came Glaston stood in the middle of a brown lake,
into which water was rushing from the sky in straight, continuous lines.
The prospect was discomposing. Some, too confident in the apparent
change, had omitted needful precautions, in most parts none were now
possible, and in many more none would have been of use. Most cellars
were full, and the water was rising on the ground-floors. It was a very
different affair from a flood in a mountainous country, but serious
enough, though without immediate danger to life. Many a person that
morning stepped out of bed up to the knee in muddy water.

With the first of the dawn the curate stood peering from the window of
his dressing-room, through the water that coursed down the pane, to
discover the state of the country; for the window looked inland from the
skirt of the town. All was gray mist, brown water, and sheeting rain.
The only things clear were that not a soul would be at church that
morning, and that, though he could do nothing to divide them the bread
needful for their souls, he might do something for some of their bodies.
It was a happy thing it was Sunday, for, having laid in their stock of
bread the day before, people were not so dependent on the bakers, half
whose ovens must now be full of water. But most of the kitchens must be
flooded, he reasoned, the fire-wood soaking, and the coal in some
cellars inaccessible. The very lucifer-matches in many houses would be
as useless as the tinderbox of a shipwrecked sailor. And if the rain
were to cease at once the water would yet keep rising for many hours. He
turned from the window, took his bath in homoeopathic preparation, and
then went to wake his wife.

She was one of those blessed women who always open their eyes smiling.
She owed very little of her power of sympathy to personal suffering; the
perfection of her health might have made one who was too anxious for her
spiritual growth even a little regretful. Her husband therefore had
seldom to think of sparing her when any thing had to be done. She could
lose a night's sleep without the smallest injury, and stand fatigue
better than most men; and in the requirements of the present necessity
there would be mingled a large element of adventure, almost of frolic,
full of delight to a vigorous organization.

"What a good time of it the angels of wind and flame must have!" said
the curate to himself as he went to wake her. "What a delight to be
embodied as a wind, or a flame, or a rushing sea!--Come, Helen, my help!
Glaston wants you," he said softly in her ear.

She started up.

"What is it, Thomas?" she said, holding her eyes wider open than was
needful, to show him she was capable.

"Nothing to frighten you, darling," he answered, "but plenty to be done.
The river is out, and the people are all asleep. Most of them will have
to wait for their breakfast, I fear. We shall have no prayers this
morning."

"But plenty of divine service," rejoined Helen, with a smile for what
her aunt called one of his whims, as she got up and seized some of her
garments.

"Take time for your bath, dear," said her husband.

"There will be time for that afterward," she replied. "What shall I do
first?"

"Wake the servants, and tell them to light the kitchen fire, and make
all the tea and coffee they can. But tell them to make it good. We shall
get more of every thing as soon as it is light. I'll go and bring the
boat. I had it drawn up and moored in the ruins ready to float
yesterday. I wish I hadn't put on my shirt though: I shall have to swim
for it, I fear."

"I shall have one aired before you come back," said Helen.

"Aired!" returned her husband: "you had better say watered. In five
minutes neither of us will have a dry stitch on. I'll take it off again,
and be content with my blue jersey."

He hurried out into the rain. Happily there was no wind.

Helen waked the servants. Before they appeared she had the fire lighted,
and as many utensils as it would accommodate set upon it with water.
When Wingfold returned, he found her in the midst of her household,
busily preparing every kind of eatable and drinkable they could lay
hands upon.

He had brought his boat to the church yard and moored it between two
headstones: they would have their breakfast first, for there was no
saying when they might get any lunch, and food is work. Besides, there
was little to be gained by rousing people out of their good sleep: there
was no danger yet.

"It is a great comfort," said the curate, as he drank his coffee, "to
see how Drake goes in heart and soul for his tenants. He is pompous--a
little, and something of a fine gentleman, but what is that beside his
great truth! That work of his is the simplest act of Christianity of a
public kind I have ever seen!"

"But is there not a great change on him since he had his money?" said
Helen. "He seems to me so much humbler in his carriage and simpler in
his manners than before."

"It is quite true," replied her husband. "It is mortifying to think," he
went on after a little pause, "how many of our clergy, from mere
beggarly pride, holding their rank superior--as better accredited
servants of the Carpenter of Nazareth, I suppose--would look down on
that man as a hedge-parson. The world they court looked down upon
themselves from a yet greater height once, and may come to do so again.
Perhaps the sooner the better, for then they will know which to choose.
Now they serve Mammon and think they serve God."

"It is not quite so bad as that, surely!" said Helen.

"If it is not worldly pride, what is it? I do not think it is spiritual
pride. Few get on far enough to be much in danger of that worst of all
vices. It must then be church-pride, and that is the worst form of
worldly pride, for it is a carrying into the kingdom of Heaven of the
habits and judgments of the kingdom of Satan. I am wrong! such things
can not be imported into the kingdom of Heaven: they can only be
imported into the Church, which is bad enough. Helen, the churchman's
pride is a thing to turn a saint sick with disgust, so utterly is it at
discord with the lovely human harmony he imagines himself the minister
of. He is the Pharisee, it may be the good Pharisee, of the kingdom of
Heaven; but if the proud churchman be in the kingdom at all, it must be
as one of the least in it. I don't believe one in ten who is guilty of
this pride is aware of the sin of it. Only the other evening I heard a
worthy canon say, it may have been more in joke than appeared, that he
would have all dissenters burned. Now the canon would not hang one of
them--but he does look down on them all with contempt. Such miserable
paltry weaknesses and wickednesses, for in a servant of the Kingdom the
feeling which suggests such a speech is wicked, are the moth holes in
the garments of the Church, the teredo in its piles, the dry rot in its
floors, the scaling and crumbling of its buttresses. They do more to
ruin what such men call the Church, even in outward respects, than any
of the rude attacks of those whom they thus despise. He who, in the name
of Christ, pushes his neighbor from him, is a schismatic, and that of
the worst and only dangerous type! But we had better be going. It's of
no use telling you to take your waterproof; you'd only be giving it to
the first poor woman we picked up."

"I may as well have the good of it till then," said Helen, and ran to
fetch it, while the curate went to bring his boat to the house.

When he opened the door, there was no longer a spot of earth or of sky
to be seen--only water, and the gray sponge filling the upper air,
through which coursed multitudinous perpendicular runnels of water. Clad
in a pair of old trowsers and a jersey, he went wading, and where the
ground dipped, swimming, to the western gate of the churchyard. In a few
minutes he was at the kitchen window, holding the boat in a long
painter, for the water, although quite up to the rectory walls, was not
yet deep enough there to float the boat with any body in it. The
servants handed him out the great cans they used at school-teas, full of
hot coffee, and baskets of bread, and he placed them in the boat,
covering them with a tarpaulin. Then Helen appeared at the door, in her
waterproof, with a great fur-cloak--to throw over him, she said, when
she took the oars, for she meant to have her share of the fun: it was so
seldom there was any going on a Sunday!--How she would have shocked her
aunt, and better women than she!

"To-day," said the curate, "we shall praise God with the _mirth_ of the
good old hundredth psalm, and not with the _fear_ of the more modern
version."

As he spoke he bent to his oars, and through a narrow lane the boat soon
shot into Pine-street--now a wide canal, banked with houses dreary and
dead, save where, from an upper window, peeped out here and there a
sleepy, dismayed countenance. In silence, except for the sounds of the
oars, and the dull rush of water everywhere, they slipped along.

"This _is_ fun!" said Helen, where she sat and steered.

"Very quiet fun as yet," answered the curate. "But it will get faster by
and by."

As often as he saw any one at a window, he called out that tea and
coffee would be wanted for many a poor creature's breakfast. But here
they were all big houses, and he rowed swiftly past them, for his
business lay, not where there were servants and well-stocked larders,
but where there were mothers and children and old people, and little but
water besides. Nor had they left Pine street by many houses before they
came where help was right welcome. Down the first turning a miserable
cottage stood three feet deep in the water. Out jumped the curate with
the painter in his hand, and opened the door.

On the bed, over the edge of which the water was lapping, sat a sickly
young woman in her night-dress, holding her baby to her bosom. She
stared for a moment with big eyes, then looked down, and said nothing;
but a rose-tinge mounted from her heart to her pale cheek.

"Good morning, Martha!" said the curate cheerily. "Rather damp--ain't
it? Where's your husband?"

"Away looking for work, sir," answered Martha, in a hopeless tone.

"Then he won't miss you. Come along. Give me the baby."

"I can't come like this, sir. I ain't got no clothes on."

"Take them with you. You can't put them on: they're all wet. Mrs.
Wingfold is in the boat: she'll see to every thing you want. The door's
hardly wide enough to let the boat through, or I'd pull it close up to
the bed for you to get in."

She hesitated.

"Come along," he repeated. "I won't look at you. Or wait--I'll take the
baby, and come back for you. Then you won't get so wet."

He took the baby from her arms, and turned to the door.

"It ain't you as I mind, sir," said Martha, getting into the water at
once and following him, "--no more'n my own people; but all the town'll
be at the windows by this time."

"Never mind; we'll see to you," he returned.

In half a minute more, with the help of the windowsill, she was in the
boat, the fur-cloak wrapped about her and the baby, drinking the first
cup of the hot coffee.

"We must take her home at once," said the curate.

"You said we should have fun!" said Helen, the tears rushing into her
eyes.

She had left the tiller, and, while the mother drank her coffee, was
patting the baby under the cloak. But she had to betake herself to the
tiller again, for the curate was not rowing straight.

When they reached the rectory, the servants might all have been
grandmothers from the way they received the woman and her child.

"Give them a warm bath together," said Helen, "as quickly as
possible.--And stay, let me out, Thomas--I must go and get Martha some
clothes. I shan't be a minute."

The next time they returned, Wingfold, looking into the kitchen, could
hardly believe the sweet face he saw by the fire, so refined in its
comforted sadness, could be that of Martha. He thought whether the fine
linen, clean and white, may not help the righteousness even of the
saints a little.

Their next take was a boat-load of children and an old grandmother. Most
of the houses had a higher story, and they took only those who had no
refuge. Many more, however, drank of their coffee and ate of their
bread. The whole of the morning they spent thus, calling, on their
passages, wherever they thought they could get help or find
accommodation. By noon a score of boats were out rendering similar
assistance. The water was higher than it had been for many years, and
was still rising. Faber had laid hands upon an old tub of a
salmon-coble, and was the first out after the curate. But there was no
fun in the poor doctor's boat. Once the curate's and his met in the
middle of Pine street--both as full of people as they could carry.
Wingfold and Helen greeted Faber frankly and kindly. He returned their
greeting with solemn courtesy, rowing heavily past.

By lunch-time, Helen had her house almost full, and did not want to go
again: there was so much to be done! But her husband persuaded her to
give him one hour more: the servants were doing so well! he said. She
yielded. He rowed her to the church, taking up the sexton and his boy on
their way. There the crypts and vaults were full of water. Old
wood-carvings and bits of ancient coffins were floating about in them.
But the floor of the church was above the water: he landed Helen dry in
the porch, and led her to the organ-loft. Now the organ was one of great
power; seldom indeed, large as the church was, did they venture its full
force: he requested her to pull out every stop, and send the voice of
the church, in full blast, into every corner of Glaston. He would come
back for her in half an hour and take her home. He desired the sexton to
leave all the doors open, and remember that the instrument would want
every breath of wind he and his boy could raise.

He had just laid hold of his oars, when out of the porch rushed a roar
of harmony that seemed to seize his boat and blow it away upon its
mission like a feather--for in the delight of the music the curate never
felt the arms that urged it swiftly along. After him it came pursuing,
and wafted him mightily on. Over the brown waters it went rolling, a
grand billow of innumerable involving and involved waves. He thought of
the spirit of God that moved on the face of the primeval waters, and out
of a chaos wrought a cosmos. "Would," he said to himself, "that ever
from the church door went forth such a spirit of harmony and healing of
peace and life! But the church's foes are they of her own household, who
with the axes and hammers of pride and exclusiveness and vulgar
priestliness, break the carved work of her numberless chapels, yea,
build doorless screens from floor to roof, dividing nave and choir and
chancel and transepts and aisles into sections numberless, and, with the
evil dust they raise, darken for ages the windows of her clerestory!"

The curate was thinking of no party, but of individual spirit. Of the
priestliness I have encountered, I can not determine whether the worse
belonged to the Church of England or a certain body of Dissenters.




CHAPTER XLIII.

THE GATE-LODGE.


Mr Bevis had his horses put to, then taken away again, and an old hunter
saddled. But half-way from home he came to a burst bridge, and had to
return, much to the relief of his wife, who, when she had him in the
house again, could enjoy the rain, she said: it was so cosey and
comfortable to feel you could not go out, or any body call. I presume
she therein seemed to take a bond of fate, and doubly assure the
every-day dullness of her existence. Well, she was a good creature, and
doubtless a corner would be found for her up above, where a little more
work would probably be required of her.

Polwarth and his niece Ruth rose late, for neither had slept well. When
they had breakfasted, they read together from the Bible: first the uncle
read the passage he had last got light upon--he was always getting light
upon passages, and then the niece the passage she had last been
gladdened by; after which they sat and chatted a long time by the
kitchen fire.

"I am afraid your asthma was bad last night, uncle dear," said Ruth. "I
heard your breathing every time I woke."

"It was, rather," answered the little man, "but I took my revenge, and
had a good crow over it."

"I know what you mean, uncle: do let me hear the crow."

He rose, and slowly climbing the stair to his chamber, returned with a
half sheet of paper in his hand, resumed his seat, and read the
following lines, which he had written in pencil when the light came:

  Satan, avaunt!
    Nay, take thine hour;
  Thou canst not daunt,
    Thou hast no power;
  Be welcome to thy nest,
  Though it be in my breast.

  Burrow amain;
    Dig like a mole;
  Fill every vein
    With half-burned coal;
  Puff the keen dust about,
  And all to choke me out.

  Fill music's ways
    With creaking cries,
  That no loud praise
    May climb the skies;
  And on my laboring chest
  Lay mountains of unrest.

  My slumber steep
    In dreams of haste,
  That only sleep,
    No rest I taste--
  With stiflings, rimes of rote,
  And fingers on the throat.

  Satan, thy might
    I do defy;
  Live core of night,
    I patient lie:
  A wind comes up the gray
  Will blow thee clean away.

  Christ's angel, Death,
    All radiant white,
  With one cold breath
    Will scare thee quite,
  And give my lungs an air
  As fresh as answered prayer.

  So, Satan, do
    Thy worst with me,
  Until the True
    Shall set me free,
  And end what He began,
  By making me a man.

"It is not much of poetry, Ruth!" he said, raising his eyes from the
paper; "--no song of thrush or blackbird! I am ashamed that I called it
a cock-crow--for that is one of the finest things in the world--a
clarion defiance to darkness and sin--far too good a name for my poor
jingle--except, indeed, you call it a Cochin-china-cock-crow--from out a
very wheezy chest!"

"'My strength is made perfect in weakness,'" said Ruth solemnly,
heedless of the depreciation. To her the verses were as full of meaning
as if she had made them herself.

"I think I like the older reading better--that is, without the _My_,"
said Polwarth: "'Strength is made perfect in weakness.' Somehow--I can
not explain the feeling--to hear a grand aphorism, spoken in widest
application, as a fact of more than humanity, of all creation, from the
mouth of the human God, the living Wisdom, seems to bring me close to
the very heart of the universe. Strength--strength itself--all over--is
made perfect in weakness;--a law of being, you see, Ruth! not a law of
Christian growth only, but a law of growth, even all the growth leading
up to the Christian, which growth is the highest kind of creation. The
Master's own strength was thus perfected, and so must be that of His
brothers and sisters. Ah, what a strength must be his!--how patient in
endurance--how gentle in exercise--how mighty in devotion--how fine in
its issues,-perfected by such suffering! Ah, my child, you suffer sorely
sometimes--I know it well! but shall we not let patience have her
perfect work, that we may--one day, Ruth, one day, my child--be perfect
and entire, wanting nothing?"

Led by the climax of his tone, Ruth slipped from her stool on her knees.
Polwarth kneeled beside her, and said:

"O Father of life, we praise Thee that one day Thou wilt take Thy poor
crooked creatures, and give them bodies like Christ's, perfect as His,
and full of Thy light. Help us to grow faster--as fast as Thou canst
help us to grow. Help us to keep our eyes on the opening of Thy hand,
that we may know the manna when it comes. O Lord, we rejoice that we are
Thy making, though Thy handiwork is not very clear in our outer man as
yet. We bless Thee that we feel Thy hand making us. What if it be in
pain! Evermore we hear the voice of the potter above the hum and grind
of his wheel. Father, Thou only knowest how we love Thee. Fashion the
clay to Thy beautiful will. To the eyes of men we are vessels of
dishonor, but we know Thou dost not despise us, for Thou hast made us,
and Thou dwellest with us. Thou hast made us love Thee, and hope in
Thee, and in Thy love we will be brave and endure. All in good time, O
Lord. Amen."

While they thus prayed, kneeling on the stone floor of the little
kitchen, dark under the universal canopy of cloud, the rain went on
clashing and murmuring all around, rushing from the eaves, and
exploding with sharp hisses in the fire, and in the mingled noise they
had neither heard a low tap, several times repeated, nor the soft
opening of the door that followed. When they rose from their knees, it
was therefore with astonishment they saw a woman standing motionless in
the doorway, without cloak or bonnet, her dank garments clinging to her
form and dripping with rain.

When Juliet woke that morning, she cared little that the sky was dull
and the earth dark. A selfish sorrow, a selfish love even, makes us
stupid, and Juliet had been growing more and more stupid. Many people,
it seems to me, through sorrow endured perforce and without a gracious
submission, slowly sink in the scale of existence. Such are some of
those middle-aged women, who might be the very strength of social
well-being, but have no aspiration, and hope only downward--after rich
husbands for their daughters, it may be--a new bonnet or an old
coronet--the devil knows what.

Bad as the weather had been the day before, Dorothy had yet contrived to
visit her, and see that she was provided with every necessary; and
Juliet never doubted she would come that day also. She thought of
Dorothy's ministrations as we so often do of God's--as of things that
come of themselves, for which there is no occasion to be thankful.

When she had finished the other little house-work required for her
comfort, a labor in which she found some little respite from the
gnawings of memory and the blankness of anticipation, she ended by
making up a good fire, though without a thought of Dorothy's being wet
when she arrived, and sitting down by the window, stared out at the
pools, spreading wider and wider on the gravel walks beneath her. She
sat till she grew chilly, then rose and dropped into an easy chair by
the fire, and fell fast asleep.

She slept a long time, and woke in a terror, seeming to have waked
herself with a cry. The fire was out, and the hearth cold. She shivered
and drew her shawl about her. Then suddenly she remembered the frightful
dream she had had.

She dreamed that she had just fled from her husband and gained the park,
when, the moment she entered it, something seized her from behind, and
bore her swiftly, as in the arms of a man--only she seemed to hear the
rush of wings behind her--the way she had been going. She struggled in
terror, but in vain; the power bore her swiftly on, and she knew
whither. Her very being recoiled from the horrible depth of the
motionless pool, in which, as she now seemed to know, lived one of the
loathsome creatures of the semi-chaotic era of the world, which had
survived its kind as well as its coevals, and was ages older than the
human race. The pool appeared--but not as she had known it, for it
boiled and heaved, bubbled and rose. From its lowest depths it was moved
to meet and receive her! Coil upon coil it lifted itself into the air,
towering like a waterspout, then stretched out a long, writhing,
shivering neck to take her from the invisible arms that bore her to her
doom. The neck shot out a head, and the head shot out the tongue of a
water-snake. She shrieked and woke, bathed in terror.

With the memory of the dream not a little of its horror returned; she
rose to shake it off, and went to the window. What did she see there?
The fearsome pool had entered the garden, had come half-way to the
house, and was plainly rising every moment. More or less the pool had
haunted her ever since she came; she had seldom dared go nearer it than
half-way down the garden. But for the dulling influence of her misery,
it would have been an unendurable horror to her, now it was coming to
fetch her as she had seen it in her warning dream! Her brain reeled; for
a moment she gazed paralyzed with horror, then turned from the window,
and, with almost the conviction that the fiend of her vision was
pursuing her, fled from the house, and across the park, through the
sheets of rain, to the gate-lodge, nor stopped until, all unaware of
having once thought of him in her terror, she stood at the door of
Polwarth's cottage.

Ruth was darting toward her with outstretched hands, when her uncle
stopped her.

"Ruth, my child," he said, "run and light a fire in the parlor. I will
welcome our visitor."

She turned instantly, and left the room. Then Polwarth went up to
Juliet, who stood trembling, unable to utter a word, and said, with
perfect old-fashioned courtesy, "You are heartily welcome, ma'am. I sent
Ruth away that I might first assure you that you are as safe with her as
with me. Sit here a moment, ma'am. You are so wet, I dare not place you
nearer to the fire.--Ruth!"

