Paul Faber, Surgeon Part 14

"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 n.o.ble, 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 G.o.d 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, G.o.d 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 G.o.dward should be an influence destructive of the same. Under the growing fascination of the handsome, n.o.ble-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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d," 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 pa.s.sed, 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 n.o.bler 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 G.o.ddess-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 G.o.d! 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.s through his various stages of Pagan, Guebre, Moslem, Jew, Essene--G.o.d knows what all--before he can begin to see and understand the living Christ. The child has to pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sage 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sisting, 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 a.s.sembly. 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 G.o.d of workmen, the G.o.d 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d?--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 n.o.bler 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 G.o.d 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.