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Paul Faber, Surgeon

by George MacDonald · English · Gutenberg #12387 · 932,259 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Paul Faber, Surgeon

Author: George MacDonald


        
Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #12387]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAUL FABER, SURGEON ***

[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

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