She came instantly.

"Ruth," he repeated, "this lady is Mrs. Faber. She is come to visit us
for a while. Nobody must know of it.--You need not be at all uneasy,
Mrs. Faber. Not a soul will come near us to-day. But I will lock the
door, to secure time, if any one should.--You will get Mrs. Faber's room
ready at once, Ruth. I will come and help you. But a spoonful of brandy
in hot water first, please.--Let me move your chair a little, ma'am--out
of the draught."

Juliet in silence did every thing she was told, received the prescribed
antidote from Ruth, and was left alone in the kitchen.

But the moment she was freed from one dread, she was seized by another;
suspicion took the place of terror; and as soon as she heard the toiling
of the goblins up the creaking staircase, she crept to the foot of it
after them, and with no more compunction than a princess in a
fairy-tale, set herself to listen. It was not difficult, for the little
inclosed staircase carried every word to the bottom of it.

"I _thought_ she wasn't dead!" she heard Ruth exclaim joyfully; and the
words and tone set her wondering.

"I saw you did not seem greatly astonished at the sight of her; but what
made you think such an unlikely thing?" rejoined her uncle.

"I saw you did not believe she was dead. That was enough for me."

"You are a witch, Ruth! I never said a word one way or the other."

"Which showed that you were thinking, and made me think. You had
something in your mind which you did not choose to tell me yet."

"Ah, child!" rejoined her uncle, in a solemn tone, "how difficult it is
to hide any thing! I don't think God wants any thing hidden. The light
is His region, His kingdom, His palace-home. It can only be evil,
outside or in, that makes us turn from the fullest light of the
universe. Truly one must be born again to enter into the kingdom!"

Juliet heard every word, heard and was bewildered. The place in which
she had sought refuge was plainly little better than a kobold-cave, yet
merely from listening to the talk of the kobolds without half
understanding it, she had begun already to feel a sense of safety
stealing over her, such as she had never been for an instant aware of in
the Old House, even with Dorothy beside her.

They went on talking, and she went on listening. They were so much her
inferiors there could be no impropriety in doing so!

"The poor lady," she heard the man-goblin say, "has had some difference
with her husband; but whether she wants to hide from him or from the
whole world or from both, she only can tell. Our business is to take
care of her, and do for her what God may lay to our hand. What she
desires to hide, is sacred to us. We have no secrets of our own, Ruth,
and have the more room for those of other people who are unhappy enough
to have any. Let God reveal what He pleases: there are many who have no
right to know what they most desire to know. She needs nursing, poor
thing! We will pray to God for her."

"But how shall we make her comfortable in such a poor little house?"
returned Ruth. "It is the dearest place in the world to me--but how will
she feel in it?"

"We will keep her warm and clean," answered her uncle, "and that is all
an angel would require."

"An angel!--yes," answered Ruth: "for angels don't eat; or, at least, if
they do, for I doubt if you will grant that they don't, I am certain
that they are not so hard to please as some people down here. The poor,
dear lady is delicate--you know she has always been--and I am not much
of a cook."

"You are a very good cook, my dear. Perhaps you do not know a great many
dishes, but you are a dainty cook of those you do know. Few people can
have more need than we to be careful what they eat,--we have got such a
pair of troublesome cranky little bodies; and if you can suit them, I
feel sure you will be able to suit any invalid that is not fastidious by
nature rather than necessity."

"I will do my best," said Ruth cheerily, comforted by her uncle's
confidence. "The worst is that, for her own sake, I must not get a girl
to help me."

"The lady will help you with her own room," said Polwarth. "I have a
shrewd notion that it is only the _fine_ ladies, those that are so
little of ladies that they make so much of being ladies, who mind doing
things with their own hands. Now you must go and make her some tea,
while she gets in bed. She is sure to like tea best."

Juliet retreated noiselessly, and when the woman-gnome entered the
kitchen, there sat the disconsolate lady where she had left her, still
like the outcast princess of a fairy-tale: she had walked in at the
door, and they had immediately begun to arrange for her stay, and the
strangest thing to Juliet was that she hardly felt it strange. It was
only as if she had come a day sooner than she was expected--which
indeed was very much the case, for Polwarth had been looking forward to
the possibility, and latterly to the likelihood of her becoming their
guest.

"Your room is ready now," said Ruth, approaching her timidly, and
looking up at her with her woman's childlike face on the body of a
child. "Will you come?"

Juliet rose and followed her to the garret-room with the dormer window,
in which Ruth slept.

"Will you please get into bed as fast as you can," she said, "and when
you knock on the floor I will come and take away your clothes and get
them dried. Please to wrap this new blanket round you, lest the cold
sheets should give you a chill. They are well aired, though. I will
bring you a hot bottle, and some tea. Dinner will be ready soon."

So saying she left the chamber softly. The creak of the door as she
closed it, and the white curtains of the bed and window, reminded Juliet
of a certain room she once occupied at the house of an old nurse, where
she had been happier than ever since in all her life, until her brief
bliss with Faber: she burst into tears, and weeping undressed and got
into bed. There the dryness and the warmth and the sense of safety
soothed her speedily; and with the comfort crept in the happy thought
that here she lay on the very edge of the high road to Glaston, and that
nothing could be more probable than that she would soon see her husband
ride past. With that one hope she could sit at a window watching for
centuries! "O Paul! Paul! my Paul!" she moaned. "If I could but be made
clean again for you! I would willingly be burned at the stake, if the
fire would only make me clean, for the chance of seeing you again in the
other world!" But as the comfort into her brain, so the peace of her new
surroundings stole into her heart. The fancy grew upon her that she was
in a fairy-tale, in which she must take every thing as it came, for she
could not alter the text. Fear vanished; neither staring eyes nor
creeping pool could find her in the guardianship of the benevolent
goblins. She fell fast asleep; and the large, clear, gray eyes of the
little woman gnome came and looked at her as she slept, and their gaze
did not rouse her. Softly she went, and came again; but, although dinner
was then ready, Ruth knew better than to wake her. She knew that sleep
is the chief nourisher in life's feast, and would not withdraw the
sacred dish. Her uncle said sleep was God's contrivance for giving man
the help he could not get into him while he was awake. So the loving
gnomes had their dinner together, putting aside the best portions of it
against the waking of the beautiful lady lying fast asleep above.




CHAPTER XLIV.

THE CORNER OF THE BUTCHER'S SHOP.


All that same Sunday morning, the minister and Dorothy had of course
plenty of work to their hand, for their more immediate neighbors were
all of the poor. Their own house, although situated on the very bank of
the river, was in no worse plight than most of the houses in the town,
for it stood upon an artificial elevation; and before long, while it had
its lower parts full of water like the rest, its upper rooms were filled
with people from the lanes around. But Mr. Drake's heart was in the
Pottery, for he was anxious as to the sufficiency of his measures. Many
of the neighbors, driven from their homes, had betaken themselves to his
inclosure, and when he went, he found the salmon-fishers still carrying
families thither. He set out at once to get what bread he could from the
baker's, a quantity of meat from the butcher, cheese, coffee, and tins
of biscuits and preserved meat from the grocers: all within his bounds
were either his own people or his guests, and he must do what he could
to feed them. For the first time he felt rich, and heartily glad and
grateful that he was. He could please God, his neighbor, and himself all
at once, getting no end of good out of the slave of which the
unrighteous make a god.

He took Dorothy with him, for he would have felt helpless on such an
expedition without her judgment; and, as Lisbeth's hands were more than
full, they agreed it was better to take Amanda. Dorothy was far from
comfortable at having to leave Juliet alone all day, but the possibility
of her being compelled to omit her customary visit had been contemplated
between them, and she could not fail to understand it on this the first
occasion. Anyhow, better could not be, for the duty at home was far the
more pressing. That day she showed an energy which astonished even her
father. Nor did she fail of her reward. She received insights into
humanity which grew to real knowledge. I was going to say that, next to
an insight into the heart of God, an insight into the heart of a human
being is the most precious of things; but when I think of it--what is
the latter but the former? I will say this at least, that no one reads
the human heart well, to whom the reading reveals nothing of the heart
of the Father. The wire-gauze of sobering trouble over the flaming
flower of humanity, enabled Dorothy to see right down into its
fire-heart, and distinguish there the loveliest hues and shades. Where
the struggle for own life is in abeyance, and the struggle for other
life active, there the heart that God thought out and means to perfect,
the pure love-heart of His humans, reveals itself truly, and is gracious
to behold. For then the will of the individual sides divinely with his
divine impulse, and his heart is unified in good. When the will of the
man sides perfectly with the holy impulses in him, then all is well; for
then his mind is one with the mind of his Maker; God and man are one.

Amanda shrieked with delight when she was carried to the boat, and went
on shrieking as she floated over flower-beds and box-borders, caught now
and then in bushes and overhanging branches. But the great fierce
current, ridging the middle of the brown lake as it followed the tide
out to the ocean, frightened her a little. The features of the flat
country were all but obliterated; trees only and houses and corn-stacks
stood out of the water, while in the direction of the sea where were
only meadows, all indication of land had vanished; one wide, brown level
was everywhere, with a great rushing serpent of water in the middle of
it. Amanda clapped her little hands in ecstasy. Never was there such a
child for exuberance of joy! her aunt thought. Or, if there were others
as glad, where were any who let the light of their gladness so shine
before men, invading, conquering them as she did with the rush of her
joy! Dorothy held fast to the skirt of her frock, fearing every instant
the explosive creature would jump overboard in elemental sympathy. But,
poled carefully along by Mr. Drake, they reached in safety a certain old
shed, and getting in at the door of the loft where a cow-keeper stored
his hay and straw, through that descended into the heart of the Pottery,
which its owner was delighted to find--not indeed dry under foot with
such a rain falling, but free from lateral invasion.

His satisfaction, however, was of short duration. Dorothy went into one
of the nearer dwellings, and he was crossing an open space with Amanda,
to get help from a certain cottage in unloading the boat and
distributing its cargo, when he caught sight of a bubbling pool in the
middle of it. Alas! it was from a drain, whose covering had burst with
the pressure from within. He shouted for help. Out hurried men, women
and children on all sides. For a few moments he was entirely occupied in
giving orders, and let Amanda's hand go: every body knew her, and there
seemed no worse mischief within reach for her than dabbling in the
pools, to which she was still devoted.

Two or three spades were soon plying busily, to make the breach a little
wider, while men ran to bring clay and stones from one of the condemned
cottages. Suddenly arose a great cry, and the crowd scattered in all
directions. The wall of defense at the corner of the butcher's shop had
given away, and a torrent was galloping across the Pottery, straight for
the spot where the water was rising from the drain. Amanda, gazing in
wonder at the fight of the people about her, stood right in its course,
but took no heed of it, or never saw it coming. It caught her, swept her
away, and tumbled with her, foaming and roaring, into the deep
foundation of which I have spoken. Her father had just missed her, and
was looking a little anxiously round, when a shriek of horror and fear
burst from the people, and they rushed to the hole. Without a word
spoken he knew Amanda was in it. He darted through them, scattering men
and women in all directions, but pulling off his coat as he ran.

Though getting old, he was far from feeble, and had been a strong
swimmer in his youth. But he plunged heedlessly, and the torrent, still
falling some little height, caught him, and carried him almost to the
bottom. When he came to the top, he looked in vain for any sign of the
child. The crowd stood breathless on the brink. No one had seen her,
though all eyes were staring into the tumult. He dived, swam about
beneath, groping in the frightful opacity, but still in vain. Then down
through the water came a shout, and he shot to the surface--to see only
something white vanish. But the recoil of the torrent from below caught
her, and just as he was diving again, brought her up almost within
arm's-length of him. He darted to her, clasped her, and gained the
brink. He could not have got out, though the cavity was now brimful, but
ready hands had him in safety in a moment. Fifty arms were stretched to
take the child, but not even to Dorothy would he yield her. Ready to
fall at every step, he blundered through the water, which now spread
over the whole place, and followed by Dorothy in mute agony, was making
for the shed behind which lay his boat, when one of the salmon fishers,
who had brought his coble in at the gap, crossed them, and took them up.
Mr. Drake dropped into the bottom of the boat, with the child pressed to
his bosom. He could not speak.

"To Doctor Faber's! For the child's life!" said Dorothy, and the fisher
rowed like a madman.

Faber had just come in. He undressed the child with his own hands,
rubbed her dry, and did every thing to initiate respiration. For a long
time all seemed useless, but he persisted beyond the utmost verge of
hope. Mr. Drake and Dorothy stood in mute dismay. Neither was quite a
_child_ of God yet, and in the old man a rebellious spirit murmured: it
was hard that he should have evil for good! that his endeavors for his
people should be the loss of his child!

Faber was on the point of ceasing his efforts in utter despair, when he
thought he felt a slight motion of the diaphragm, and renewed them
eagerly. She began to breathe. Suddenly she opened her eyes, looked at
him for a moment, then with a smile closed them again. To the watchers
heaven itself seemed to open in that smile. But Faber dropped the tiny
form, started a pace backward from the bed, and stood staring aghast.
The next moment he threw the blankets over the child, turned away, and
almost staggered from the room. In his surgery he poured himself out a
glass of brandy, swallowed it neat, sat down and held his head in his
hands. An instant after, he was by the child's side again, feeling her
pulse, and rubbing her limbs under the blankets.

The minister's hands had turned blue, and he had begun to shiver, but a
smile of sweetest delight was on his face.

"God bless me!" cried the doctor, "you've got no coat on! and you are
drenched! I never saw any thing but the child!"

"He plunged into the horrible hole after her," said Dorothy. "How
wicked of me to forget him for any child under the sun! He got her out
all by himself, Mr. Faber!--Come home, father dear.--I will come back
and see to Amanda as soon as I have got him to bed."

"Yes, Dorothy; let us go," said the minister, and put his hand on her
shoulder. His teeth chattered and his hand shook.

The doctor rang the bell violently.

"Neither of you shall leave this house to-night.--Take a hot bath to the
spare bedroom, and remove the sheets," he said to the housekeeper, who
had answered the summons. "My dear sir," he went on, turning again to
the minister, "you must get into the blankets at once. How careless of
me! The child's life will be dear at the cost of yours."

"You have brought back the soul of the child to me, Mr. Faber," said the
minister, trembling, "and I can never thank you enough."

"There won't be much to thank me for, if you have to go instead.--Miss
Drake, while I give your father his bath, you must go with Mrs. Roberts,
and put on dry clothes. Then you will be able to nurse him."

As soon as Dorothy, whose garments Juliet had been wearing so long, was
dressed in some of hers, she went to her father's room. He was already
in bed, but it was long before they could get him warm. Then he grew
burning hot, and all night was talking in troubled dreams. Once Dorothy
heard him say, as if he had been talking to God face to face: "O my God,
if I had but once seen Thee, I do not think I could ever have mistrusted
Thee. But I could never be quite sure."

The morning brought lucidity. How many dawns a morning brings! His first
words were "How goes it with the child?" Having heard that she had had a
good night, and was almost well, he turned over, and fell fast asleep.
Then Dorothy, who had been by his bed all night, resumed her own
garments, and went to the door.




CHAPTER XLV.

HERE AND THERE.


The rain had ceased, and the flood was greatly diminished. It was
possible, she judged, to reach the Old House, and after a hasty
breakfast, she set out, leaving her father to Mrs. Roberts's care. The
flood left her no choice but go by the high road to Polwarth's gate, and
then she had often to wade through mud and water. The moment she saw the
gatekeeper, she knew somehow by his face that Juliet was in the lodge.
When she entered, she saw that already her new circumstances were
working upon her for peace. The spiritual atmosphere, so entirely human,
the sense that she was not and would not be alone, the strange talk
which they held openly before her, the food they coaxed her to eat, the
whole surrounding of thoughts and things as they should be, was
operating far more potently than could be measured by her understanding
of their effects, or even consciousness of their influences. She still
looked down upon the dwarfs, condescended to them, had a vague feeling
that she honored them by accepting their ministration--for which, one
day, she would requite them handsomely. Not the less had she all the
time a feeling that she was in the society of ministering spirits of
God, good and safe and true. From the Old House to the cottage was from
the Inferno to the Purgatorio, across whose borders faint wafts from
Paradise now and then strayed wandering. Without knowing it, she had
begun already to love the queer little woman, with the wretched body,
the fine head, and gentle, suffering face; while the indescribable awe,
into which her aversion to the kobold, with his pigeon-chest, his
wheezing breath, his great head, and his big, still face, which to such
eyes as the curate's seemed to be looking into both worlds at once, had
passed over, bore no unimportant part in that portion of her discipline
here commenced. One of the loftiest spirits of the middle earth, it was
long before she had quite ceased to regard him as a power of the nether
world, partly human, and at once something less and something more. Yet
even already she was beginning to feel at home with them! True, the
world in which they really lived was above her spiritual vision, as
beyond her intellectual comprehension, yet not the less was the air
around them the essential air of homeness; for the truths in which their
spirits lived and breathed, were the same which lie at the root of every
feeling of home-safety in the world, which make the bliss of the child
in his mother's bed, the bliss of young beasts in their nests, of birds
under their mother's wing. The love which inclosed her was far too great
for her--as the heaven of the mother's face is beyond the understanding
of the new-born child over whom she bends; but that mother's face is
nevertheless the child's joy and peace. She did not yet recognize it as
love, saw only the ministration; but it was what she sorely needed: she
said the sort of thing suited her, and at once began to fall in with it.
What it cost her entertainers, with organization as delicate as uncouth,
in the mere matter of bodily labor, she had not an idea--imagined indeed
that she gave them no trouble at all, because, having overheard the
conversation between them upon her arrival, she did herself a part of
the work required for her comfort in her own room. She never saw the
poor quarters to which Ruth for her sake had banished herself--never
perceived the fact that there was nothing good enough wherewith to repay
them except worshipful gratitude, love, admiration, and
submission--feelings she could not even have imagined possible in regard
to such inferiors.

And now Dorothy had not a little to say to Juliet about her husband. In
telling what had taken place, however, she had to hear many more
questions than she was able to answer.

"Does he really believe me dead, Dorothy?" was one of them.

"I do not believe there is one person in Glaston who knows what he
thinks," answered Dorothy. "I have not heard of his once opening his
mouth on the subject. He is just as silent now as he used to be ready to
talk."

"My poor Paul!" murmured Juliet, and hid her face and wept.

Indeed not a soul in Glaston or elsewhere knew a single thought he had.
Certain mysterious advertisements in the county paper were imagined by
some to be his and to refer to his wife. Some, as the body had never
been seen, did begin to doubt whether she was dead. Some, on the other
hand, hinted that her husband had himself made away with her--for, they
argued, what could be easier to a doctor, and why, else, did he make no
search for the body? To Dorothy this supposed fact seemed to indicate a
belief that she was not dead--perhaps a hope that she would sooner
betray herself if he manifested no anxiety to find her. But she said
nothing of this to Juliet.

Her news of him was the more acceptable to the famished heart of the
wife, that, from his great kindness to them all, and especially from the
perseverance which had restored to them their little Amanda, Dorothy's
heart had so warmed toward him, that she could not help speaking of him
in a tone far more agreeable to Juliet than hitherto she had been able
to use. His pale, worn look, and the tokens of trouble throughout his
demeanor, all more evident upon nearer approach, had also wrought upon
her; and she so described his care, anxiety, and tenderness over Amanda,
that Juliet became jealous of the child, as she would have been of any
dog she saw him caress. When all was told, and she was weary of asking
questions to which there were no answers, she fell back in her chair
with a sigh: alas, she was no nearer to him for the hearing of her ears!
While she lived she was open to his scorn, and deserved it the more that
she had _seemed_ to die! She must die; for then at last a little love
would revive in his heart, ere he died too and followed her nowhither.
Only first she must leave him his child to plead for her:--she used
sometimes to catch herself praying that the infant might be like her.

"Look at my jacket!" said Dorothy. It was one of Juliet's, and she hoped
to make her smile.

"Did Paul see you with my clothes on?" she said angrily.

Dorothy started with the pang of hurt that shot through her. But the
compassionate smile on the face of Polwarth, who had just entered, and
had heard the last article of the conversation, at once set her right.
For not only was he capable of immediate sympathy with emotion, but of
revealing at once that he understood its cause. Ruth, who had come into
the room behind him, second only to her uncle in the insight of love,
followed his look by asking Dorothy if she might go to the Old House, as
soon as the weather permitted, to fetch some clothes for Mrs. Faber, who
had brought nothing with her but what she wore; whereupon Dorothy,
partly for leisure to fight her temper, said she would go herself, and
went. But when she returned, she gave the bag to Ruth at the door, and
went away without seeing Juliet again. She was getting tired of her
selfishness, she said to herself. Dorothy was not herself yet perfect in
love--which beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things,
endureth all things.

