Surgeon Paul Faber by George MacDonald (e book free reading txt) 📕

ever and anon started awake, and with fretful claws pulled at its nest in the fibers of her heart?

The curate and his wife talked softly all the way back to the house.

"Do you really think," said Helen, "that every fault one has ever committed will one day be trumpeted out to the universe?"

"That were hardly worth the while of the universe," answered her husband. "Such an age-long howling of evil stupidities would be enough to turn its brain with ennui and disgust. Nevertheless, the hypocrite will certainly know himself discovered and shamed, and unable any longer to hide himself from his neighbor. His past deeds also will be made plain to all who, for further ends of rectification, require to know them. Shame will then, I trust, be the first approach of his redemption."

Juliet, for she was close behind them, heard his words and shuddered.

"You are feeling it cold, Mrs. Faber," said the rector, and, with the fatherly familiarity of an old man, drew her cloak better around her.

"It is not cold," she faltered; "but somehow the night-air always makes me shiver."

The rector pulled a muffler from his coat-pocket, and laid it like a scarf on her shoulders.

"How kind you are!" she murmured. "I don't deserve it."

"Who deserves any thing?" said the rector. "I less, I am sure, than any one I know. Only, if you will believe my curate, you have but to ask, and have what you need."

"I wasn't the first to say that, sir," Wingfold struck in, turning his head over his shoulder.

"I know that, my boy," answered Mr. Bevis; "but you were the first to make me want to find its true.-I say, Mrs. Faber, what if it should turn out after all, that there was a grand treasure hid in your field and mine, that we never got the good of because we didn't believe it was there and dig for it? What if this scatter-brained curate of mine should be right when he talks so strangely about our living in the midst of calling voices, cleansing fires, baptizing dews, and won't hearken, won't be clean, won't give up our sleep and our dreams for the very bliss for which we cry out in them!"

The old man had stopped, taken off his hat, and turned toward her. He spoke with such a strange solemnity of voice that it could hardly have been believed his by those who knew him as a judge of horses and not as a reader of prayers. The other pair had stopped also.

"I should call it very hard," returned Juliet, "to come so near it and yet miss it."

"Especially to be driven so near it against one's will, and yet succeed in getting past without touching it," said the curate, with a flavor of asperity. His wife gently pinched his arm, and he was ashamed.

When they reached home, Juliet went straight to bed-or at least to her room for the night.

"I say, Wingfold," remarked the rector, as they sat alone after supper, "that sermon of yours was above your congregation."

"I am afraid you are right, sir. I am sorry. But if you had seen their faces as I did, perhaps you would have modified the conclusion."

"I am very glad I heard it, though," said the rector.

They had more talk, and when Wingfold went up stairs, he found Helen asleep. Annoyed with himself for having spoken harshly to Mrs. Faber, and more than usually harassed by a sense of failure in his sermon, he threw himself into a chair, and sat brooding and praying till the light began to appear. Out of the reeds shaken all night in the wind, rose with the morning this bird:-

THE SMOKE.

Lord, I have laid my heart upon Thy altar,
But can not get the wood to burn;
It hardly flares ere it begins to falter,
And to the dark return.

Old sap, or night-fallen dew, has damped the fuel;
In vain my breath would flame provoke;
Yet see-at every poor attempt's renewal
To Thee ascends the smoke.

'Tis all I have-smoke, failure, foiled endeavor,
Coldness, and doubt, and palsied lack;
Such as I have I send Thee;-perfect Giver,
Send Thou Thy lightning back.

In the morning, as soon as breakfast was over, Helen's ponies were brought to the door, she and Juliet got into the carriage, Wingfold jumped up behind, and they returned to Glaston. Little was said on the way, and Juliet seemed strangely depressed. They left her at her own door.

"What did that look mean?" said Wingfold to his wife, the moment they were round the corner of Mr. Drew's shop.

"You saw it then?" returned Helen. "I did not think you had been so quick."

"I saw what I could not help taking for relief," said the curate, "when the maid told her that her husband was not at home."

They said no more till they reached the rectory, where Helen followed her husband to his study.

"He can't have turned tyrant already!" she said, resuming the subject of Juliet's look. "But she's afraid of him."

"It did look like it," rejoined her husband. "Oh, Helen, what a hideous thing fear of her husband must be for a woman, who has to spend not her days only in his presence, but her nights by his side! I do wonder so many women dare to be married. They would need all to have clean consciences."

