Paul Faber, Surgeon Part 10

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 coa.r.s.e 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 G.o.d,--"

"Ah!" interrupted the doctor, "there, _you_ beg the question. Suppose there should be no G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 superst.i.tion 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 pa.s.sionately 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 b.u.t.terflies, 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 sh.o.r.e?

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 G.o.d, 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."