Faber too had been up all night--by the bedside of the little Amanda.
She scarcely needed such close attendance, for she slept soundly, and
was hardly at all feverish. Four or five times in the course of the
night, he turned down the bed-clothes to examine her body, as if he
feared some injury not hitherto apparent. Of such there was no sign.

In his youth he had occupied himself much with comparative anatomy and
physiology. His predilection for these studies had greatly sharpened his
observation, and he noted many things that escaped the eyes of better
than ordinary observers. Amongst other kinds of things to which he kept
his eyes open, he was very quick at noting instances of the strange
persistency with which Nature perpetuates minute peculiarities, carrying
them on from generation to generation. Occupied with Amanda, a certain
imperfection in one of the curves of the outer ear attracted his
attention. It is as rare to see a perfect ear as to see a perfect form,
and the varieties of unfinished curves are many; but this imperfection
was very peculiar. At the same time it was so slight, that not even the
eye of a lover, none save that of a man of science, alive to minutest
indications, would probably have seen it. The sight of it startled Faber
not a little; it was the second instance of the peculiarity that had
come to his knowledge. It gave him a new idea to go upon, and when the
child suddenly opened her eyes, he saw another face looking at him out
of hers. The idea then haunted him; and whether it was that it
assimilated facts to itself, or that the signs were present, further
search afforded what was to him confirmation of the initiatory
suspicion.

Notwithstanding the state of feebleness in which he found Mr. Drake the
next morning, he pressed him with question upon question, amounting to a
thorough cross-examination concerning Amanda's history, undeterred by
the fact that, whether itself merely bored, or its nature annoyed him,
his patient plainly disrelished his catechising. It was a subject which,
as his love to the child increased, had grown less and less agreeable to
Mr. Drake: she was to him so entirely his own that he had not the least
desire to find out any thing about her, to learn a single fact or hear a
single conjecture to remind him that she was not in every sense as well
as the best, his own daughter. He was therefore not a little annoyed at
the persistency of the doctor's questioning, but, being a courteous man,
and under endless obligation to him for the very child's sake as well as
his own, he combated disinclination, and with success, acquainting the
doctor with every point he knew concerning Amanda. Then first the doctor
grew capable of giving his attention to the minister himself; whose son
if he had been, he could hardly have shown him greater devotion. A whole
week passed before he would allow him to go home. Dorothy waited upon
him, and Amanda ran about the house. The doctor and she had been friends
from the first, and now, when he was at home, there was never any doubt
where Amanda was to be found.

The same day on which the Drakes left him, Faber started by the
night-train for London, and was absent three days.

Amanda was now perfectly well, but Mr. Drake continued poorly. Dorothy
was anxious to get him away from the river-side, and proposed putting
the workmen into the Old House at once. To this he readily consented,
but would not listen to her suggestion that in the meantime he should go
to some watering-place. He would be quite well in a day or two, and
there was no rest for him, he said, until the work so sadly bungled was
properly done. He did not believe his plans were defective, and could
not help doubting whether they had been faithfully carried out. But the
builder, a man of honest repute, protested also that he could not
account for the yielding of the wall, except he had had the mishap to
build over some deep drain, or old well, which was not likely, so close
to the river. He offered to put it up again at his own expense, when
perhaps they might discover the cause of the catastrophe.

Sundry opinions and more than one rumor were current among the
neighbors. At last they were mostly divided into two parties, the one
professing the conviction that the butcher, who was known to have some
grudge at the minister, had, under the testudo-shelter of his
slaughter-house, undermined the wall; the other indignantly asserting
that the absurdity had no foundation except in the evil thoughts of
churchmen toward dissenters, being in fact a wicked slander. When the
suggestion reached the minister's ears, he, knowing the butcher, and
believing the builder, was inclined to institute investigations; but as
such a course was not likely to lead the butcher to repentance, he
resolved instead to consult with him how his premises might be included
in the defense. The butcher chuckled with conscious success, and for
some months always chuckled when sharpening his knife; but by and by the
coals of fire began to scorch, and went on scorching--the more that Mr.
Drake very soon became his landlord, and voluntarily gave him several
advantages. But he gave strict orders that there should be no dealings
with him. It was one thing, he said, to be good to the sinner, and
another to pass by his fault without confession, treating it like a mere
personal affair which might be forgotten. Before the butcher died, there
was not a man who knew him who did not believe he had undermined the
wall. He left a will assigning all his property to trustees, for the
building of a new chapel, but when his affairs came to be looked into,
there was hardly enough to pay his debts.

The minister was now subject to a sort of ague, to which he paid far too
little heed. When Dorothy was not immediately looking after him, he
would slip out in any weather to see how things were going on in the
Pottery. It was no wonder, therefore, that his health did not improve.
But he could not be induced to regard his condition as at all serious.




CHAPTER XLVI.

THE MINISTER'S STUDY.


Helen was in the way of now and then writing music to any song that
specially took her fancy--not with foolish hankering after publication,
but for the pleasure of brooding in melody upon the words, and singing
them to her husband. One day he brought her a few stanzas, by an unknown
poet, which, he said, seemed to have in them a slightly new element.
They pleased her more than him, and began at once to sing themselves. No
sooner was her husband out of the room than she sat down to her piano
with them. Before the evening, she had written to them an air with a
simple accompaniment. When she now sung the verses to him, he told her,
to her immense delight, that he understood and liked them far better.
The next morning, having carried out one or two little suggestions he
had made, she was singing them by herself in the drawing-room, when
Faber, to whom she had sent because one of her servants was ill,
entered. He made a sign begging her to continue, and she finished the
song.

"Will you let me see the words," he said.

She handed them to him. He read them, laid down the manuscript, and,
requesting to be taken to his patient, turned to the door. Perhaps he
thought she had laid a music-snare for him.

The verses were these:

  A YEAR SONG.

    Sighing above,
      Rustling below,
    Through the woods
      The winds go.
    Beneath, dead crowds;
      Above, life bare;
    And the besom winds
      Sweep the air.
  _Heart, leave thy woe;
  Let the dead things go._

    Through the brown leaves
      Gold stars push;
    A mist of green
      Veils the bush.
    Here a twitter,
      There a croak!
    They are coming--
      The spring-folk!
  _Heart, be not dumb;
  Let the live things come._

    Through the beach
      The winds go,
    With a long speech,
      Loud and slow.
    The grass is fine,
      And soft to lie in;
    The sun doth shine
      The blue sky in.
  _Heart, be alive;
  Let the new things thrive._

    Round again!
      Here now--
    A rimy fruit
      On a bare bough!
    There the winter
      And the snow;
    And a sighing ever
      To fall and go!
  _Heart, thy hour shall be;
  Thy dead will comfort thee._

Faber was still folded in the atmosphere of the song when, from the
curate's door, he arrived at the minister's, resolved to make that
morning a certain disclosure--one he would gladly have avoided, but felt
bound in honor to make. The minister grew pale as he listened, but held
his peace. Not until the point came at which he found himself personally
concerned, did he utter a syllable.

I will in my own words give the substance of the doctor's communication,
stating the facts a little more fairly to him than his pride would allow
him to put them in his narrative.

Paul Faber was a student of St. Bartholomew's, and during some time held
there the office of assistant house-surgeon. Soon after his appointment,
he being then three and twenty, a young woman was taken into one of the
wards, in whom he gradually grew much interested. Her complaint caused
her much suffering, but was more tedious than dangerous.

Attracted by her sweet looks, but more by her patience, and the
gratitude with which she received the attention shown her, he began to
talk to her a little, especially during a slight operation that had to
be not unfrequently performed. Then he came to giving her books to read,
and was often charmed with the truth and simplicity of the remarks she
would make. She had been earning her living as a clerk, had no friends
in London, and therefore no place to betake herself to in her illness
but the hospital. The day she left it, in the simplicity of her heart,
and with much timidity, she gave him a chain she had made for him of her
hair. On the ground of supplementary attention, partly desirable, partly
a pretext, but unassociated with any evil intent, he visited her after
in her lodging. The joy of her face, the light of her eyes when he
appeared, was enchanting to him. She pleased every gentle element of his
nature; her worship flattered him, her confidence bewitched him. His
feelings toward her were such that he never doubted he was her friend.
He did her no end of kindness; taught her much; gave her good advice as
to her behavior, and the dangers she was in; would have protected her
from every enemy, real and imaginary, while all the time, undesignedly,
he was depriving her of the very nerve of self-defense. He still gave
her books--and good books--Carlyle even, and Tennyson; read poetry with
her, and taught her to read aloud; went to her chapel with her sometimes
of a Sunday evening--for he was then, so he said, and so he imagined, a
thorough believer in revelation. He took her to the theater, to
pictures, to concerts, taking every care of her health, her manners, her
principles. But one enemy he forgot to guard her against: how is a man
to protect even the woman he loves from the hidden god of his
idolatry--his own grand contemptible self?

It is needless to set the foot of narration upon every step of the
slow-descending stair. With all his tender feelings and generous love of
his kind, Paul Faber had not yet learned the simplest lesson of
humanity--that he who would not be a murderer, must be his brother's
keeper--still more his sister's, protecting every woman first of all
from himself--from every untruth in him, chiefly from every unhallowed
approach of his lower nature, from every thing that calls itself love
and is but its black shadow, its demon ever murmuring _I love_, that it
may devour. The priceless reward of such honesty is the power to love
better; but let no man insult his nature by imagining himself noble for
so carrying himself. As soon let him think himself noble that he is no
swindler. Doubtless Faber said to himself as well as to her, and said it
yet oftener when the recoil of his selfishness struck upon the door of
his conscience and roused Don Worm, that he would be true to her
forever. But what did he mean by the words? Did he know? Had they any
sense of which he would not have been ashamed even before the girl
herself? Would such truth as he contemplated make of him her
hiding-place from the wind, her covert from the tempest? He never even
thought whether to marry her or not, never vowed even in his heart not
to marry another. All he could have said was, that at the time he had no
intention of marrying another, and that he had the intention of keeping
her for himself indefinitely, which may be all the notion some people
have of _eternally_. But things went well with them, and they seemed to
themselves, notwithstanding the tears shed by one of them in secret,
only the better for the relation between them.

At length a child was born. The heart of a woman is indeed infinite, but
time, her presence, her thoughts, her hands are finite: she could not
_seem_ so much a lover as before, because she must be a mother now: God
only can think of two things at once. In his enduring selfishness, Faber
felt the child come between them, and reproached her neglect, as he
called it. She answered him gently and reasonably; but now his bonds
began to weary him. She saw it, and in the misery of the waste vision
opening before her eyes, her temper, till now sweet as devoted, began to
change. And yet, while she loved her child the more passionately that
she loved her forebodingly, almost with the love of a woman already
forsaken, she was nearly mad sometimes with her own heart, that she
could not give herself so utterly as before to her idol.

It took but one interview after he had confessed it to himself, to
reveal the fact to her that she had grown a burden to him. He came a
little seldomer, and by degrees which seemed to her terribly rapid, more
and more seldom. He had never recognized duty in his relation to her. I
do not mean that he had not done the effects of duty toward her; love
had as yet prevented the necessity of appeal to the stern daughter of
God. But what love with which our humanity is acquainted can keep
healthy without calling in the aid of Duty? Perfect Love is the mother
of all duties and all virtues, and needs not be admonished of her
children; but not until Love is perfected, may she, casting out Fear,
forget also Duty. And hence are the conditions of such a relation
altogether incongruous. For the moment the man, not yet debased, admits
a thought of duty, he is aware that far more is demanded of him than,
even for the sake of purest right, he has either the courage or the
conscience to yield. But even now Faber had not the most distant
intention of forsaking her; only why should he let her burden him, and
make his life miserable? There were other pleasures besides the company
of the most childishly devoted of women: why should he not take them?
Why should he give all his leisure to one who gave more than the half of
it to her baby?

He had money of his own, and, never extravagant upon himself, was more
liberal to the poor girl than ever she desired. But there was nothing
mercenary in her. She was far more incapable of turpitude than he, for
she was of a higher nature, and loved much where he loved only a little.
She was nobler, sweetly prouder than he. She had sacrificed all to him
for love--could accept nothing from him without the love which alone is
the soul of any gift, alone makes it rich. She would not, could not see
him unhappy. In her fine generosity, struggling to be strong, she said
to herself, that, after all, she would leave him richer than she was
before--richer than he was now. He would not want the child he had given
her; she would, and she could, live for her, upon the memory of two
years of such love as, comforting herself in sad womanly pride, she
flattered herself woman had seldom enjoyed. She would not throw the past
from her because the weather of time had changed; she would not mar
every fair memory with the inky sponge of her present loss. She would
turn her back upon her sun ere he set quite, and carry with her into the
darkness the last gorgeous glow of his departure. While she had his
child, should she never see him again, there remained a bond between
them--a bond that could never be broken. He and she met in that child's
life--her being was the eternal fact of their unity.

Both she and he had to learn that there was yet a closer bond between
them, necessary indeed to the fact that a child _could_ be born of them,
namely, that they two had issued from the one perfect Heart of love. And
every heart of perplexed man, although, too much for itself, it can not
conceive how the thing should be, has to learn that there, in that heart
whence it came, lies for it restoration, consolation, content. Herein, O
God, lies a task for Thy perfection, for the might of Thy
imagination--which needs but Thy will (and Thy suffering?) to be
creation!

One evening when he paid her a visit after the absence of a week, he
found her charmingly dressed, and merry, but in a strange fashion which
he could not understand. The baby, she said, was down stairs with the
landlady, and she free for her Paul. She read to him, she sang to him,
she bewitched him afresh with the graces he had helped to develop in
her. He said to himself when he left her that surely never was there a
more gracious creature--and she was utterly his own! It was the last
flicker of the dying light--the gorgeous sunset she had resolved to
carry with her in her memory forever. When he sought her again the next
evening, he found her landlady in tears. She had vanished, taking with
her nothing but her child, and her child's garments. The gown she had
worn the night before hung in her bedroom--every thing but what she must
then be wearing was left behind. The woman wept, spoke of her with
genuine affection, and said she had paid every thing. To his questioning
she answered that they had gone away in a cab: she had called it, but
knew neither the man nor his number. Persuading himself she had but gone
to see some friend, he settled himself in her rooms to await her return,
but a week rightly served to consume his hope. The iron entered into his
soul, and for a time tortured him. He wept--but consoled himself that he
wept, for it proved to himself that he was not heartless. He comforted
himself further in the thought that she knew where to find him and that
when trouble came upon her, she would remember how good he had been to
her, and what a return she had made for it. Because he would not give up
every thing to her, liberty and all, she had left him! And in revenge,
having so long neglected him for the child, she had for the last once
roused in her every power of enchantment, had brought her every charm
into play, that she might lastingly bewitch him with the old spell, and
the undying memory of their first bliss--then left him to his lonely
misery! She had done what she could for the ruin of a man of education,
a man of family, a man on the way to distinction!--a man of genius, he
said even, but he was such only as every man is: he was a man of latent
genius.

But verily, though our sympathy goes all with a woman like her, such a
man, however little he deserves, and however much he would scorn it, is
far more an object of pity. She has her love, has not been false
thereto, and one day will through suffering find the path to the door of
rest. When she left him, her soul was endlessly richer than his. The
music, of which he said she knew nothing, in her soul moved a deep wave,
while it blew but a sparkling ripple on his; the poetry they read
together echoed in a far profounder depth of her being, and I do not
believe she came to loathe it as he did; and when she read of Him who
reasoned that the sins of a certain woman must have been forgiven her,
else how could she love so much, she may well have been able, from the
depth of such another loving heart, to believe utterly in Him--while we
know that her poor, shrunken lover came to think it manly, honest,
reasonable, meritorious to deny Him.

Weeks, months, years passed, but she never sought him; and he so far
forgot her by ceasing to think of her, that at length, when a chance
bubble did rise from the drowned memory, it broke instantly and
vanished. As to the child, he had almost forgotten whether _it_ was a
boy or a girl.

But since, in his new desolation, he discovered her, beyond a doubt, in
the little Amanda, old memories had been crowding back upon his heart,
and he had begun to perceive how Amanda's mother must have felt when she
saw his love decaying visibly before her, and to suspect that it was in
the self-immolation of love that she had left him. His own character had
been hitherto so uniformly pervaded with a refined selfishness as to
afford no standpoint of a different soil, whence by contrast to
recognize the true nature of the rest; but now it began to reveal itself
to his conscious judgment. And at last it struck him that twice he had
been left--by women whom he loved--at least by women who loved him. Two
women had trusted him utterly, and he had failed them both! Next
followed the thought stinging him to the heart, that the former was the
purer of the two; that the one on whom he had looked down because of her
lack of education, and her familiarity with humble things and simple
forms of life, knew nothing of what men count evil, while she in whom he
had worshiped refinement, intellect, culture, beauty, song--she who, in
love-teachableness had received his doctrine against all the prejudices
of her education, was--what she had confessed herself!

But, against all reason and logic, the result of this comparison was,
that Juliet returned fresh to his imagination in all the first witchery
of her loveliness; and presently he found himself for the first time
making excuses for her; if she had deceived him she had deceived him
from love; whatever her past, she had been true to him, and was, from
the moment she loved him, incapable of wrong.--He had cast her from him,
and she had sought refuge in the arms of the only rival he ever would
have had to fear--the bare-ribbed Death!

Naturally followed the reflection--what was he to demand purity of any
woman?--Had he not accepted--yes, tempted, enticed from the woman who
preceded her, the sacrifice of one of the wings of her soul on the altar
of his selfishness! then driven her from him, thus maimed and helpless,
to the mercy of the rude blasts of the world! She, not he ever, had been
the noble one, the bountiful giver, the victim of shameless ingratitude.
Flattering himself that misery would drive her back to him, he had not
made a single effort to find her, or mourned that he could never make up
to her for the wrongs he had done her. He had not even hoped for a
future in which he might humble himself before her! What room was there
here to talk of honor! If she had not sunk to the streets it was through
her own virtue, and none of his care! And now she was dead! and his
child, but for the charity of a despised superstition, would have been
left an outcast in the London streets, to wither into the old-faced
weakling of a London workhouse!




CHAPTER XLVII.

THE BLOWING OF THE WIND.


Smaller and smaller Faber felt as he pursued his plain, courageous
confession of wrong to the man whose life was even now in peril for the
sake of his neglected child. When he concluded with the expression of
his conviction that Amanda was his daughter, then first the old minister
spoke. His love had made him guess what was coming, and he was on his
guard.

"May I ask what is your object in making this statement to me, Mr.
Faber?" he said coldly.

"I am conscious of none but to confess the truth, and perform any duty
that may be mine in consequence of the discovery," said the doctor.

"Do you wish this truth published to the people of Glaston?" inquired
the minister, in the same icy tone.

"I have no such desire: but I am of course prepared to confess Amanda my
child, and to make you what amends may be possible for the trouble and
expense she has occasioned you."

"Trouble! Expense!" cried the minister fiercely. "Do you mean in your
cold-blooded heart, that, because you, who have no claim to the child
but that of self-indulgence--because you believe her yours, I who have
for years carried her in my bosom, am going to give her up to a man,
who, all these years, has made not one effort to discover his missing
child? In the sight of God, which of us is her father? But I forget;
that is a question you can not understand. Whether or not you are her
father, I do not care a straw. You have not _proved_ it; and I tell you
that, until the court of chancery orders me to deliver up my darling to
you, to be taught there is no living Father of men--and that by the
fittest of all men to enforce the lie--not until then will I yield a
hair of her head to you. God grant, if you were her father, her mother
had more part in her than you!--A thousand times rather I would we had
both perished in the roaring mud, than that I should have to give her up
to you."

He struck his fist on the table, rose, and turned from him. Faber also
rose, quietly, silent and pale. He stood a moment, waiting. Mr. Drake
turned. Faber made him an obeisance, and left the room.

The minister was too hard upon him. He would not have been so hard but
for his atheism; he would not have been so hard if he could have seen
into his soul. But Faber felt he deserved it. Ere he reached home,
however, he had begun to think it rather hard that, when a man confessed
a wrong, and desired to make what reparation he could, he should have
the very candor of his confession thus thrown in his teeth. Verily, even
toward the righteous among men, candor is a perilous duty.

He entered the surgery. There he had been making some experiments with
peroxide of manganese, a solution of which stood in a bottle on the
table. A ray of brilliant sunlight was upon it, casting its shadow on a
piece of white paper, a glorious red. It caught his eyes. He could never
tell what it had to do with the current of his thoughts, but neither
could he afterward get rid of the feeling that it had had some influence
upon it. For as he looked at it, scarcely knowing he did, and thinking
still how hard the minister had been upon him, suddenly he found himself
in the minister's place, and before him Juliet making her sad
confession: how had he met that confession? The whole scene returned,
and for the first time struck him right on the heart, and then first he
began to be in reality humbled in his own eyes. What if, after all, he
was but a poor creature? What if, instead of having any thing to be
proud of, he was in reality one who, before any jury of men or women
called to judge him, must hide his head in shame?

