Paul Faber, Surgeon Part 18

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

"G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d will lift him up?"

said Dorothy to herself when she was alone. "It seems to me if I only knew G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, give us for His glory the warped reflection of our cracked and spotted and rippled gla.s.s, 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 a.s.sailed; 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 b.u.t.terfly--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 pet.i.tions! 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 a.s.sumed 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.sent 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 a.s.sented, 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 G.o.d'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 d.a.m.nation is something as near it as it can be made; itself it can not be, for even the d.a.m.ned must live by G.o.d'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 n.o.blest 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 n.o.ble 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 G.o.d 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 gra.s.s. 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sed, 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 dest.i.tute. 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 G.o.d he did _not_ trust in Him? Where was the faithlessness of which his faithlessness complained? A phantom of its own! Yea, let G.o.d 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 G.o.d leave him thus without faith? Why did not G.o.d 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 G.o.d put faith into your heart without your stirring up your heart to believe, the faith would be G.o.d's and not yours. It is true all is G.o.d'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 s.p.a.ce; 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 c.h.i.n.ks 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 pa.s.sage below might have been much shabbier without necessarily indicating poverty. His walking-stick had a gold k.n.o.b 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 G.o.d after a bettering fashion for forty years at least, and yet would not give G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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?"