"Or no end of faith in their husbands," said Helen. "If ever I come to be afraid of you, it will be because I have done something very wrong indeed."

"Don't be too sure of that, Helen," returned Wingfold. "There are very decent husbands as husbands go, who are yet unjust, exacting, selfish. The most devoted of wives are sometimes afraid of the men they yet consider the very models of husbands. It is a brutal shame that a woman should feel afraid, or even uneasy, instead of safe, beside her husband."

"You are always on the side of the women, Thomas," said his wife; "and I love you for it somehow-I can't tell why."

"You make a mistake to begin with, my dear: you don't love me because I am on the side of the women, but because I am on the side of the wronged. If the man happened to be the injured party, and I took the side of the woman, you would be down on me like an avalanche."

"I dare say. But there is something more in it. I don't think I am altogether mistaken. You don't talk like most men. They have such an ugly way of asserting superiority, and sneering at women! That you never do, and as a woman I am grateful for it."

The same afternoon Dorothy Drake paid a visit to Mrs. Faber, and was hardly seated before the feeling that something was wrong arose in her. Plainly Juliet was suffering-from some cause she wished to conceal. Several times she seemed to turn faint, hurriedly fanned herself, and drew a deep breath. Once she rose hastily and went to the window, as if struggling with some oppression, and returned looking very pale.

Dorothy was frightened.

"What is the matter, dear?" she said.

"Nothing," answered Juliet, trying to smile. "Perhaps I took a little cold last night," she added with a shiver.

"Have you told your husband?" asked Dorothy.

"I haven't seen him since Saturday," she answered quietly, but a pallor almost deathly overspread her face.

"I hope he will soon be home," said Dorothy. "Mind you tell him how you feel the instant he comes in."

Juliet answered with a smile, but that smile Dorothy never forgot. It haunted her all the way home. When she entered her chamber, her eyes fell upon the petal of a monthly rose, which had dropped from the little tree in her window, and lay streaked and crumpled on the black earth of the flower-pot: by one of those queer mental vagaries in which the imagination and the logical faculty seem to combine to make sport of the reason-"How is it that smile has got here before me?" she said to herself.

She sat down and thought. Could it be that Juliet had, like herself, begun to find there could be no peace without the knowledge of an absolute peace? If it were so, and she would but let her know it, then, sisters at least in sorrow and search, they would together seek the Father of their spirits, if haply they might find Him; together they would cry to Him-and often: it might be He would hear them, and reveal Himself. Her heart was sore all day, thinking of that sad face. Juliet, whether she knew it or not, was, like herself, in trouble because she had no God.

The conclusion shows that Dorothy was far from hopeless. That she could believe the lack of a God was the cause unknown to herself of her friend's depression, implies an assurance of the human need of a God, and a hope there might be One to be found. For herself, if she could but find Him, she felt there would be nothing but bliss evermore. Dorothy then was more hopeful than she herself knew. I doubt if absolute hopelessness is ever born save at the word, Depart from me . Hope springs with us from God Himself, and, however down-beaten, however sick and nigh unto death, will evermore lift its head and rise again.

She could say nothing to her father. She loved him-oh, how dearly! and trusted him; where she could trust him at all!-oh, how perfectly! but she had no confidence in his understanding of herself. The main cause whence arose his insufficiency and her lack of trust was, that all his faith in God was as yet scarcely more independent of thought-forms, word-shapes, dogma and creed, than that of the Catholic or Calvinist. How few are there whose faith is simple and mighty in the Father of Jesus Christ, waiting to believe all that He will reveal to them! How many of those who talk of faith as the one needful thing, will accept as sufficient to the razing of the walls of partition between you and them, your heartiest declaration that you believe in Him with the whole might of your nature, lay your soul bare to the revelation of His spirit, and stir up your will to obey Him?-And then comes your temptation-to exclude, namely, from your love and sympathy the weak and boisterous brethren who, after the fashion possible to them, believe in your Lord, because they exclude you, and put as little confidence in your truth as in your insight. If you do know more of Christ than they, upon you lies the heavier obligation to be true to them, as was St. Paul to the Judaizing Christians, whom these so much resemble, who were his chief hindrance in the work his Master had given him to do. In Christ we must forget Paul and Apollos and Cephas, pope and bishop and pastor and presbyter, creed and interpretation and theory. Care-less of their opinions, we must be careful of themselves-careful that we have salt in ourselves, and that the salt lose not its savor, that the old man, dead through Christ, shall not, vampire-like,