The thought once allowed to enter and remain long enough to be
questioned, never more went far from him. For a time he walked in the
midst of a dull cloud, first of dread, then of dismay--a cloud from
which came thunders, and lightnings, and rain. It passed, and a
doubtful dawn rose dim and scared upon his consciousness, a dawn in
which the sun did not appear, and on which followed a gray, solemn day.
A humbler regard of himself had taken the place of confidence and
satisfaction. An undefined hunger, far from understood by himself, but
having vaguely for its object clearance and atonement and personal
purity even, had begun to grow, and move within him. The thought stung
him with keen self-contempt, yet think he must and did, that a woman
might be spotted not a little, and yet be good enough for him in the
eyes of retributive justice. He saw plainly that his treatment of his
wife, knowing what he did of himself, was a far worse shame than any
fault of which a girl, such as Juliet was at the time, could have been
guilty. And with that, for all that he believed it utterly in vain, his
longing after the love he had lost, grew and grew, ever passing over
into sickening despair, and then springing afresh; he longed for Juliet
as she had prayed to him--as the only power that could make him clean;
it seemed somehow as if she could even help him in his repentance for
the wrong done to Amanda's mother. The pride of the Pharisee was gone,
the dignity of the husband had vanished, and his soul longed after the
love that covers a multitude of sins, as the air in which alone his
spirit could breathe and live and find room. I set it down briefly: the
change passed upon him by many degrees, with countless alternations of
mood and feeling, and without the smallest conscious change of opinion.

The rest of the day after receiving Faber's communication, poor Mr.
Drake roamed about like one on the verge of insanity, struggling to
retain lawful dominion over his thoughts. At times he was lost in
apprehensive melancholy, at times roused to such fierce anger that he
had to restrain himself from audible malediction. The following day
Dorothy would have sent for Faber, for he had a worse attack of the
fever than ever before, but he declared that the man should never again
cross his threshold. Dorothy concluded there had been a fresh outbreak
between them of the old volcano. He grew worse and worse, and did not
object to her sending for Dr. Mather; but he did not do him much good.
He was in a very critical state, and Dorothy was miserable about him.
The fever was persistent, and the cough which he had had ever since the
day that brought his illness, grew worse. His friends would gladly have
prevailed upon him to seek a warmer climate, but he would not hear of
it.

Upon one occasion, Dorothy, encouraged by the presence of Dr. Mather,
was entreating him afresh to go somewhere from home for a while.

"No, no: what would become of my money?" he answered, with a smile which
Dorothy understood. The doctor imagined it the speech of a man whom
previous poverty and suddenly supervening wealth had made penurious.

"Oh!" he remarked reassuringly, "you need not spend a penny more abroad
than you do at home. The difference in the living would, in some places,
quite make up for the expense of the journey."

The minister looked bewildered for a moment, then seemed to find
himself, smiled again, and replied--

"You do not quite understand me: I have a great deal of money to spend,
and it ought to be spent here in England where it was made--God knows
how."

"You may get help to spend it in England, without throwing your life
away with it," said the doctor, who could not help thinking of his own
large family.

"Yes, I dare say I might--from many--but it was given _me_ to spend--in
destroying injustice, in doing to men as others ought to have done to
them. My preaching was such a poor affair that it is taken from me, and
a lower calling given me--to spend money. If I do not well with that,
then indeed I am a lost man. If I be not faithful in that which is
another's, who will give me that which is my own? If I can not further
the coming of Christ, I can at least make a road or two, exalt a valley
or two, to prepare His way before Him."

Thereupon it was the doctor's turn to smile. All that was to him as if
spoken in a language unknown, except that he recognized the religious
tone in it. "The man is true to his profession," he said to himself,
"--as he ought to be of course; but catch me spending _my_ money that
way, if I had but a hold of it!"

His father died soon after, and he got a hold of the money he called
_his_, whereupon he parted with his practice, and by idleness and
self-indulgence, knowing all the time what he was about, brought on an
infirmity which no skill could cure, and is now a grumbling invalid, at
one or another of the German spas. I mention it partly because many
preferred this man to Faber on the ground that he went to church every
Sunday, and always shook his head at the other's atheism.

Faber wrote a kind, respectful letter, somewhat injured in tone, to the
minister, saying he was much concerned to hear that he was not so well,
and expressing his apprehension that he himself had been in some measure
the cause of his relapse. He begged leave to assure him that he
perfectly recognized the absolute superiority of Mr. Drake's claim to
the child. He had never dreamed of asserting any right in her, except so
much as was implied in the acknowledgment of his duty to restore the
expense which his wrong and neglect had caused her true father; beyond
that he well knew he could make no return save in gratitude; but if he
might, for the very partial easing of his conscience, be permitted to
supply the means of the child's education, he was ready to sign an
agreement that all else connected with it should be left entirely to Mr.
Drake. He begged to be allowed to see her sometimes, for, long ere a
suspicion had crossed his mind that she was his, the child was already
dear to him. He was certain that her mother would have much preferred
Mr. Drake's influence to his own, and for her sake also, he would be
careful to disturb nothing. But he hoped Mr. Drake would remember that,
however unworthy, he was still her father.

The minister was touched by the letter, moved also in the hope that an
arrow from the quiver of truth had found in the doctor a vulnerable
spot. He answered that he should be welcome to see the child when he
would; and that she should go to him when he pleased. He must promise,
however, as the honest man every body knew him to be, not to teach her
there was no God, or lead her to despise the instructions she received
at home.

The word _honest_ was to Faber like a blow. He had come to the painful
conclusion that he was neither honest man nor gentleman. Doubtless he
would have knocked any one down who told him so, but then who had the
right to take with him the liberties of a conscience? Pure love only, I
suspect, can do that without wrong. He would not try less to be honest
in the time to come, but he had never been, and could no more ever feel
honest. It did not matter much. What was there worth any effort? All was
flat and miserable--a hideous long life! What did it matter what he was,
so long as he hurt nobody any more! He was tired of it all.

It added greatly to his despondency that he found he could no longer
trust his temper. That the cause might be purely physical was no
consolation to him. He had been accustomed to depend on his
imperturbability, and now he could scarcely recall the feeling of the
mental condition. He did not suspect how much the change was owing to
his new-gained insight into his character, and the haunting
dissatisfaction it caused.

To the minister he replied that he had been learning a good deal of
late, and among other things that the casting away of superstition did
not necessarily do much for the development of the moral nature; in
consequence of which discovery, he did not feel bound as before to
propagate the negative portions of his creed. If its denials were true,
he no longer believed them powerful for good; and merely as facts he did
not see that a man was required to disseminate them. Even here, however,
his opinion must go for little, seeing he had ceased to care much for
any thing, true or false. Life was no longer of any value to him, except
indeed he could be of service to Amanda. Mr. Drake might be assured she
was the last person on whom he would wish to bring to bear any of the
opinions so objectionable in his eyes. He would make him the most
comprehensive promise to that effect. Would Mr. Drake allow him to say
one thing more?--He was heartily ashamed of his past history; and if
there was one thing to make him wish there were a God--of which he saw
no chance--it was that he might beg of Him the power to make up for the
wrongs he had done, even if it should require an eternity of atonement.
Until he could hope for that, he must sincerely hold that his was the
better belief, as well as the likelier--namely, that the wronger and the
wronged went into darkness, friendly with oblivion, joy and sorrow alike
forgotten, there to bid adieu both to reproach and self-contempt. For
himself he had no desire after prolonged existence. Why should he desire
to live a day, not to say forever--worth nothing to himself, or to any
one? If there were a God, he would rather entreat Him, and that he would
do humbly enough, to unmake him again. Certainly, if there were a God,
He had not done over well by His creatures, making them so ignorant and
feeble that they could not fail to fall. Would Mr. Drake have made his
Amanda so?

When Wingfold read the letter of which I have thus given the
substance--it was not until a long time after, in Polwarth's room--he
folded it softly together and said:

"When he wrote that letter, Paul Faber was already becoming not merely a
man to love, but a man to revere." After a pause he added, "But what a
world it would be, filled with contented men, all capable of doing the
things for which they would despise themselves."

It was some time before the minister was able to answer the letter
except by sending Amanda at once to the doctor with a message of kind
regards and thanks. But his inability to reply was quite as much from
the letter's giving him so much to think of first, as from his weakness
and fever. For he saw that to preach, as it was commonly understood, the
doctrine of the forgiveness of sins to such a man, would be useless: he
would rather believe in a God who would punish them, than in One who
would pass them by. To be told he was forgiven, would but rouse in him
contemptuous indignation. "What is that to me?" he would return. "I
remain what I am." Then grew up in the mind of the minister the
following plant of thought: "Things divine can only be shadowed in the
human; what is in man must be understood of God with the divine
difference--not only of degree, but of kind, involved in the fact that
He makes me, I can make nothing, and if I could, should yet be no less a
creature of Him the Creator; therefore, as the heavens are higher than
the earth, so His thoughts are higher than our thoughts, and what we
call His forgiveness may be, must be something altogether transcending
the conception of man--overwhelming to such need as even that of Paul
Faber, whose soul has begun to hunger after righteousness, and whose
hunger must be a hunger that will not easily be satisfied." For a poor
nature will for a time be satisfied with a middling God; but as the
nature grows richer, the ideal of the God desired grows greater. The
true man can be satisfied only with a God of magnificence, never with a
God such as in his childhood and youth had been presented to Faber as
the God of the Bible. That God only whom Christ reveals to the humble
seeker, can ever satisfy human soul.

Then it came into the minister's mind, thinking over Faber's religion
toward his fellows, and his lack toward God, how when the young man
asked Jesus what commandments he must keep up that he might inherit
eternal life, Jesus did not say a word concerning those of the first
table--not a word, that is, about his duty toward God; He spoke only of
his duty toward man. Then it struck him that our Lord gave him no sketch
or summary or part of a religious system--only told him what he asked,
the practical steps by which he might begin to climb toward eternal
life. One thing he lacked--namely, God Himself, but as to how God would
meet him, Jesus says nothing, but Himself meets him on those steps with
the offer of God. He treats the duties of the second table as a stair to
the first--a stair which, probably by its crumbling away in failure
beneath his feet as he ascended, would lift him to such a vision and
such a horror of final frustration, as would make him stretch forth his
hands, like the sinking Peter, to the living God, the life eternal which
he blindly sought, without whose closest presence he could never do the
simplest duty aright, even of those he had been doing from his youth up.
His measure of success, and his sense of utter failure, would together
lift him _toward_ the One Good.

Thus, looking out upon truth from the cave of his brother's need, and
seeing the direction in which the shadow of his atheism fell, the
minister learned in what direction the clouded light lay, and turning
his gaze thitherward, learned much. It is only the aged who have dropped
thinking that become stupid. Such can learn no more, until first their
young nurse Death has taken off their clothes, and put the old babies to
bed. Of such was not Walter Drake. Certain of his formerly petted
doctrines he now threw away as worse than rubbish; others he dropped
with indifference; of some it was as if the angels picked his pockets
without his knowing it, or ever missing them; and still he found,
whatever so-called doctrine he parted with, that the one glowing truth
which had lain at the heart of it, buried, mired, obscured, not only
remained with him, but shone out fresh, restored to itself by the loss
of the clay-lump of worldly figures and phrases, in which the human
intellect had inclosed it. His faith was elevated, and so confirmed.




CHAPTER XLVIII.

THE BORDER-LAND.


Mr. Drew, the draper, was, of all his friends, the one who most
frequently visited his old pastor. He had been the first, although a
deacon of the church, in part to forsake his ministry, and join the
worship of, as he honestly believed, a less scriptural community,
because in the abbey church he heard better news of God and His Kingdom:
to him rightly the gospel was every thing, and this church or that, save
for its sake, less than nothing and vanity. It had hurt Mr. Drake not a
little at first, but he found Drew in consequence only the more warmly
his personal friend, and since learning to know Wingfold, had heartily
justified his defection; and now that he was laid up, he missed
something any day that passed without a visit from the draper. One
evening Drew found him very poorly, though neither the doctor nor
Dorothy could prevail upon him to go to bed. He could not rest, but kept
walking about, his eye feverish, his pulse fluttering. He welcomed his
friend even more warmly than usual, and made him sit by the fire, while
he paced the room, turning and turning, like a caged animal that fain
would be king of infinite space.

"I am sorry to see you so uncomfortable," said Mr. Drew.

"On the contrary, I feel uncommonly well," replied the pastor. "I always
measure my health by my power of thinking; and to-night my thoughts are
like birds--or like bees rather, that keep flying in delight from one
lovely blossom to another. Only the fear keeps intruding that an hour
may be at hand, when my soul will be dark, and it will seem as if the
Lord had forsaken me."

"But does not _our daily bread_ mean our spiritual as well as our bodily
bread?" said the draper. "Is it not just as wrong in respect of the one
as of the other to distrust God for to-morrow when you have enough for
to-day? Is He a God of times and seasons, of this and that, or is He the
All in all?"

"You are right, old friend," said the minister, and ceasing his walk, he
sat down by the fire opposite him. "I am faithless still.--O Father in
Heaven, give us this day our daily bread.--I suspect, Drew, that I have
had as yet no more than the shadow of an idea how immediately I--we live
upon the Father.--I will tell you something. I had been thinking what it
would be if God were now to try me with heavenly poverty, as for a short
time he tried me with earthly poverty--that is, if he were to stint me
of life itself--not give me enough of Himself to live upon--enough to
make existence feel a good. The fancy grew to a fear, laid hold upon me,
and made me miserable. Suppose, for instance, I said to myself, I were
no more to have any larger visitation of thoughts and hopes and
aspirations than old Mrs. Bloxam, who sits from morning to night with
the same stocking on her needles, and absolutely the same expression, of
as near nothing as may be upon human countenance, nor changes whoever
speaks to her!"

"She says the Lord is with her," suggested the draper.

"Well!" rejoined the minister, in a slow, cogitative tone.

"And plainly life is to her worth having," added the draper. "Clearly
she has as much of life as is necessary to her present stage."

"You are right. I have been saying just the same things to myself; and,
I trust, when the Lord comes, He will not find me without faith. But
just suppose life _were_ to grow altogether uninteresting! Suppose
certain moods--such as you, with all your good spirits and blessed
temper, must surely sometimes have experienced--suppose they were to
become fixed, and life to seem utterly dull, God nowhere, and your own
dreary self, and nothing but that self, everywhere!"

"Let me read you a chapter of St. John," said the draper.

"Presently I will. But I am not in the right mood just this moment. Let
me tell you first how I came by my present mood. Don't mistake me: I am
not possessed by the idea--I am only trying to understand its nature,
and set a trap fit to catch it, if it should creep into my inner
premises, and from an idea swell to a seeming fact.--Well, I had a
strange kind of a vision last night--no, not a vision--yes, a kind of
vision--anyhow a very strange experience. I don't know whether the
draught the doctor gave me--I wish I had poor Faber back--this fellow is
fitter to doctor oxen and mules than men!--I don't know whether the
draught had any thing to do with it--I thought I tasted something sleepy
in it--anyhow, thought is thought, and truth is truth, whatever drug, no
less than whatever joy or sorrow, may have been midwife to it. The
first I remember of the mental experience, whatever it may have to be
called, is, that I was coming awake--returning to myself after some
period wherein consciousness had been quiescent. Of place, or time, or
circumstance, I knew nothing. I was only growing aware of being. I
speculated upon nothing. I did not even say to myself, 'I was dead, and
now I am coming alive.' I only felt. And I had but one feeling--and that
feeling was love--the outgoing of a longing heart toward--I could not
tell what;--toward--I can not describe the feeling--toward the only
existence there was, and that was every thing;--toward pure being, not
as an abstraction, but as the one actual fact, whence the world, men,
and me--a something I knew only by being myself an existence. It was
more me than myself; yet it was not me, or I could not have loved it. I
never thought me myself by myself; my very existence was the
consciousness of this absolute existence in and through and around me:
it made my heart burn, and the burning of my heart was my life--and the
burning was the presence of the Absolute. If you can imagine a growing
fruit, all blind and deaf, yet loving the tree it could neither look
upon nor hear, knowing it only through the unbroken arrival of its life
therefrom--that is something like what I felt. I suspect the _form_ of
the feeling was supplied by a shadowy memory of the time before I was
born, while yet my life grew upon the life of my mother.

"By degrees came a change. What seemed the fire in me, burned and burned
until it began to grow light; in which light I began to remember things
I had read and known about Jesus Christ and His Father and my Father.
And with those memories the love grew and grew, till I could hardly bear
the glory of God and His Christ, it made me love so intensely. Then the
light seemed to begin to pass out beyond me somehow, and therewith I
remembered the words of the Lord, 'Let your light so shine before men,'
only I was not letting it shine, for while I loved like that, I could no
more keep it from shining than I could the sun. The next thing was, that
I began to think of one I had loved, then of another and another and
another--then of all together whom ever I had loved, one after another,
then all together. And the light that went out from me was as a nimbus
infolding every one in the speechlessness of my love. But lo! then, the
light staid not there, but, leaving them not, went on beyond them,
reaching and infolding every one of those also, whom, after the manner
of men, I had on earth merely known and not loved. And therewith I knew
that, for all the rest of the creation of God, I needed but the hearing
of the ears or the seeing of the eyes to love each and every one, in his
and her degree; whereupon such a perfection of bliss awoke in me, that
it seemed as if the fire of the divine sacrifice had at length seized
upon my soul, and I was dying of absolute glory--which is love and love
only. I had all things, yea the All. I was full and unutterably,
immeasurably content. Yet still the light went flowing out and out from
me, and love was life and life was light and light was love. On and on
it flowed, until at last it grew eyes to me, and I could see. Lo! before
me was the multitude of the brothers and sisters whom I
loved--individually--a many, many--not a mass;--I loved every individual
with that special, peculiar kind of love which alone belonged to that
one, and to that one alone. The sight dazzled the eyes which love itself
had opened. I said to myself, 'Ah, how radiant, how lovely, how divine
they are! and they are mine, every one--the many, for I love them!'

"Then suddenly came a whisper--not to my ear--I heard it far away, but
whether in some distant cave of thought, away beyond the flaming walls
of the universe, or in some forgotten dungeon-corner of my own heart, I
could not tell. 'O man,' it said, 'what a being, what a life is thine!
See all these souls, these fires of life, regarding and loving thee! It
is in the glory of thy love their faces shine. Their hearts receive it,
and send it back in joy. Seest thou not all their eyes fixed upon thine?
Seest thou not the light come and go upon their faces, as the pulses of
thy heart flow and ebb? See, now they flash, and now they fade! Blessed
art thou, O man, as none else in the universe of God is blessed!'

"It was, or seemed, only a voice. But therewith, horrible to tell, the
glow of another fire arose in me--an orange and red fire, and it went
out from me, and withered all the faces, and the next moment there was
darkness--all was black as night. But my being was still awake--only if
then there was bliss, now was there the absolute blackness of darkness,
the positive negation of bliss, the recoil of self to devour itself, and
forever. The consciousness of being was intense, but in all the universe
was there nothing to enter that being, and make it other than an
absolute loneliness. It was, and forever, a loveless, careless,
hopeless monotony of self-knowing--a hell with but one demon, and no
fire to make it cry: my self was the hell, my known self the demon of
it--a hell of which I could not find the walls, cold and dark and empty,
and I longed for a flame that I might know there was a God. Somehow I
only remembered God as a word, however; I knew nothing of my whence or
whither. One time there might have been a God, but there was none now:
if there ever was one, He must be dead. Certainly there was no God to
love--for if there was a God, how could the creature whose very essence
was to him an evil, love the Creator of him? I had the word _love_, and
I could reason about it in my mind, but I could not call up the memory
of what the feeling of it was like. The blackness grew and grew. I hated
life fiercely. I hated the very possibility of a God who had created me
a blot, a blackness. With that I felt blackness begin to go out from me,
as the light had gone before--not that I remembered the light; I had
forgotten all about it, and remembered it only after I awoke. Then came
the words of the Lord to me: 'If therefore the light that is in thee be
darkness, how great is that darkness!' And I knew what was coming: oh,
horror! in a moment more I should see the faces of those I had once
loved, dark with the blackness that went out from my very existence;
then I should hate them, and my being would then be a hell to which the
hell I now was would be a heaven! There was just grace enough left in me
for the hideousness of the terror to wake me. I was cold as if I had
been dipped in a well. But oh, how I thanked God that I was what I am,
and might yet hope after what I may be!"

