Paul Faber, Surgeon Part 31

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 mult.i.tude of words--at least to his own daughter: he was not so sure of G.o.d as he was of that daughter, with those eyes looking straight into his! Could it be that he never had believed in G.o.d 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, d.o.g.g.i.ng 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 G.o.d--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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d;" but now he hesitated, and minutes pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d."

"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 G.o.dlike heart. The Lord says a bramble-bush can not bring forth grapes."

"The notions you gathered of G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.suredly it would have become, a veil to hide from men the Father of their spirits. Do you long for the a.s.surance 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.s--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 pa.s.sed 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 x.x.xIII.

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 pa.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce, 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.