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

that the sunset might not wound him so sore; now, as he rode homeward into the fronting sunset, he felt nothing, cared for nothing, only ached with a dull aching through body and soul. He was still kind to his fellows, but the glow of the kindness had vanished, and truest thanks hardly waked the slightest thrill.

He very seldom saw Wingfold now, and less than ever was inclined toward his doctrine; for had it not been through him this misery had come upon him? Had he not, with the confidence of all the sciences, uttered the merest dreams as eternal truths? How could poor Juliet help supposing he knew the things he asserted, and taking them for facts? The human heart was the one unreasonable thing, sighing ever after that which is not! Sprung from nothing, it yet desired a creator!-at least some hearts did so: his did not; he knew better!

There was of course no reason in this. Was the thing not a fact which she had confessed? was he not a worshiper of fact? did he not even dignify it with the name of truth? and could he wish his wife had kept the miserable fact to herself, leaving him to his fools'-paradise of ignorance? Why then should he feel resentment against the man whose teaching had only compelled her to confess it?-But the thing was out of the realm of science and its logic.

Sometimes he grew fierce, and determined to face every possible agony, endure all, and dominate his misery; but ever and anon it returned with its own disabling sickness, bringing the sense of the unendurable. Of his own motion he saw nobody except in his practice. He studied hard, even to weariness and faintness, contrived strange experiments, and caught, he believed, curious peeps into the house of life. Upon them he founded theories as wild as they were daring, and hob-nobbed with death and corruption. But life is at the will of the Maker, and misery can not kill it. By degrees a little composure returned, and the old keen look began to revive. But there were wrinkles on the forehead that had hitherto been smooth as ivory; furrows, the dry water-courses of sorrow, appeared on his cheeks, and a few silvery threads glinted in his hair. His step was heavy, and his voice had lost its ring-the cheer was out of it. He no more obtruded his opinions, for, as I have said, he shrunk from all interchange, but he held to them as firmly as ever. He was not to be driven from the truth by suffering! But there was a certain strange movement in his spirit of which he took no note-a feeling of resentment, as if against a God that yet did not exist, for making upon him the experiment whether he might not, by oppression, be driven to believe in Him.

When Dorothy knew of his return, and his ways began to show that he intended living just as before his marriage, the time seemed come for telling Juliet of the accident and his recovery from the effects of it. She went into violent hysterics, and the moment she could speak, blamed Dorothy bitterly for not having told her before.

"It is all your lying religion!" she said.

"Your behavior, Juliet," answered Dorothy, putting on the matron, and speaking with authority, "shows plainly how right I was. You were not to be trusted, and I knew it. Had I told you, you would have rushed to him, and been anything but welcome. He would not even have known you; and you would have been two on the doctor's hands. You would have made everything public, and when your husband came to himself, would probably have been the death of him after all."

"He may have begun to think more kindly of me by that time," said Juliet, humbled a little.

"We must not act on may-haves ," answered Dorothy.

"You say he looks wretched now," suggested Juliet.

"And well he may, after concussion of the brain, not to mention what preceded it," said Dorothy.

She had come to see that Juliet required very plain speaking. She had so long practiced the art of deceiving herself that she was skillful at it. Indeed, but for the fault she had committed, she would all her life long have been given to petting and pitying, justifying and approving of herself. One can not help sometimes feeling that the only chance for certain persons is to commit some fault sufficient to shame them out of the self-satisfaction in which they burrow. A fault, if only it be great and plain enough to exceed their powers of self-justification, may then be, of God's mercy, not indeed an angel of light to draw them, but verily a goblin of darkness to terrify them out of themselves. For the powers of darkness are His servants also, though incapable of knowing it: He who is first and last can, even of those that love the lie, make slaves of the truth. And they who will not be sons shall be slaves, let them rant and wear crowns as they please in the slaves' quarters.

"You must not expect him to get over such a shock all at once," said Dorothy. "-It may be," she continued, "that you were wrong in running away from him. I do not pretend to judge between you, but, perhaps, after the injury you had done him, you ought to have left it with him to say what you were to do next. By taking it in your own hands, you may have only added to the wrong."