The minister's face was pale as the horse that grew gray when Death
mounted him; and his eyes shone with a feverous brilliancy. The draper
breathed a deep breath, and rubbed his white forehead. The minister rose
and began again to pace the room. Drew would have taken his departure,
but feared leaving him in such a state. He bethought himself of
something that might help to calm him, and took out his pocket-book. The
minister's dream had moved him deeply, but he restrained himself all he
could from manifesting his emotion.

"Your vision," he said, "reminds me of some verses of Mr. Wingfold's, of
which Mrs. Wingfold very kindly let me take a copy. I have them here in
my pocket-book; may I read them to you?"

The minister gave rather a listless consent, but that was enough for
Mr. Drew's object, and he read the following poem.

  SHALL THE DEAD PRAISE THEE?

  I can not praise Thee. By his instrument
    The organ-master sits, nor moves a hand;
  For see the organ pipes o'erthrown and bent,
    Twisted and broke, like corn-stalks tempest-fanned!

  I well could praise Thee for a flower, a dove;
    But not for life that is not life in me;
  Not for a being that is less than love--
    A barren shoal half-lifted from a sea,

  And for the land whence no wind bloweth ships,
    And all my living dead ones thither blown--
  Rather I'd kiss no more their precious lips,
    Than carry them a heart so poor and prone.

  Yet I do bless Thee Thou art what Thou art,
    That Thou dost know Thyself what Thou dost know--
  A perfect, simple, tender, rhythmic heart,
    Beating Thy blood to all in bounteous flow.

  And I can bless Thee too for every smart,
    For every disappointment, ache, and fear;
  For every hook Thou fixest in my heart,
    For every burning cord that draws me near.

  But prayer these wake, not song. Thyself I crave.
    Come Thou, or all Thy gifts away I fling.
  Thou silent, I am but an empty grave;
    Think to me, Father, and I am a king.

  Then, like the wind-stirred bones, my pipes shall quake,
    The air burst, as from burning house the blaze;
  And swift contending harmonies shall shake
    Thy windows with a storm of jubilant praise.

  Thee praised, I haste me humble to my own--
    Then love not shame shall bow me at their feet,
  Then first and only to my stature grown,
    Fulfilled of love, a servant all-complete.

At first the minister seemed scarcely to listen, as he sat with closed
eyes and knitted brows, but gradually the wrinkles disappeared like
ripples, an expression of repose supervened, and when the draper lifted
his eyes at the close of his reading, there was a smile of quiet
satisfaction on the now aged-looking countenance. As he did not open his
eyes, Drew crept softly from the room, saying to Dorothy as he left the
house, that she _must_ get him to bed as soon as possible. She went to
him, and now found no difficulty in persuading him. But something, she
could not tell what, in his appearance, alarmed her, and she sent for
the doctor. He was not at home, and had expected to be out all night.
She sat by his bedside for hours, but at last, as he was quietly asleep,
ventured to lay herself on a couch in the room. There she too fell fast
asleep, and slept till morning, undisturbed.

When she went to his bedside, she found him breathing softly, and
thought him still asleep. But he opened his eyes, looked at her for a
moment fixedly, and then said:

"Dorothy, child of my heart! things may be very different from what we
have been taught, or what we may of ourselves desire; but every
difference will be the step of an ascending stair--each nearer and
nearer to the divine perfection which alone can satisfy the children of
a God, alone supply the poorest of their cravings."

She stooped and kissed his hand, then hastened to get him some food.

When she returned, he was gone up the stair of her future, leaving
behind him, like a last message that all was well, the loveliest smile
frozen upon a face of peace. The past had laid hold upon his body; he
was free in the Eternal. Dorothy was left standing at the top of the
stair of the present.




CHAPTER XLIX.

EMPTY HOUSES.


The desolation that seized on Dorothy seemed at first overwhelming.
There was no refuge for her. The child's tears, questions, and outbreaks
of merriment were but a trouble to her. Even Wingfold and Helen could do
little for her. Sorrow was her sole companion, her sole _comfort_ for a
time against the dreariness of life. Then came something better. As her
father's form receded from her, his spirit drew nigh. I mean no phantom
out of Hades--no consciousness of local presence: such things may be--I
think _sometimes_ they are; but I would rather know my friend better
through his death, than only be aware of his presence about me; that
will one day follow--how much the more precious that the absence will
have doubled its revelations, its nearness! To Dorothy her father's
character, especially as developed in his later struggles after
righteousness--the root-righteousness of God, opened itself up day by
day. She saw him combating his faults, dejected by his failures,
encouraged by his successes; and he grew to her the dearer for his
faults, as she perceived more plainly how little he had sided, how hard
he had fought with them. The very imperfections he repudiated gathered
him honor in the eyes of her love, sowed seeds of perennial tenderness
in her heart. She saw how, in those last days, he had been overcoming
the world with accelerated victory, and growing more and more of the
real father that no man can be until he has attained to the sonship. The
marvel is that our children are so tender and so trusting to the slow
developing father in us. The truth and faith which the great Father has
put in the heart of the child, makes him the nursing father of the
fatherhood in his father; and thus in part it is, that the children of
men will come at last to know the great Father. The family, with all its
powers for the development of society, is a family because it is born
and rooted in, and grows out of the very bosom of God. Gabriel told
Zacharias that his son John, to make ready a people prepared for the
Lord, should turn the hearts of the fathers to the children.

Few griefs can be so paralyzing as, for a time, that of a true daughter
upon the departure, which at first she feels as the loss, of a true
parent; but through the rifts of such heartbreaks the light of love
shines clearer, and where love is, there is eternity: one day He who is
the Householder of the universe, will begin to bring out of its treasury
all the good old things, as well as the better new ones. How true must
be the bliss up to which the intense realities of such sorrows are
needful to force the way for the faithless heart and feeble will! Lord,
like Thy people of old, we need yet the background of the thunder-cloud
against which to behold Thee; but one day the only darkness around Thy
dwelling will be the too much of Thy brightness. For Thou art the
perfection which every heart sighs toward, no mind can attain unto. If
Thou wast One whom created mind could embrace, Thou wouldst be too small
for those whom Thou hast made in Thine own image, the infinite creatures
that seek their God, a Being to love and know infinitely. For the
created to know perfectly would be to be damned forever in the nutshell
of the finite. He who is His own cause, alone can understand perfectly
and remain infinite, for that which is known and that which knows are in
Him the same infinitude.

Faber came to see Dorothy--solemn, sad, kind. He made no attempt at
condolence, did not speak a word of comfort; but he talked of the old
man, revealing for him a deep respect; and her heart was touched, and
turned itself toward him. Some change, she thought, must have passed
upon him. Her father had told her nothing of his relation to Amanda. It
would have to be done some day, but he shrunk from it. She could not
help suspecting there was more between Faber and him than she had at
first imagined; but there was in her a healthy contentment with
ignorance, and she asked no questions. Neither did Faber make any
attempt to find out whether she knew what had passed; even about Amanda
and any possible change in her future he was listless. He had never been
a man of plans, and had no room for any now under the rubbish of a
collapsed life. His days were gloomy and his nights troubled. He dreamed
constantly either of Amanda's mother, or of Juliet--sometimes of both
together, and of endless perplexity between them. Sometimes he woke
weeping. He did not now despise his tears, for they flowed neither from
suffering nor self-pity, but from love and sorrow and repentance. A
question of the possibility of his wife's being yet alive would
occasionally occur to him, but he always cast the thought from him as a
folly in which he dared not indulge lest it should grow upon him and
unman him altogether. Better she were dead than suffering what his
cruelty might have driven her to: he had weakened her self-respect by
insult, and then driven her out helpless.

People said he took the loss of his wife coolly; but the fact was that,
in every quiet way, he had been doing all man could do to obtain what
information concerning her there might possibly be to be had. Naturally
he would have his proceedings as little as possible in the public mouth;
and to employ the police or the newspapers in such a quest was too
horrible. But he had made inquiries in all directions. He had put a
question or two to Polwarth, but at that time he _knew_ nothing of her,
and did not feel bound to disclose his suspicions. Not knowing to what
it might not expose her, he would not betray the refuge of a woman with
a woman. Faber learned what every body had learned, and for a time was
haunted by the horrible expectation of further news from the lake. Every
knock at the door made him start and turn pale. But the body had not
floated, and would not now.

We have seen that, in the light thrown upon her fault from the revived
memory of his own, a reaction had set in: the tide of it grew fiercer as
it ran. He had deposed her idol--the God who she believed could pardon,
and the bare belief in whom certainly could comfort her; he had taken
the place with her of that imaginary, yet, for some, necessary being;
but when, in the agony of repentant shame, she looked to him for the
pardon he alone could give her, he had turned from her with loathing,
contempt, and insult! He was the one in the whole-earth, who, by saying
to her _Let it be forgotten_, could have lifted her into life and hope!
She had trusted in him, and he, an idol indeed, had crumbled in the
clinging arms of her faith! Had she not confessed to him what else he
would never have known, humbling herself in a very ecstasy of
repentance? Was it not an honor to any husband to have been so trusted
by his wife? And had he not from very scorn refused to strike her! Was
she not a woman still? a being before whom a man, when he can no longer
worship, must weep? Could _any_ fault, ten times worse than she had
committed, make her that she was no woman? that he, merely as a man,
owed her nothing? Her fault was grievous; it stung him to the soul: what
then was it not to her? Not now for his own shame merely, or the most,
did he lament it, but for the pity of it, that the lovely creature
should not be clean, had not deserved his adoration; that she was not
the ideal woman; that a glory had vanished from the earth; that she he
had loved was not in herself worthy. What then must be her sadness! And
this was his--the man's--response to her agony, this his balm for her
woe, his chivalry, his manhood--to dash her from him, and do his potent
part to fix forever upon her the stain which he bemoaned! Stained? Why
then did he not open his arms wide and take her, poor sad stain and all,
to the bosom of a love which, by the very agony of its own grief and
its pity over hers, would have burned her clean? What did it matter for
him? What was he? What was his honor? Had he had any, what fitter use
for honor than to sacrifice it for the redemption of a wife? That would
be to honor honor. But he had none. There was not a stone on the face of
the earth that would consent to be thrown at her by him!

Ah men! men! gentlemen! was there ever such a poor sneaking scarecrow of
an idol as that gaping straw-stuffed inanity you worship, and call
_honor_? It is not Honor; it is but _your_ honor. It is neither gold,
nor silver, nor honest copper, but a vile, worthless pinchbeck. It may
be, however, for I have not the honor to belong to any of your clubs,
that you no longer insult the word by using it at all. It may be you
have deposed it, and enthroned another word of less significance to you
still. But what the recognized slang of the day may be is
nothing--therefore unnecessary to what I have to say--which is, that the
man is a wretched ape who will utter a word about a woman's virtue, when
in himself, soul and body, there is not a clean spot; when his body
nothing but the furnace of the grave, his soul nothing but the eternal
fire can purify. For him is many a harlot far too good: she is yet
capable of devotion; she would, like her sisters of old, recognize the
Holy if she saw Him, while he would pass by his Maker with a rude stare,
or the dullness of the brute which he has so assiduously cultivated in
him.

By degrees Faber grew thoroughly disgusted with himself, then heartily
ashamed. Were it possible for me to give every finest shade and
gradation of the change he underwent, there would be still an
unrepresented mystery which I had not compassed. But were my analysis
correct as fact itself, and my showing of it as exact as words could
make it, never a man on whom some such change had not at least begun to
pass, would find in it any revelation. He ceased altogether to vaunt his
denials, not that now he had discarded them, but simply because he no
longer delighted in them. They were not interesting to him any more. He
grew yet paler and thinner. He ate little and slept ill--and the waking
hours of the night were hours of torture. He was out of health, and he
knew it, but that did not comfort him. It was wrong and its misery that
had made him ill, not illness that had made him miserable. Was he a
weakling, a fool not to let the past be the past? "Things without all
remedy should be without regard: what's done is done." But not every
strong man who has buried his murdered in his own garden, and set up no
stone over them, can forget where they lie. It needs something that is
not strength to be capable of that. The dead alone can bury their dead
so; and there is a bemoaning that may help to raise the dead. But
sometimes such dead come alive unbemoaned. Oblivion is not a tomb strong
enough to keep them down. The time may come when a man will find his
past but a cenotaph, and its dead all walking and making his present
night hideous. And when such dead walk so, it is a poor chance they do
not turn out vampires.

When she had buried her dead out of her sight, Dorothy sought solitude
and the things unseen more than ever. The Wingfolds were like swallows
about her, never folding their wings of ministry, but not haunting her
with bodily visitation. She never refused to see them, but they
understood: the hour was not yet when their presence would be a comfort
to her. The only comfort the heart can take must come--not from, but
through itself. Day after day she would go into the park, avoiding the
lodge, and there brood on the memories of her father and his late words.
And ere long she began to feel nearer to him than she had ever felt
while he was with her. For, where the outward sign has been understood,
the withdrawing of it will bring the inward fact yet nearer. When our
Lord said the spirit of Himself would come to them after He was gone, He
but promised the working of one of the laws of His Father's kingdom: it
was about to operate in loftiest grade.

Most people find the first of a bereavement more tolerable than what
follows. They find in its fever a support. When the wound in the earth
is closed, and the wave of life has again rushed over it, when things
have returned to their wonted, now desiccated show, then the very Sahara
of desolation opens around them, and for a time existence seems almost
insupportable. With Dorothy it was different. Alive in herself, she was
hungering and thirsting after life, therefore death could not have
dominion over her.

To her surprise she found also--she could not tell how the illumination
had come--she wondered even how it should ever have been absent--that,
since her father's death, many of her difficulties had vanished. Some of
them, remembering there had been such, she could hardly recall
sufficiently to recognize them. She had been lifted into a region above
that wherein moved the questions which had then disturbed her peace.
From a point of clear vision, she saw the things themselves so
different, that those questions were no longer relevant. The things
themselves misconceived, naturally no satisfaction can be got from
meditation upon them, or from answers sought to the questions they
suggest. If it be objected that she had no better ground for believing
than before, I answer that, if a man should be drawing life from the
heart of God, it could matter little though he were unable to give a
satisfactory account of the mode of its derivation. That the man lives
is enough. That another denies the existence of any such life save in
the man's self-fooled imagination, is nothing to the man who lives it.
His business is not to raise the dead, but to live--not to convince the
blind that there is such a faculty as sight, but to make good use of his
eyes. He may not have an answer to any one objection raised by the
adopted children of Science--their adopted mother raises none--to that
which he believes; but there is no more need that should trouble
him, than that a child should doubt his bliss at his mother's breast,
because he can not give the chemical composition of the milk he draws:
that in the thing which is the root of the bliss, is rather beyond
chemistry. Is a man not blessed in his honesty, being unable to reason
of the first grounds of property? If there be truth, that truth must be
itself--must exercise its own blessing nature upon the soul which
receives it in loyal understanding--that is, in obedience. A man may
accept no end of things as facts which are not facts, and his mistakes
will not hurt him. He may be unable to receive many facts as facts, and
neither they nor his refusal of them will hurt him. He may not a whit
the less be living in and by the truth. He may be quite unable to answer
the doubts of another, but if, in the progress of his life, those doubts
should present themselves to his own soul, then will he be able to meet
them: he is in the region where all true answers are gathered. He may be
unable to receive this or that embodiment or form of truth, not having
yet grown to its level; but it is no matter so long as when he sees a
truth he does it: to see and not do would at once place him in eternal
danger. Hence a man of ordinary intellect and little imagination, may
yet be so radiant in nobility as, to the true poet-heart, to be right
worshipful. There is in the man who does the truth the radiance of life
essential, eternal--a glory infinitely beyond any that can belong to the
intellect, beyond any that can ever come within its scope to be judged,
proven, or denied by it. Through experiences doubtful even to the soul
in which they pass, the life may yet be flowing in. To know God is to be
in the secret place of all knowledge; and to trust Him changes the
atmosphere surrounding mystery and seeming contradiction, from one of
pain and fear to one of hope: the unknown may be some lovely truth in
store for us, which yet we are not good enough to apprehend. A man may
dream all night that he is awake, and when he does wake, be none the
less sure that he is awake in that he thought so all the night when he
was not; but he will find himself no more able to prove it than he would
have been then, only able to talk better about it. The differing
consciousnesses of the two conditions can not be _produced_ in evidence,
or embodied in forms of the understanding. But my main point is this,
that not to be intellectually certain of a truth, does not prevent the
heart that loves and obeys that truth from getting its truth-good, from
drawing life from its holy _factness_, present in the love of it.

As yet Dorothy had no plans, except to carry out those of her father,
and, mainly for Juliet's sake, to remove to the old house as soon as
ever the work there was completed. But the repairs and alterations were
of some extent, and took months. Nor was she desirous of shortening
Juliet's sojourn with the Polwarths: the longer that lasted with safety,
the better for Juliet, and herself too, she thought.

On Christmas eve, the curate gave his wife a little poem. Helen showed
it to Dorothy, and Dorothy to Juliet. By this time she had had some
genuine teaching--far more than she recognized as such, and the
spiritual song was not altogether without influence upon her. Here it
is:

  THAT HOLY THING.

  They all were looking for a king
    To slay their foes, and lift them high:
  Thou cam'st a little baby thing
    That made a woman cry.

  O Son of Man, to right my lot
    Naught but Thy presence can avail;
  Yet on the road Thy wheels are not,
    Nor on the sea Thy sail.

  My how or when Thou wilt not heed,
    But come down Thine own secret stair,
  That Thou mayst answer all my need,
    Yea, every by-gone prayer.




CHAPTER L.

FALLOW FIELDS.


The spring was bursting in bud and leaf before the workmen were out of
the Old House. The very next day, Dorothy commenced her removal. Every
stick of the old furniture she carried with her; every book of her
father's she placed on the shelves of the library he had designed. But
she took care not to seem neglectful of Juliet, never failing to carry
her the report of her husband as often as she saw him. It was to Juliet
like an odor from Paradise making her weep, when Dorothy said that he
looked sad--"so different from his old self!"

One day Dorothy ventured, hardly to hint, but to approach a hint of
mediation. Juliet rose indignant: no one, were he an angel from Heaven,
should interfere between her husband and her! If they could not come
together without that, there should be a mediator, but not such as
Dorothy meant!

"No, Dorothy!" she resumed, after a rather prolonged silence; "the very
word _mediation_ would imply a gulf between us that could not be passed.
But I have one petition to make to you, Dorothy. You _will_ be with me
in my trouble--won't you?"

"Certainly, Juliet--please God, I will."

"Then promise me, if I can't get through--if I am going to die, that you
will bring him to me. I _must_ see my Paul once again before the
darkness."

"Wouldn't that be rather unkind--rather selfish?" returned Dorothy.

She had been growing more and more pitiful of Paul.

Juliet burst into tears, called Dorothy cruel, said she meant to kill
her. How was she to face it but in the hope of death? and how was she to
face death but in the hope of seeing Paul once again for the last time?
She was certain she was going to die; she knew it! and if Dorothy would
not promise, she was not going to wait for such a death!

"But there will be a doctor," said Dorothy, "and how am I----"

Juliet interrupted her--not with tears but words of indignation: Did
Dorothy dare imagine she would allow any man but her Paul to come near
her? Did she? Could she? What did she think of her? But of course she
was prejudiced against her! It was too cruel!

The moment she could get in a word, Dorothy begged her to say what she
wished.

"You do not imagine, Juliet," she said, "that I could take such a
responsibility on myself!"

"I have thought it all over," answered Juliet. "There are women properly
qualified, and you must find one. When she says I am dying,--when she
gets frightened, you will send for my husband? Promise me."

"Juliet, I will," answered Dorothy, and Juliet was satisfied.

But notwithstanding her behavior's continuing so much the same, a
change, undivined by herself as well as unsuspected by her friend, had
begun to pass upon Juliet. Every change must begin further back than the
observation of man can reach--in regions, probably, of which we have no
knowledge. To the eyes of his own wife, a man may seem in the gall of
bitterness and the bond of iniquity, when "larger, other eyes than ours"
may be watching with delight the germ of righteousness swell within the
inclosing husk of evil. Sooner might the man of science detect the first
moment of actinic impact, and the simultaneously following change in the
hitherto slumbering acorn, than the watcher of humanity make himself
aware of the first movement of repentance. The influences now for some
time operative upon her, were the more powerful that she neither
suspected nor could avoid them. She had a vague notion that she was kind
to her host and hostess; that she was patronizing them; that her friend
Dorothy, with whom she would afterwards arrange the matter, filled their
hands for her use; that, in fact, they derived benefit from her
presence;--and surely they did, although not as she supposed. The only
benefits they reaped were invaluable ones--such as spring from love and
righteousness and neighborhood. She little thought how she interfered
with the simple pleasures and comforts of the two; how many a visit of
friends, whose talk was a holy revelry of thought and utterance,
Polwarth warded, to avoid the least danger of her discovery; how often
fear for her shook the delicate frame of Ruth; how often her host left
some book unbought, that he might procure instead some thing to tempt
her to eat; how often her hostess turned faint in cooking for her. The
crooked creatures pitied, as well they might, the lovely lady; they
believed that Christ was in her; that the deepest in her was the nature
He had made--His own, and not that which she had gathered to
herself--and thought her own. For the sake of the Christ hidden in her,
her own deepest, best, purest self; that she might be lifted from the
dust-heap of the life she had for herself ruined, into the clear air of
a pure will and the Divine Presence, they counted their best labor most
fitly spent. It is the human we love in each other--and the human is the
Christ. What we do not love is the devilish--no more the human than the
morrow's wormy mass was the manna of God. To be for the Christ in a man,
is the highest love you can give him; for in the unfolding alone of that
Christ can the individuality, the genuine peculiarity of the man, the
man himself, be perfected--the flower of his nature be developed, in its
own distinct loveliness, beauty, splendor, and brought to its idea.

The main channel through which the influences of the gnomes reached the
princess, was their absolute simplicity. They spoke and acted what was
in them. Through this open utterance, their daily, common righteousness
revealed itself--their gentleness, their love of all things living,
their care of each other, their acceptance as the will of God concerning
them of whatever came, their general satisfaction with things as they
were--though it must in regard to some of them have been in the hope
that they would soon pass away, for one of the things Juliet least could
fail to observe was their suffering patience. They always spoke as if
they felt where their words were going--as if they were hearing them
arrive--as if the mind they addressed were a bright silver table on
which they must not set down even the cup of the water of life roughly:
it must make no scratch, no jar, no sound beyond a faint sweet
salutation. Pain had taught them not sensitiveness but delicacy. A
hundred are sensitive for one that is delicate. Sensitiveness is a
miserable, a cheap thing in itself, but invaluable if it be used for the
nurture of delicacy. They refused to receive offense, their care was to
give none. The burning spot in the center of that distorted spine, which
ought to have lifted Ruth up to a lovely woman, but had failed and sunk,
and ever after ached bitterly as if with defeat, had made her pitiful
over the pains of humanity: she could bear it, for there was something
in her deeper than pain; but alas for those who were not thus upheld!
Her agony drove her to pray for the whole human race, exposed to like
passion with her. The asthmatic choking which so often made Polwarth's
nights a long misery, taught him sympathy with all prisoners and
captives, chiefly with those bound in the bonds of an evil conscience:
to such he held himself specially devoted. They thought little of
bearing pain: to know they had caused it would have been torture. Each,
graciously uncomplaining, was tender over the ailing of the other.

Juliet had not been long with them before she found the garments she had
in her fancy made for them, did not fit them, and she had to devise,
afresh. They were not gnomes, kobolds, goblins, or dwarfs, but a prince
and princess of sweet nobility, who had loved each other in beauty and
strength, and knew that they were each crushed in the shell of a cruel
and mendacious enchantment. How they served each other! The uncle would
just as readily help the niece with her saucepans, as the niece would
help the uncle to find a passage in Shakespeare or a stanza in George
Herbert. And to hear them talk!

For some time Juliet did not understand them, and did not try. She had
not an idea what they were talking about. Then she began to imagine they
must be weak in the brain--a thing not unlikely with such spines as
theirs--and had silly secrets with each other, like children, which they
enjoyed talking about chiefly because none could understand but
themselves. Then she came to fancy it was herself and her affairs they
were talking about, deliberating upon--in some mental if not lingual
gibberish of their own. By and by it began to disclose itself to her,
that the wretched creatures, to mask their misery from themselves, were
actually playing at the kingdom of Heaven, speaking and judging and
concluding of things of this world by quite other laws, other scales,
other weights and measures than those in use in it. Every thing was
turned topsy-turvy in this their game of make-believe. Their religion
was their chief end and interest, and their work their play, as lightly
followed as diligently. What she counted their fancies, they seemed to
count their business; their fancies ran over upon their labor, and made
every day look and feel like a harvest-home, or the eve of a
long-desired journey, for which every preparation but the last and
lightest was over. Things in which she saw no significance made them
look very grave, and what she would have counted of some importance to
such as they, drew a mere smile from them. She saw all with bewildered
eyes, much as his neighbors looked upon the strange carriage of Lazarus,
as represented by Robert Browning in the wonderful letter of the Arab
physician. But after she had begun to take note of their sufferings, and
come to mark their calm, their peace, their lighted eyes, their ready
smiles, the patience of their very moans, she began to doubt whether
somehow they might not be touched to finer issues than she. It was not,
however, until after having, with no little reluctance and recoil,
ministered to them upon an occasion in which both were disabled for some
hours, that she began to _feel_ they had a hold upon something unseen,
the firmness of which hold made it hard to believe it closed upon an
unreality. If there was nothing there, then these dwarfs, in the
exercise of their foolish, diseased, distorted fancies, came nearer to
the act of creation than any grandest of poets; for these their
inventions did more than rectify for them the wrongs of their existence,
not only making of their chaos a habitable cosmos, but of themselves
heroic dwellers in the same. Within the charmed circle of this their
well-being, their unceasing ministrations to her wants, their
thoughtfulness about her likings and dislikings, their sweetness of
address, and wistful watching to discover the desire they might satisfy
or the solace they could bring, seemed every moment enticing her. They
soothed the aching of her wounds, mollified with ointment the stinging
rents in her wronged humanity.

At first, when she found they had no set prayers in the house, she
concluded that, for all the talk of the old gnome in the garden, they
were not very religious. But by and by she began to discover that no one
could tell when they might not be praying. At the most unexpected times
she would hear her host's voice somewhere uttering tones of glad
beseeching, of out-poured adoration. One day, when she had a bad
headache, the little man came into her room, and, without a word to her,
kneeled by her bedside, and said, "Father, who through Thy Son knowest
pain, and Who dost even now in Thyself feel the pain of this Thy child,
help her to endure until Thou shall say it is enough, and send it from
her. Let it not overmaster her patience; let it not be too much for her.
What good it shall work in her, Thou, Lord, needest not that we should
instruct Thee." Therewith he rose, and left the room.

For some weeks after, she was jealous of latent design to bring their
religion to bear upon her; but perceiving not a single direct approach,
not the most covert hint of attack, she became gradually convinced that
they had no such intent. Polwarth was an absolute serpent of holy
wisdom, and knew that upon certain conditions of the human being the
only powerful influences of religion are the all but insensible ones. A
man's religion, he said, ought never to be held too near his neighbor.
It was like violets: hidden in the banks, they fill the air with their
scent; but if a bunch of them is held to the nose, they stop away their
own sweetness.

Not unfrequently she heard one of them reading to the other, and by and
by, came to join them occasionally. Sometimes it would be a passage of
the New Testament, sometimes of Shakespeare, or of this or that old
English book, of which, in her so-called education, Juliet had never
even heard, but of which the gatekeeper knew every landmark. He would
often stop the reading to talk, explaining and illustrating what the
writer meant, in a way that filled Juliet with wonder. "Strange!" she
would say to herself; "I never thought of that!" She did not suspect
that it would have been strange indeed if she had thought of it.

In her soul began to spring a respect for her host and hostess, such as
she had never felt toward God or man. When, despite of many revulsions
it was a little established, it naturally went beyond them in the
direction of that which they revered. The momentary hush that preceded
the name of our Lord, and the smile that so often came with it; the
halo, as it were, which in their feeling surrounded Him; the confidence
of closest understanding, the radiant humility with which they
approached His idea; the way in which they brought the commonest
question side by side with the ideal of Him in their minds, considering
the one in the light of the other, and answering it thereby; the way in
which they took all He said and did on the fundamental understanding
that His relation to God was perfect, but His relation to men as yet an
imperfect, endeavoring relation, because of their distance from His
Father; these, with many another outcome of their genuine belief, began
at length to make her feel, not merely as if there had been, but as if
there really were such a person as Jesus Christ. The idea of Him ruled
potent in the lives of the two, filling heart and brain and hands and
feet: how could she help a certain awe before it, such as she had never
felt!

Suddenly one day the suspicion awoke in her mind, that the reason why
they asked her no questions, put out no feelers after discovery
concerning her, must be that Dorothy had told them every thing: if it
was, never again would she utter word good or bad to one whose very
kindness, she said to herself, was betrayal! The first moment therefore
she saw Polwarth alone, unable to be still an instant with her doubt
unsolved, she asked him, "with sick assay," but point-blank, whether he
knew why she was in hiding from her husband.

"I do not know, ma'am," he answered.

"Miss Drake told you nothing?" pursued Juliet.

"Nothing more than I knew already: that she could not deny when I put it
to her."

"But how did you know any thing?" she almost cried out, in a sudden rush
of terror as to what the public knowledge of her might after all be.

"If you will remember, ma'am," Polwarth replied, "I told you, the first
time I had the pleasure of speaking to you, that it was by observing and
reasoning upon what I observed, that I knew you were alive and at the
Old House. But it may be some satisfaction to you to see how the thing
took shape in my mind."

Thereupon he set the whole process plainly before her.

Fresh wonder, mingled with no little fear, laid hold upon Juliet. She
felt not merely as if he could look into her, but as if he had only to
look into himself to discover all her secrets.

"I should not have imagined you a person to trouble himself to that
extent with other people's affairs," she said, turning away.

"So far as my service can reach, the things of others are also mine,"
replied Polwarth, very gently.

"But you could not have had the smallest idea of serving me when you
made all those observations concerning me."

"I had long desired to serve your husband, ma'am. Never from curiosity
would I have asked a single question about you or your affairs. But what
came to me I was at liberty to understand if I could, and use for lawful
ends if I might."

Juliet was silent. She dared hardly think, lest the gnome should see her
very thoughts in their own darkness. Yet she yielded to one more urgent
question that kept pushing to get out. She tried to say the words
without thinking of the thing, lest he should thereby learn it.

"I suppose then you have your own theory as to my reasons for seeking
shelter with Miss Drake for a while?" she said--and the moment she said
it, felt as if some demon had betrayed her, and used her organs to utter
the words.

"If I have, ma'am," answered Polwarth, "it is for myself alone. I know
the sacredness of married life too well to speculate irreverently on its
affairs. I believe that many an awful crisis of human history is there
passed--such, I presume, as God only sees and understands. The more
carefully such are kept from the common eye and the common judgment, the
better, I think."

If Juliet left him with yet a little added fear, it was also with
growing confidence, and some comfort, which the feeble presence of an
infant humility served to enlarge.

Polwarth had not given much thought to the question of the cause of
their separation. That was not of his business. What he could not well
avoid seeing was, that it could hardly have taken place since their
marriage. He had at once, as a matter of course, concluded that it lay
with the husband, but from what he had since learned of Juliet's
character, he knew she had not the strength either of moral opinion or
of will to separate, for any reason past and gone, from the husband she
loved so passionately; and there he stopped, refusing to think further.
For he found himself on the verge of thinking what, in his boundless
respect for women, he shrank with deepest repugnance from entertaining
even as a transient flash of conjecture.

One trifle I will here mention, as admitting laterally a single ray of
light upon Polwarth's character. Juliet had come to feel some desire to
be useful in the house beyond her own room, and descrying not only dust,
but what she judged disorder in her _landlord's_ little library--for
such she chose to consider him--which, to her astonishment in such a
mere cottage, consisted of many more books than her husband's, and ten
times as many readable ones, she offered to dust and rearrange them
properly: Polwarth instantly accepted her offer, with thanks--which were
solely for the kindness of the intent, he could not possibly be grateful
for the intended result--and left his books at her mercy. I do not know
another man who, loving his books like Polwarth, would have done so.
Every book had its own place. He could--I speak advisedly--have laid his
hand on any book of at least three hundred of them, in the dark. While
he used them with perfect freedom, and cared comparatively little about
their covers, he handled them with a delicacy that looked almost like
respect. He had seen ladies handle books, he said, laughing, to
Wingfold, in a fashion that would have made him afraid to trust them
with a child. It was a year after Juliet left the house before he got
them by degrees muddled into order again; for it was only as he used
them that he would alter their places, putting each, when he had done
with it for the moment, as near where it had been before as he could;
thus, in time, out of a neat chaos, restoring a useful work-a-day world.

Dorothy's thoughts were in the meantime much occupied for Juliet. Now
that she was so sadly free, she could do more for her. She must occupy
her old quarters as soon as possible after the workmen had finished. She
thought at first of giving out that a friend in poor health was coming
to visit her, but she soon saw that would either involve lying or lead
to suspicion, and perhaps discovery, and resolved to keep her presence
in the house concealed from the outer world as before. But what was she
to do with respect to Lisbeth? Could she trust her with the secret? She
certainly could not trust Amanda. She would ask Helen to take the latter
for a while, and do her best to secure the silence of the former.

She so represented the matter to Lisbeth as to rouse her heart in regard
to it even more than her wonder. But her injunctions to secrecy were so
earnest, that the old woman was offended. She was no slip of a girl, she
said, who did not know how to hold her tongue. She had had secrets to
keep before now, she said; and in proof of her perfect trustworthiness,
was proceeding to tell some of them, when she read her folly in
Dorothy's fixed regard, and ceased.

"Lisbeth," said her mistress, "you have been a friend for sixteen years,
and I love you; but if I find that you have given the smallest hint even
that there is a secret in the house, I solemnly vow you shall not be
another night in it yourself, and I shall ever after think of you as a
wretched creature who periled the life of a poor, unhappy lady rather
than take the trouble to rule her own tongue."

Lisbeth trembled, and did hold her tongue, in spite of the temptation to
feel herself for just one instant the most important person in Glaston.

As the time went on, Juliet became more fretful, and more confiding.
She was never cross with Ruth--why, she could not have told; and when
she had been cross to Dorothy, she was sorry for it. She never said she
was sorry, but she tried to make up for it. Her husband had not taught
her the virtue, both for relief and purification, that lies in the
_acknowledgment_ of wrong. To take up blame that is our own, is to
wither the very root of it.

Juliet was pleased at the near prospect of the change, for she had
naturally dreaded being ill in the limited accommodation of the lodge.
She formally thanked the two crushed and rumpled little angels, begged
them to visit her often, and proceeded to make her very small
preparations with a fitful cheerfulness. Something might come of the
change, she flattered herself. She had always indulged a vague fancy
that Dorothy was devising help for her; and it was in part the
disappointment of nothing having yet justified the expectation, that had
spoiled her behavior to her. But for a long time Dorothy had been
talking of Paul in a different tone, and that very morning had spoken of
him even with some admiration: it might be a prelude to something! Most
likely Dorothy knew more than she chose to say! She dared ask no
question for the dread of finding herself mistaken. She preferred the
ignorance that left room for hope. But she did not like all Dorothy said
in his praise; for her tone, if not her words, seemed to imply some kind
of change in him. He might have his faults, she said to herself, like
other men, but she had not yet discovered them; and any change would, in
her eyes, be for the worse. Would she ever see her own old Paul again?

One day as Faber was riding at a good round trot along one of the back
streets of Glaston, approaching his own house, he saw Amanda, who still
took every opportunity of darting out at an open door, running to him
with outstretched arms, right in the face of Niger, just as if she
expected the horse to stop and take her up. Unable to trust him so well
as his dear old Ruber, he dismounted, and taking her in his arms, led
Niger to his stable. He learned from her that she was staying with the
Wingfolds, and took her home, after which his visits to the rectory were
frequent.

The Wingfolds could not fail to remark the tenderness with which he
regarded the child. Indeed it soon became clear that it was for her sake
he came to them. The change that had begun in him, the loss of his
self-regard following on the loss of Juliet, had left a great gap in his
conscious being: into that gap had instantly begun to shoot the
all-clothing greenery of natural affection. His devotion to her did not
at first cause them any wonderment. Every body loved the little Amanda,
they saw in him only another of the child's conquests, and rejoiced in
the good the love might do him. Even when they saw him looking fixedly
at her with eyes over clear, they set it down to the frustrated
affection of the lonely, wifeless, childless man. But by degrees they
did come to wonder a little: his love seemed to grow almost a passion.
Strange thoughts began to move in their minds, looking from the one to
the other of this love and the late tragedy.

"I wish," said the curate one morning, as they sat at breakfast, "if
only for Faber's sake, that something definite was known about poor
Juliet. There are rumors in the town, roving like poisonous fogs. Some
profess to believe he has murdered her, getting rid of her body utterly,
then spreading the report that she had run away. Others say she is mad,
and he has her in the house, but stupefied with drugs to keep her quiet.
Drew told me he had even heard it darkly hinted that he was making
experiments upon her, to discover the nature of life. It is dreadful to
think what a man is exposed to from evil imaginations groping after
theory. I dare hardly think what might happen should these fancies get
rooted among the people. Many of them are capable of brutality. For my
part, I don't believe the poor woman is dead yet."

Helen replied she did not believe that, in her sound mind, Juliet would
have had the resolution to kill herself; but who could tell what state
of mind she was in at the time? There was always something mysterious
about her--something that seemed to want explanation.

Between them it was concluded that, the next time Faber came, Wingfold
should be plain with him. He therefore told him that if he could cast
any light on his wife's disappearance, it was most desirable he should
do so; for reports were abroad greatly to his disadvantage. Faber
answered, with a sickly smile of something like contempt, that they had
had a quarrel the night before, for which he was to blame; that he had
left her, and the next morning she was gone, leaving every thing, even
to her wedding-ring, behind her, except the clothes she wore; that he
had done all he could to find her, but had been utterly foiled. More he
could not say.

The next afternoon, he sought an interview with the curate in his
study, and told him every thing he had told Mr. Drake. The story seemed
to explain a good deal more than it did, leaving the curate with the
conviction that the disclosure of this former relation had caused the
quarrel between him and his wife, and more doubtful than ever as to
Juliet's having committed suicide.




CHAPTER LI.

THE NEW OLD HOUSE.


It was a lovely moon-lighted midnight when they set out, the four of
them, to walk from the gate across the park to the Old House. Like
shadows they flitted over the green sward, all silent as shadows.
Scarcely a word was spoken as they went, and the stray syllable now and
then, was uttered softly as in the presence of the dead. Suddenly but
gently opened in Juliet's mind a sense of the wonder of life. The moon,
having labored through a heap of cloud into a lake of blue, seemed to
watch her with curious interest as she toiled over the level sward. The
air now and then made a soundless sigh about her head, like a waft of
wings invisible. The heavenly distances seemed to have come down and
closed her softly in. All at once, as if waked from an eternity of
unconsciousness, she found herself, by no will of her own, with no power
to say nay, present to herself--a target for sorrow to shoot at, a tree
for the joy-birds to light upon and depart--a woman, scorned of the man
she loved, bearing within her another life, which by no will of its own,
and with no power to say nay, must soon become aware of its own joys and
sorrows, and have no cause to bless her for her share in its being. Was
there no one to answer for it? Surely there must be a heart-life
somewhere in the universe, to whose will the un-self-willed life could
refer for the justification of its existence, for its motive, for the
idea of it that should make it seem right to itself--to whom it could
cry to have its divergence from that idea rectified! Was she not now,
she thought, upon her silent way to her own deathbed, walking, walking,
the phantom of herself, in her own funeral? What if, when the
bitterness of death was past, and her child was waking in this world,
she should be waking in another, to a new life, inevitable as the
former--another, yet the same? We know not whence we came--why may we
not be going whither we know not? We did not know we were coming here,
why may we not be going there without knowing it--this much more
open-eyed, more aware that we know we do not know? That terrible
morning, she had come this way, rushing swiftly to her death: she was
caught and dragged back from Hades, to be there-after--now, driven
slowly toward it, like an ox to the slaughter! She could not avoid her
doom--she _must_ encounter that which lay before her. That she shrunk
from it with fainting terror was nothing; on she must go! What an iron
net, what a combination of all chains and manacles and fetters and
iron-masks and cages and prisons was this existence--at least to a
woman, on whom was laid the burden of the generations to follow! In the
lore of centuries was there no spell whereby to be rid of it? no dark
saying that taught how to make sure death should be death, and not a
fresh waking? That the future is unknown, assures only danger! New
circumstances have seldom to the old heart proved better than the new
piece of cloth to the old garment.

Thus meditated Juliet. She was beginning to learn that, until we get to
the heart of life, its outsides will be forever fretting us; that among
the mere garments of life, we can never be at home. She was hard to
teach, but God's circumstance had found her.

When they came near the brow of the hollow, Dorothy ran on before, to
see that all was safe. Lisbeth was of course the only one in the house.
The descent was to Juliet like the going down to the gates of Death.

Polwarth, who had been walking behind with Ruth, stepped to her side the
moment Dorothy left her. Looking up in her face, with the moonlight full
upon his large features, he said,

"I have been feeling all the way, ma'am, as if Another was walking
beside us--the same who said, 'I am with you always even to the end of
the world.' He could not have meant that only for the few that were so
soon to follow Him home; He must have meant it for those also who should
believe by their word. Becoming disciples, all promises the Master made
to His disciples are theirs."

"It matters little for poor me," answered Juliet with a sigh. "You know
I do not believe in Him."

"But I believe in Him," answered Polwarth, "and Ruth believes in Him,
and so does Miss Drake; and if He be with us, he can not be far from
you."

With that he stepped back to Ruth's side, and said no more.

Dorothy opened the door quickly, the moment their feet were on the
steps; they entered quickly, and she closed it behind them at once,
fearful of some eye in the night. How different was the house from that
which Juliet had left! The hall was lighted with a soft lamp, showing
dull, warm colors on walls and floor. The dining-room door stood open; a
wood-fire was roaring on the hearth, and candles were burning on a snowy
table spread for a meal. Dorothy had a chamber-candle in her hand. She
showed the Polwarths into the dining-room, then turning to Juliet, said,

"I will take you to your room, dear."

"I have prepared your old quarters for you," she said, as they went up
the stair.

With the words there rushed upon Juliet such a memory of mingled
dreariness and terror, that she could not reply.

"You know it will be safest," added Dorothy, and as she spoke, set the
candle on a table at the top of the stair. They went along the passage,
and she opened the door of the closet. All was dark.

She opened the door in the closet, and Juliet started back with
amazement. It was the loveliest room! and--like a marvel in a
fairy-tale--the great round moon was shining gloriously, first through
the upper branches of a large yew, and then through an oriel window,
filled with lozenges of soft greenish glass, through which fell a lovely
picture on the floor in light and shadow and something that was neither
or both. Juliet turned in delight, threw her arms round Dorothy, and
kissed her.

"I thought I was going into a dungeon," she said, "and it is a room for
a princess!"

"I sometimes almost believe, Juliet," returned Dorothy, "that God will
give us a great surprise one day."

Juliet was tired, and did not want to hear about God. If Dorothy had
done all this, she thought, for the sake of reading her a good lesson,
it spoiled it all. She did not understand the love that gives beyond the
gift, that mantles over the cup and spills the wine into the spaces of
eternal hope. The room was so delicious that she begged to be excused
from going down to supper. Dorothy suggested it would not be gracious to
her friends. Much as she respected, and indeed loved them, Juliet
resented the word _friends_, but yielded.

The little two would themselves rather have gone home--it was so
late--but staid, fearing to disappoint Dorothy. If they did run a risk
by doing so, it was for a good reason--therefore of no great
consequence.

"How your good father will delight to watch you here sometimes, Miss
Drake," said Polwarth, "if those who are gone are permitted to see,
walking themselves unseen."

Juliet shuddered. Dorothy's father not two months gone and the dreadful
little man to talk to her like that!

"Do you then think," said Dorothy, "that the dead only seem to have gone
from us?" and her eyes looked like store-houses of holy questions.

"I know so little," he answered, "that I dare hardly say I _think_ any
thing. But if, as our Lord implies, there be no such thing as that which
the change appears to us--nothing like that we are thinking of when we
call it _death_--may it not be that, obstinate as is the appearance of
separation, there is, notwithstanding, none of it?--I don't care, mind:
His will _is_, and that is every thing. But there can be no harm, where
I do not know His will, in venturing a _may be_. I am sure He likes His
little ones to tell their fancies in the dimmits about the nursery fire.
Our souls yearning after light of any sort must be a pleasure to him to
watch.--But on the other hand, to resume the subject, it may be that, as
it is good for us to miss them in the body that we may the better find
them in the spirit, so it may be good for them also to miss our bodies
that they may find our spirits."

"But," suggested Ruth, "they had that kind of discipline while yet on
earth, in the death of those who went before them; and so another sort
might be better for them now. Might it not be more of a discipline for
them to see, in those left behind, how they themselves, from lack of
faith, went groping about in the dark, while crowds all about them knew
perfectly what they could not bring themselves to believe?"

"It might, Ruth, it might; nor do I think any thing to the contrary. Or
it might be given to some and not to others, just as it was good for
them. It may be that some can see some, or can see them sometimes, and
watch their ways in partial glimpses of revelation. Who knows who may be
about the house when all its mortals are dead for the night, and the
last of the fires are burning unheeded! There are so many hours of both
day and night--in most houses--in which those in and those out of the
body need never cross each others' paths! And there are tales, legends,
reports, many mere fiction doubtless, but some possibly of a different
character, which represent this and that doer of evil as compelled,
either by the law of his or her own troubled being, or by some law
external thereto, ever, or at fixed intervals, to haunt the moldering
scenes of their past, and ever dream horribly afresh the deeds done in
the body. These, however, tend to no proof of what we have been speaking
about, for such 'extravagant and erring spirit' does not haunt the
living from love, but the dead from suffering. In this life, however,
few of us come really near to each other in the genuine simplicity of
love, and that may be the reason why the credible stories of love
meeting love across the strange difference are so few. It is a wonderful
touch, I always think, in the play of Hamlet, that, while the prince
gazes on the spirit of his father, noting every expression and
gesture--even his dress, as he passes through his late wife's chamber,
Gertrude, less unfaithful as widow than as wife, not only sees nothing,
but by no sigh or hint, no sense in the air, no beat of her own heart,
no creep even of her own flesh, divines his presence--is not only
certain that she sees nothing, but that she sees all there is. She is
the dead, not her husband. To the dead all are dead. The eternal life
makes manifest both life and death."

"Please, Mr. Polwarth," said Juliet, "remember it is the middle of the
night. No doubt it is just the suitable time, but I would rather not
make one in an orgy of horrors. We have all to be alone presently."

She hated to hear about death, and the grandest of words, Eternal Life,
which to most means nothing but prolonged existence, meant to her just
death. If she had stolen a magic spell for avoiding it, she could not
have shrunk more from any reference to the one thing commonest and most
inevitable. Often as she tried to imagine the reflection of her own
death in the mind of her Paul, the mere mention of the ugly thing seemed
to her ill-mannered, almost indecent.

"The Lord is awake all night," said Polwarth, rising, "and therefore
the night is holy as the day.--Ruth, we should be rather frightened to
walk home under that awful sky, if we thought the Lord was not with us."

"The night is fine enough," said Juliet.

"Yes," said Ruth, replying to her uncle, not to Juliet; "but even if He
were asleep--you remember how He slept once, and yet reproached His
disciples with their fear and doubt."

"I do; but in the little faith with which He reproached them, He
referred, not to Himself, but to His Father. Whether He slept or waked
it was all one: the Son may sleep, for the Father never sleeps."

They stood beside each other, taking their leave: what little objects
they were, opposite the two graceful ladies, who also stood beside each
other, pleasant to look upon. Sorrow and suffering, lack and weakness,
though plain to see upon them both, had not yet greatly dimmed their
beauty. The faces of the dwarfs, on the other hand, were marked and
lined with suffering; but the suffering was dominated by peace and
strength. There was no sorrow there, little lack, no weakness or fear,
and a great hope. They never spent any time in pitying themselves; the
trouble that alone ever clouded their sky, was the suffering of others.
Even for this they had comfort--their constant ready help consoled both
the sufferer and themselves.

"Will you come and see me, if you die first, uncle?" said Ruth, as they
walked home together in the moonlight. "You will think how lonely I am
without you."

"If it be within the law of things, if I be at liberty, and the thing
seem good for you, my Ruth, you may be sure I will come to you. But of
one thing I am pretty certain, that such visions do not appear when
people are looking for them. You must not go staring into the dark
trying to see me. Do your work, pray your prayers, and be sure I love
you: if I am to come, I will come. It may be in the hot noon or in the
dark night: it may be with no sight and no sound, yet a knowledge of
presence; or I may be watching you, helping you perhaps and you never
know it until I come to fetch you at the last,--if I may. You have been
daughter and sister, and mother to me, my Ruth. You have been my one in
the world. God, I think sometimes, has planted about you and me, my
child, a cactus-hedge of ugliness, that we might be so near and so
lonely as to learn love as few have learned it in this world--love
without fear, or doubt, or pain, or anxiety--with constant satisfaction
in presence, and calm content in absence. Of the last, however, I can
not boast much, seeing we have not been parted a day for--how many years
is it, Ruth?--Ah, Ruth! a bliss beyond speech is waiting us in the
presence of the Master, where, seeing Him as He is, we shall grow like
Him and be no more either dwarfed or sickly. But you will have the same
face, Ruth, else I should be forever missing something."

"But you do not think we shall be perfect all at once?"

"No, not all at once; I can not believe that: God takes time to what He
does--the doing of it is itself good. It would be a sight for heavenly
eyes to see you, like a bent and broken and withered lily, straightening
and lengthening your stalk, and flushing into beauty.--But fancy what it
will be to see at length to the very heart of the person you love, and
love Him perfectly--and that _you_ can love _Him!_ Every love will then
be a separate heaven, and all the heavens will blend in one perfect
heaven--the love of God--the All in all."

They were walking like children, hand in hand: Ruth pressed that of her
uncle, for she could not answer in words.

Even to Dorothy their talk would have been vague, vague from the
intervening mist of her own atmosphere. To them it was vague only from
the wide stretch of its horizon, the distance of its zenith. There is
all difference between the vagueness belonging to an imperfect sight,
and the vagueness belonging to the distance of the outlook. But to walk
on up the hill of duty, is the only way out of the one into the other. I
think some only know they are laboring, hardly know they are climbing,
till they find themselves near the top.




CHAPTER LII.

THE LEVEL OF THE LYTHE.


Dorothy's faith in Polwarth had in the meantime largely increased. She
had not only come to trust him thoroughly, but gained much strength from
the confidence. As soon as she had taken Juliet her breakfast the next
morning, she went to meet him in the park, for so they had arranged the
night before.

She had before acquainted him with the promise Juliet had exacted from
her, that she would call her husband the moment she seemed in danger--a
possibility which Juliet regarded as a certainty; and had begged him to
think how they could contrive to have Faber within call. He had now a
plan to propose with this object in view, but began, apparently, at a
distance from it.

"You know, Miss Drake," he said, "that I am well acquainted with every
yard of this ground. Had your honored father asked me whether the Old
House was desirable for a residence, I should have expressed
considerable doubt. But there is one thing which would greatly improve
it--would indeed, I hope, entirely remove my objection to it. Many years
ago I noted the state of the stone steps leading up to the door: they
were much and diversely out of the level; and the cause was evident with
the first great rain: the lake filled the whole garden--to the top of
the second step. Now this, if it take place only once a year, must of
course cause damp in the house. But I think there is more than that will
account for. I have been in the cellars repeatedly, both before and
since your father bought it; and always found them too damp. The cause
of it, I think, is, that the foundations are as low as the ordinary
level of the water in the pond, and the ground at that depth is of large
gravel: it seems to me that the water gets through to the house. I
should propose, therefore, that from the bank of the Lythe a tunnel be
commenced, rising at a gentle incline until it pierces the basin of the
lake. The ground is your own to the river, I believe?"

"It is," answered Dorothy. "But I should be sorry to empty the lake
altogether."

"My scheme," returned Polwarth, "includes a strong sluice, by which you
could keep the water at what height you pleased, and at any moment send
it into the river. The only danger would be of cutting through the
springs; and I fancy they are less likely to be on the side next the
river where the ground is softer, else they would probably have found
their way directly into it, instead of first hollowing out the pond."

"Would it be a difficult thing to do?" asked Dorothy.

"I think not," answered Polwarth. "But with your permission I will get a
friend of mine, an engineer, to look into it."

"I leave it in your hands," said Dorothy.--"Do you think we will find
any thing at the bottom?"

"Who can tell? But we do not know how near the bottom the tunnel may
bring us; there may be fathoms of mud below the level of the
river-bed.--One thing, thank God, we shall not find there!"

The same week all was arranged with the engineer. By a certain day his
men were to be at work on the tunnel.

For some time now, things had been going on much the same with all in
whom my narrative is interested. There come lulls in every process,
whether of growth or of tempest, whether of creation or destruction, and
those lulls, coming as they do in the midst of force, are precious in
their influence--because they are only lulls, and the forces are still
at work. All the time the volcano is quiet, something is going on below.
From the first moment of exhaustion, the next outbreak is preparing. To
be faint is to begin to gather, as well as to cease to expend.

Faber had been growing better. He sat more erect on his horse; his eye
was keener, his voice more kindly, though hardly less sad, and his step
was firm. His love to the child, and her delight in his attentions, were
slowly leading him back to life. Every day, if but for a moment, he
contrived to see her, and the Wingfolds took care to remove every
obstacle from the way of their meeting. Little they thought why Dorothy
let them keep the child so long. As little did Dorothy know that what
she yielded for the sake of the wife, they desired for the sake of the
husband.

At length one morning came a break: Faber received a note from the
gate-keeper, informing him that Miss Drake was having the pond at the
foot of her garden emptied into the Lythe by means of a tunnel, the
construction of which was already completed. They were now boring for a
small charge of gunpowder expected to liberate the water. The process of
emptying would probably be rapid, and he had taken the liberty of
informing Mr. Faber, thinking he might choose to be present. No one but
the persons employed would be allowed to enter the grounds.

This news gave him a greater shock than he could have believed possible.
He thought he had "supped full of horrors!" At once he arranged with his
assistant for being absent the whole day; and rode out, followed by his
groom. At the gate Polwarth joined him, and walked beside him to the Old
House, where his groom, he said, could put up the horses. That done, he
accompanied him to the mouth of the tunnel, and there left him.

Faber sat down on the stump of a felled tree, threw a big cloak, which
he had brought across the pommel of his saddle, over his knees, and
covered his face with his hands. Before him the river ran swiftly toward
the level country, making a noise of watery haste; also the wind was in
the woods, with the noises of branches and leaves, but the only sounds
he heard were the blows of the hammer on the boring-chisel, coming dull,
and as if from afar, out of the depths of the earth. What a strange,
awful significance they had to the heart of Faber! But the end was
delayed hour after hour, and there he still sat, now and then at a
louder noise than usual lifting up a white face, and staring toward the
mouth of the tunnel. At the explosion the water would probably rush in a
torrent from the pit, and in half an hour, perhaps, the pond would be
empty. But Polwarth had taken good care there should be no explosion
that day. Ever again came the blow of iron upon iron, and the boring had
begun afresh.

Into her lovely chamber Dorothy had carried to Juliet the glad tidings
that her husband was within a few hundred yards of the house, and that
she might trust Mr. Polwarth to keep him there until all danger was
over.

Juliet now manifested far more courage than she had given reason to
expect. It seemed as if her husband's nearness gave her strength to do
without his presence.

At length the child, a lovely boy, lay asleep in Dorothy's arms. The
lovelier mother also slept. Polwarth was on his way to stop the work,
and let the doctor know that its completion must be postponed for a few
days, when he heard the voice of Lisbeth behind him, calling as she ran.
He turned and met her, then turned again and ran, as fast as his little
legs could carry him, to the doctor.

"Mr. Faber," he cried, "there is a lady up there at the house, a friend
of Miss Drake's, taken suddenly ill. You are wanted as quickly as
possible."

Faber answered not a word, but went with hasty strides up the bank, and
ran to the house. Polwarth followed as fast as he could, panting and
wheezing. Lisbeth received the doctor at the door.

"Tell my man to saddle _my_ horse, and be at the back door immediately,"
he said to her.

Polwarth followed him up the stair to the landing, where Dorothy
received Faber, and led him to Juliet's room. The dwarf seated himself
on the top of the stair, almost within sight of the door.




CHAPTER LIII.

MY LADY'S CHAMBER.


When Faber entered, a dim, rosy light from drawn window-curtains filled
the air; he could see little more than his way to the bed. Dorothy was
in terror lest the discovery he must presently make, should unnerve the
husband for what might be required of the doctor. But Juliet kept her
face turned aside, and a word from the nurse let him know at once what
was necessary. He turned to Dorothy, and said,

"I must send my man home to fetch me something;" then to the nurse, and
said, "Go on as you are doing;" then once more to Dorothy, saying, "Come
with me, Miss Drake: I want writing things."

He led the way from the room, and Dorothy followed. But scarcely were
they in the passage, when the little man rose and met them. Faber would
have pushed past him, annoyed, but Polwarth held out a little phial to
him.

"Perhaps that is what you want, sir," he said.

The doctor caught it hastily, almost angrily, from his hand, looked at
it, uncorked it, and put it to his nose.

"Thank you," he said, "this is just what I wanted," and returned
instantly to the chamber.

The little man resumed his patient seat on the side, breathing heavily.
Ten minutes of utter silence followed. Then Dorothy passed him with a
note in her hand, and hurried down the stair. The next instant Polwarth
heard the sound of Niger's hoofs tearing up the slope behind the house.

"I have got some more medicines here, Miss Drake," he said, when she
reappeared on the stair.

As he spoke he brought out phial after phial, as if his pockets widened
out below into the mysterious recesses of the earth to which as a gnome
he belonged. Dorothy, however, told him it was not a medicine the
doctor wanted now, but something else, she did not know what. Her face
was dreadfully white, but as calm as an icefield. She went back into the
room, and Polwarth sat down again.

Not more than twenty minutes had passed when he heard again the soft
thunder of Niger's hoofs upon the sward; and in a minute more up came
Lisbeth, carrying a little morocco case, which she left at the door of
the room.

Then an hour passed, during which he heard nothing. He sat motionless,
and his troubled lungs grew quiet.

Suddenly he heard Dorothy's step behind him, and rose.

"You had better come down stairs with me," she said, in a voice he
scarcely knew, and her face looked almost as if she had herself passed
through a terrible illness.

"How is the poor lady?" he asked.

"The immediate danger is over, the doctor says, but he seems in great
doubt. He has sent me away. Come with me: I want you to have a glass of
wine."

"Has he recognized her?"

"I do not know. I haven't seen any sign of it yet. But the room is
dark.--We can talk better below."

"I am in want of nothing, my dear lady," said Polwarth. "I should much
prefer staying here--if you will permit me. There is no knowing when I
might be of service. I am far from unused to sick chambers."

"Do as you please, Mr. Polwarth," said Dorothy, and going down the
stair, went into the garden.

Once more Polwarth resumed his seat.

There came the noise of a heavy fall, which shook him where he sat. He
started up, went to the door of the chamber, listened a moment, heard a
hurried step and the sweeping of garments, and making no more scruple,
opened it and looked in.

All was silent, and the room was so dark he could see nothing.
Presently, however, he descried, in the middle of the floor, a prostrate
figure that could only be the doctor, for plainly it was the nurse on
her knees by him. He glanced toward the bed. There all was still.

"She is gone!" he thought with himself; "and the poor fellow has
discovered who she was!"

He went in.

"Have you no brandy?" he said to the nurse.

"On that table," she answered.

"Lay his head down, and fetch it."

Notwithstanding his appearance, the nurse obeyed: she knew the doctor
required brandy, but had lost her presence of mind.

Polwarth took his hand. The pulse had vanished--and no wonder! Once
more, utterly careless of himself, had the healer drained his own
life-spring to supply that of his patient--knowing as little now what
that patient was to him as he knew then what she was going to be. A
thrill had indeed shot to his heart at the touch of her hand, scarcely
alive as it was, when first he felt her pulse; what he saw of her
averted face through the folded shadows of pillows and curtains both of
window and bed, woke wild suggestions; as he bared her arm, he almost
gave a cry: it was fortunate that there was not light enough to show the
scar of his own lancet; but, always at any critical moment
self-possessed to coldness, he schooled himself now with sternest
severity. He insisted to himself that he was in mortal danger of being
fooled by his imagination--that a certain indelible imprint on his brain
had begun to phosphoresce. If he did not banish the fancies crowding to
overwhelm him, his patient's life, and probably his own reason as well,
would be the penalty. Therefore, with will obstinately strained, he kept
his eyes turned from the face of the woman, drawn to it as they were
even by the terror of what his fancy might there show him, and held to
his duty in spite of growing agony. His brain, he said to himself, was
so fearfully excited, that he must not trust his senses: they would
reflect from within, instead of transmitting from without. And
victoriously did he rule, until, all the life he had in gift being
exhausted, his brain, deserted by his heart, gave way, and when he
turned from the bed, all but unconscious, he could only stagger a pace
or two, and fell like one dead.

Polwarth got some brandy into his mouth with a teaspoon. In about a
minute, his heart began to beat.

"I must open another vein," he murmured as if in a dream.

When he had swallowed a third teaspoonful, he lifted his eyelids in a
dreary kind of way, saw Polwarth, and remembered that he had something
to attend to--a patient at the moment on his hands, probably--he could
not tell.

"Tut! give me a wine-glass of the stuff," he said.

Polwarth obeyed. The moment he swallowed it, he rose, rubbing his
forehead as if trying to remember, and mechanically turned toward the
bed. The nurse, afraid he might not yet know what he was about, stepped
between, saying softly,

"She is asleep, sir, and breathing quietly."

"Thank God!" he whispered with a sigh, and turning to a couch, laid
himself gently upon it.

The nurse looked at Polwarth, as much as to say: "Who is to take the
command now?"

"I shall be outside, nurse: call me if I can be useful to you," he
replied to the glance, and withdrew to his watch on the top of the
stair.

After about a quarter of an hour, the nurse came out.

"Do you want me?" said Polwarth, rising hastily.

"No, sir," she answered. "The doctor says all immediate danger is over,
and he requires nobody with him. I am going to look after my baby. And
please, sir, nobody is to go in, for he says she must not be disturbed.
The slightest noise might spoil every thing: she must sleep now all she
can."

"Very well," said Polwarth, and sat down again.

The day went on; the sun went down; the shadows deepened; and not a
sound came from the room. Again and again Dorothy came and peeped up the
stair, but seeing the little man at his post, like Zacchaeus up the
sycamore, was satisfied, and withdrew. But at length Polwarth bethought
him that Ruth would be anxious, and rose reluctantly. The same instant
the door opened, and Faber appeared. He looked very pale and worn,
almost haggard.

"Would you call Miss Drake?" he said.

Polwarth went, and following Dorothy up the stair again, heard what
Faber said.

"She is sleeping beautifully, but I dare not leave her. I must sit up
with her to-night. Send my man to tell my assistant that I shall not be
home. Could you let me have something to eat, and you take my place? And
there is Polwarth! _he_ has earned his dinner, if any one has. I do
believe we owe the poor lady's life to him."

Dorothy ran to give the message and her own orders. Polwarth begged she
would tell the groom to say to Ruth as he passed that all was well; and
when the meal was ready, joined Faber.

It was speedily over, for the doctor seemed anxious to be again with his
patient. Then Dorothy went to Polwarth. Both were full of the same
question: had Faber recognized his wife or not? Neither had come to a
certain conclusion. Dorothy thought he had, but that he was too hard and
proud to show it; Polwarth thought he had not, but had been powerfully
reminded of her. He had been talking strangely, he said, during their
dinner, and had drunk a good deal of wine in a hurried way.

Polwarth's conclusion was correct: it was with an excitement almost
insane, and a pleasure the more sorrowful that he was aware of its
transientness, a pleasure now mingling, now alternating with utter
despair, that Faber returned to sit in the darkened chamber, watching
the woman who with such sweet torture reminded him of her whom he had
lost. What a strange, unfathomable thing is the pleasure given us by a
likeness! It is one of the mysteries of our humanity. Now she had seemed
more, now less like his Juliet; but all the time he could see her at
best only very partially. Ever since his fall, his sight had been weak,
especially in twilight, and even when, once or twice, he stood over her
as she slept, and strained his eyes to their utmost, he could not tell
what he saw. For, in the hope that, by the time it did come, its way
would have been prepared by a host of foregone thoughts, Dorothy had
schemed to delay as much as she could the discovery which she trusted in
her heart must come at last; and had therefore contrived, not by drawn
curtains merely, but by closed Venetian shutters as well, to darken the
room greatly. And now he had no light but a small lamp, with a shade.

He had taken a book with him, but it was little he read that night. At
almost regular intervals he rose to see how his patient fared. She was
still floating in the twilight shallows of death, whether softly
drifting on the ebb-tide of sleep, out into the open sea, or, on its
flow, again up the river of life, he could not yet tell. Once the nurse
entered the room to see if any thing were wanted. Faber lifted his head,
and motioned her angrily away, making no ghost of a sound. The night
wore on, and still she slept. In his sleepless and bloodless brain
strangest thoughts and feelings went and came. The scents of old roses,
the stings of old sins, awoke and vanished, like the pulsing of
fire-flies. But even now he was the watcher of his own moods; and when
among the rest the thought would come: "What if this _should_ be my own
Juliet! Do not time and place agree with the possibility?" and for a
moment life seemed as if it would burst into the very madness of
delight, ever and again his common sense drove him to conclude that his
imagination was fooling him. He dared not yield to the intoxicating
idea. If he did, he would be like a man drinking poison, well knowing
that every sip, in itself a delight, brought him a step nearer to agony
and death! When she should wake, and he let the light fall upon her
face, he knew--so he said to himself--he _knew_ the likeness would
vanish in an appalling unlikeness, a mockery, a scoff of the whole night
and its lovely dream--in a face which, if beautiful as that of an angel,
not being Juliet's would be to him ugly, unnatural, a discord with the
music of his memory. Still the night was checkered with moments of
silvery bliss, in the indulgence of the mere, the known fancy of what it
would be if it _were_ she, vanishing ever in the reviving rebuke, that
he must nerve himself for the loss of that which the morning must
dispel. Yet, like one in a dream, who knows it is but a dream, and
scarce dares breathe lest he should break the mirrored ecstasy, he would
not carry the lamp to the bedside: no act of his should disperse the
airy flicker of the lovely doubt, not a movement, not a nearer glance,
until stern necessity should command.

History knows well the tendency of things to repeat themselves. Similar
circumstances falling together must incline to the production of similar
consequent events.

Toward morning Juliet awoke from her long sleep, but she had the vessel
of her brain too empty of the life of this world to recognize barely
that which was presented to her bodily vision. Over the march of two
worlds, that of her imagination, and that of fact, her soul hovered
fluttering, and blended the presentment of the two in the power of its
unity.

The only thing she saw was the face of her husband, sadly lighted by the
dimmed lamp. It was some-distance away, near the middle of the room: it
seemed to her miles away, yet near enough to be addressed. It was a more
beautiful face now than ever before--than even then when first she took
it for the face of the Son of Man--more beautiful, and more like Him,
for it was more humane. Thin and pale with suffering, it was nowise
feeble, but the former self-sufficiency had vanished, and a still sorrow
had taken its place.

He sat sunk in dim thought. A sound came that shook him as with an ague
fit. Even then he mastered his emotion, and sat still as a stone. Or was
it delight unmastered, and awe indefinable, that paralyzed him? He
dared not move lest he should break the spell. Were it fact, or were it
but yet further phantom play on his senses, it should unfold itself; not
with a sigh would he jar the unfolding, but, ear only, listen to the
end. In the utter stillness of the room, of the sleeping house, of the
dark, embracing night, he lay in famished wait for every word.

"O Jesus," said the voice, as of one struggling with weariness, or one
who speaks her thoughts in a dream, imagining she reads from a book, a
gentle, tired voice--"O Jesus! after all, Thou art there! They told me
Thou wast dead, and gone nowhere! They said there never was such a One!
And there Thou art! O Jesus, what _am_ I to do? Art Thou going to do any
thing with me?--I wish I were a leper, or any thing that Thou wouldst
make clean! But how couldst Thou, for I never quite believed in Thee,
and never loved Thee before? And there was my Paul! oh, how I loved my
Paul! and _he_ wouldn't do it. I begged and begged him, for he was my
husband when I was alive--him to take me and make me clean, but he
wouldn't: he was too pure to pardon me. He let me lie in the dirt! It
was all right of him, but surely, Lord, Thou couldst afford to pity a
poor girl that hardly knew what she was doing. My heart is very sore,
and my whole body is ashamed, and I feel so stupid! Do help me if Thou
canst. I denied Thee, I know; but then I cared for nothing but my
husband; and the denial of a silly girl could not hurt Thee, if indeed
Thou art Lord of all worlds!--I know Thou wilt forgive me for that. But,
O Christ, please, if Thou canst any way do it, make me fit for Paul.
Tell him to beat me and forgive me.--O my Saviour, do not look at me so,
or I shall forget Paul himself, and die weeping for joy. Oh, my Lord!
Oh, my Paul!"

For Paul had gently risen from his chair, and come one step
nearer--where he stood looking on her with such a smile as seldom has
been upon human face--a smile of unutterable sorrow, love, repentance,
hope. She gazed, speechless now, her spirit drinking in the vision of
that smile. It was like mountain air, like water, like wine, like
eternal life! It was forgiveness and peace from the Lord of all. And had
her brain been as clear as her heart, could she have taken it for less?
If the sinner forgave her, what did the Perfect?

Paul dared not go nearer--partly from dread of the consequences of
increased emotion. Her lips began to move again, and her voice to
murmur, but he could distinguish only a word here and there. Slowly the
eyelids fell over the great dark eyes, the words dissolved into
syllables, the sounds ceased to be words at all, and vanished: her soul
had slipped away into some silent dream.

Then at length he approached on tiptoe. For a few moments he stood and
gazed on the sleeping countenance--then dropped on his knees, and cried,

"God, if Thou be anywhere, I thank Thee."

Reader, who knowest better, do not mock him. Gently excuse him. His
brain was excited; there was a commotion in the particles of human
cauliflower; a rush of chemical changes and interchanges was going on;
the tide was setting for the vasty deep of marvel, which was nowhere but
within itself. And then he was in love with his wife, therefore open to
deceptions without end, for is not all love a longing after what never
was and never can be?

He was beaten. But scorn him not for yielding. Think how he was beaten.
Could he help it that the life in him proved too much for the death with
which he had sided? Was it poltroonery to desert the cause of ruin for
that of growth? of essential slavery for ordered freedom? of
disintegration for vital and enlarging unity? He had "said to
corruption, Thou art my father: to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my
sister;" but a Mightier than he, the Life that lighteth every man that
cometh into the world, had said, "O thou enemy, destruction shall have a
perpetual end;" and he could not stand against the life by which he
stood. When it comes to this, what can a man do? Remember he was a
created being--or, if you will not allow that, then something greatly
less. If not "loved into being" by a perfect Will, in his own image of
life and law, he had but a mother whom he never could see, because she
could never behold either herself or him: he was the offspring of the
dead, and must be pardoned if he gave a foolish cry after a parent worth
having.

Wait, thou who countest such a cry a weak submission, until, having
refused to take thine hour with thee, thine hour overtakes thee: then
see if thou wilt stand out. Another's battle is easy. God only knows
with what earthquakes and thunders, that hour, on its way to find thee,
may level the mountains and valleys between. If thou wouldst be perfect
in the greatness of thy way, thou must learn to live in the fire of thy
own divine nature turned against thy conscious self: learn to smile
content in that, and thou wilt out-satan Satan in the putridity of
essential meanness, yea, self-satisfied in very virtue of thy shame,
thou wilt count it the throned apotheosis of inbred honor. But seeming
is not being--least of all self-seeming. Dishonor will yet be dishonor,
if all the fools in creation should be in love with it, and call it
glory.

In an hour, Juliet woke again, vaguely remembering a heavenly dream,
whose odorous air yet lingered, and made her happy, she knew not why.
Then what a task would have been Faber's! For he must not go near her.
The balance of her life trembled on a knife-edge, and a touch might
incline it toward death. A sob might determine the doubt.

But as soon as he saw sign that her sleep was beginning to break, he all
but extinguished the light, then having felt her pulse, listened to her
breathing, and satisfied himself generally of her condition, crept from
the room, and calling the nurse, told her to take his place. He would be
either in the next room, he said, or within call in the park.

He threw himself on the bed, but could not rest: rose and had a bath;
listened at Juliet's door, and hearing no sound, went to the stable.
Niger greeted him with a neigh of pleasure. He made haste to saddle him,
his hands trembling so that he could hardly get the straps into the
girth buckles.

"That's Niger!" said Juliet, hearing his whinny. "Is he come?"

"Who, ma'am?" asked the nurse, a stranger to Glaston, of course.

"The doctor--is he come?"

"He's but just gone, ma'am. He's been sitting by you all night--would
let no one else come near you. Rather peculiar, in my opinion!"

A soft flush, all the blood she could show, tinged her cheek. It was
Hope's own color--the reflection of a red rose from a white.




CHAPTER LIV.

NOWHERE AND EVERYWHERE.


Faber sprung upon Niger's back, and galloped wildly through the park.
His soul was like a southern sea under a summer tornado. The slow dawn
was gathering under a smoky cloud with an edge of cold yellow; a thin
wind was abroad; rain had fallen in the night, and the grass was wet and
cool to Niger's hoofs; the earth sent up a savor, which like a soft warp
was crossed by a woof of sweet odors from leaf-buds and wild flowers,
and spangled here and there with a silver thread of bird song--for but
few of the beast-angels were awake yet. Through the fine consorting mass
of silence and odor, went the soft thunder of Niger's gallop over the
turf. His master's joy had overflowed into him: the creatures are not
all stupid that can not speak; some of them are _with us_ more than we
think. According to the grand old tale, God made his covenant with all
the beasts that came out of the ark as well as with Noah; for them also
he set his bow of hope in the cloud of fear; they are God's creatures,
God bless them! and if not exactly human, are, I think, something more
than _humanish_. Niger gave his soul with his legs to his master's mood
that morning. He was used to hard gallops with him across country, but
this was different; this was plainly a frolic, the first he had had
since he came into his service; and a frolic it should be!

A deeper, loftier, lovelier morning was dawning in Faber's world unseen.
One dread burden was lifted from his being; his fierce pride, his
unmanly cruelty, his spotless selfishness, had not hunted a woman soul
quite into the moldy jaws of the grave; she was given back to him, to
tend, and heal, and love as he had never yet dreamed of loving! Endless
was the dawn that was breaking in him; unutterably sweet the joy. Life
was now to be lived--not endured. How he would nurse the lily he had
bruised and broken! From her own remorse he would shield her. He would
be to her a summer land--a refuge from the wind, a covert from the
tempest. He would be to her like that Saviour for whom, in her wandering
fancy, she had taken him: never more in vaguest thought would he turn
from her. If, in any evil mood, a thought unkind should dare glance back
at her past, he would clasp her the closer to his heart, the more to be
shielded that the shield itself was so poor. Once he laughed aloud as he
rode, to find himself actually wondering whether the story of the
resurrection _could_ be true; for what had the restoration of his Juliet
in common with the out-worn superstition? In any overwhelming joy, he
concluded, the heart leans to lovely marvel.

But there is as much of the reasonable as of to us the marvelous in that
which alone has ever made credible proffer toward the filling of the
gulf whence issue all the groans of humanity. Let Him be tested by the
only test that can, on the supposition of His asserted nature, be
applied to Him--that of obedience to the words He has spoken--words that
commend themselves to every honest nature. Proof of other sort, if it
could be granted, would, leaving our natures where they were, only sink
us in condemnation.

Why should I pursue the story further? and if not here, where better
should I stop? The true story has no end--no end. But endlessly dreary
would the story be, were there no Life living by its own will, no
perfect Will, one with an almighty heart, no Love in whom we live and
move and have our being. Offer me an eternity in all things else after
my own imagination, but without a perfect Father, and I say, no; let me
die, even as the unbelieving would have it. Not believing in the Father
of Jesus, they are _right_ in not desiring to live. Heartily do I
justify them therein. For all this talk and disputation about
immortality, wherein is regarded only the continuance of consciousness
beyond what we call death, it is to me, with whatever splendor of
intellectual coruscation it be accompanied, but little better than a
foolish babble, the crackling of thorns under a pot. Apart from Himself,
God forbid there should be any immortality. If it could be proved apart
from Him, then apart from Him it could be, and would be infinite
damnation. It is an impossibility, and were but an unmitigated evil. And
if it be impossible without Him, it can not be believed without Him: if
it could be proved without Him, the belief so gained would be an evil.
Only with the knowledge of the Father of Christ, did the endlessness of
being become a doctrine of bliss to men. If He be the first life, the
Author of his own, to speak after the language of men, and the origin
and source of all other life, it can be only by knowing Him that we can
know whether we shall live or die. Nay more, far more!--the knowledge
of Him by such innermost contact as is possible only between creator and
created, and possible only when the created has aspired to be one with
the will of the creator, such knowledge and such alone is life to the
created; it is the very life, that alone for the sake of which God
created us. If we are one with God in heart, in righteousness, in
desire, no death can touch us, for we are life, and the garment of
immortality, the endless length of days which is but the mere shadow of
the eternal, follows as a simple necessity: He is not the God of the
dead, or of the dying, but of the essentially alive. Without this inmost
knowledge of Him, this oneness with Him, we have no life in us, for _it
is life_, and that for the sake of which all this outward show of
things, and our troubled condition in the midst of them, exists. All
that is mighty, grand, harmonious, therefore in its own nature true, is.
If not, then dearly I thank the grim Death, that I shall die and not
live. Thus undeceived, my only terror would be that the unbelievers
might be but half right, and there might be a life, so-called, beyond
the grave without a God.

My brother man, is the idea of a God too good or too foolish for thy
belief? or is it that thou art not great enough or humble enough to hold
it? In either case, I will believe it for thee and for me. Only be not
stiff-necked when the truth begins to draw thee: thou wilt find it hard
if she has to go behind and drive thee--hard to kick against the divine
goads, which, be thou ever so mulish, will be too much for thee at last.
Yea, the time will come when thou wilt goad thyself toward the divine.
But hear me this once more: the God, the Jesus, in whom I believe, are
not the God, the Jesus, in whom you fancy I believe: you know them not;
your idea of them is not mine. If you knew them you would believe in
them, for to know them is to believe in them. Say not, "Let Him teach
me, then," except you mean it in submissive desire; for He has been
teaching you all this time: if you have been doing His teaching, you are
on the way to learn more; if you hear and do not heed, where is the
wonder that the things I tell you sound in your ears as the muttering of
a dotard? They convey to you nothing, it may be: but that which makes of
them words--words--words, lies in you, not in me. Yours is the killing
power. They would bring you life, but the death in him that knoweth and
doeth not is strong; in your air they drop and die, winged things no
more.

For days Faber took measures not to be seen by Juliet. But he was
constantly about the place, and when she woke from a sleep, they had
often to tell her that he had been by her side all the time she slept.
At night he was either in her room or in the next chamber. Dorothy used
to say to her that if she wanted her husband, she had only to go to
sleep. She was greatly tempted to pretend, but would not.

At length Faber requested Dorothy to tell Juliet that the doctor said
she might send for her husband when she pleased. Much as he longed to
hear her voice, he would not come without her permission.

He was by her side the next moment. But for minutes not a word was
spoken; a speechless embrace was all.

It does not concern me to relate how by degrees they came to a close
understanding. Where love is, everything is easy, or, if not easy, yet
to be accomplished. Of course Faber made his return confession in full.
I will not say that Juliet had not her respondent pangs of retrospective
jealousy. Love, although an angel, has much to learn yet, and the demon
Jealousy may be one of the school masters of her coming perfection: God
only knows. There must be a divine way of casting out the demon; else
how would it be here-after?

Unconfessed to each other, their falls would forever have been between
to part them; confessed, they drew them together in sorrow and humility
and mutual consoling. The little Amanda could not tell whether Juliet's
house or Dorothy's was her home: when at the one, she always talked of
the other as _home_. She called her father _papa_, and Juliet _mamma_;
Dorothy had been _auntie_ from the first. She always wrote her name,
_Amanda Duck Faber_. From all this the gossips of Glaston explained
everything satisfactorily: Juliet had left her husband on discovering
that he had a child of whose existence he had never told her; but
learning that the mother was dead, yielded at length, and was
reconciled. That was the nearest they ever came to the facts, and it was
not needful they should ever know more. The talkers of the world are not
on the jury of the court of the universe. There are many, doubtless, who
need the shame of a public exposure to make them recognize their own
doing for what it is; but of such Juliet had not been. Her husband knew
her fault--that was enough: he knew also his own immeasurably worse than
hers, but when they folded each other to the heart, they left their
faults outside--as God does, when He casts our sins behind His back, in
utter uncreation.

I will say nothing definite as to the condition of mind at which Faber
had arrived when last Wingfold and he had a talk together. He was
growing, and that is all we can require of any man. He would not say he
was a believer in the supernal, but he believed more than he said, and
he never talked against belief. Also he went as often as he could to
church, which, little as it means in general, did not mean little when
the man was Paul Faber, and where the minister was Thomas Wingfold.

It is time for the end. Here it is--in a little poem, which, on her next
birthday, the curate gave Dorothy:

    O wind of God, that blowest in the mind,
      Blow, blow and wake the gentle spring in me;
    Blow, swifter blow, a strong, warm summer wind,
      Till all the flowers with eyes come out to see;
      Blow till the fruit hangs red on every tree,
    And our high-soaring song-larks meet thy dove--
  High the imperfect soars, descends the perfect Love.

    Blow not the less though winter cometh then;
      Blow, wind of God, blow hither changes keen;
    Let the spring creep into the ground again,
      The flowers close all their eyes, not to be seen:
      All lives in thee that ever once hath been:
    Blow, fill my upper air with icy storms;
  Breathe cold, O wind of God, and kill my canker-worms.