"And who helped me?" returned Juliet, in a tone of deep reproach.

"Helped you to run from him, Juliet!-Really, if you were in the habit of behaving to your husband as you do to me-!" She checked herself, and resumed calmly-"You forget the facts of the case, my dear. So far from helping you to run from him, I stopped you from running so far that neither could he find you, nor you return to him again. But now we must make the best of it by waiting. We must find out whether he wants you again, or your absence is a relief to him. If I had been a man, I should have been just as wild as he."

She had seen in Juliet some signs that self-abhorrence was wanting, and self-pity reviving, and she would connive at no unreality in her treatment of herself. She was one thing when bowed to the earth in misery and shame, and quite another if thinking herself hardly used on all sides.

It was a strange position for a young woman to be in-that of watcher over the marriage relations of two persons, to neither of whom she could be a friend otherwise than ab extra . Ere long she began almost to despair. Day after day she heard or saw that Faber continued sunk in himself, and how things were going there she could not tell. Was he thinking about the wife he had lost, or brooding over the wrong she had done him? There was the question-and who was to answer it? At the same time she was all but certain, that, things being as they were, any reconciliation that might be effected would owe itself merely to the raising, as it were of the dead, and the root of bitterness would soon trouble them afresh. If but one of them had begun the task of self-conquest, there would be hope for both. But of such a change there was in Juliet as yet no sign.

Dorothy then understood her position-it was wonderful with what clearness, but solitary necessity is a hot sun to ripen. What was she to do? To what quarter-could she to any quarter look for help? Naturally she thought first of Mr. Wingfold. But she did not feel at all sure that he would consent to receive a communication upon any other understanding than that he was to act in the matter as he might see best; and would it be right to acquaint him with the secret of another when possibly he might feel bound to reveal it? Besides, if he kept it hid, the result might be blame to him; and blame, she reasoned, although a small matter in regard to one like herself, might in respect of a man in the curate's position involve serious consequences. While she thus reflected, it came into her mind with what enthusiasm she had heard him speak of Mr. Polwarth, attributing to him the beginnings of all enlightenment he had himself ever received. Without this testimony, she would not have once thought of him. Indeed she had been more than a little doubtful of him, for she had never felt attracted to him, and from her knowledge of the unhealthy religious atmosphere of the chapel, had got unreasonably suspicious of cant. She had not had experience enough to distinguish with any certainty the speech that comes from the head and that which comes out of the fullness of the heart. A man must talk out of that which is in him; his well must give out the water of its own spring; but what seems a well maybe only a cistern, and the water by no means living water. What she had once or twice heard him say, had rather repelled than drawn her; but Dorothy had faith, and Mr. Wingfold had spoken. Might she tell him? Ought she not to seek his help? Would he keep the secret? Could he help if he would? Was he indeed as wise as they said?

In the meantime, little as she thought it, Polwarth had been awaiting a communication from her; but when he found that the question whose presence was so visible in her whole bearing, neither died nor bore fruit, he began to think whether he might not help her to speak. The next time, therefore, that he opened the gate to her, he held in his hand a little bud he had just broken from a monthly rose. It was a hard little button, upon which the green leaves of its calyx clung as if choking it.

"What is the matter with this bud, do you think, Miss Drake?" he asked.

"That you have plucked it," she answered sharply, throwing a suspicious glance in his face.

"No; that can not be it," he answered with a quiet smile of intelligence. "It has been just as you see it for the last three days. I only plucked it the moment I saw you coming."

"Then the frost has caught it."

"The frost has caught it," he answered; "but I am not quite sure whether the cause of its death was not rather its own life than the frost."

"I don't see what you mean by that, Mr. Polwarth," said Dorothy, doubtfully, and with a feeling of discomfort.

"I admit it sounds paradoxical," returned the little man. "What I mean is, that the struggle of the life in it to unfold itself, rather than any thing else, was the cause of its death."

"But the frost was the cause of its not being able to unfold itself," said Dorothy.

"That I admit," said Polwarth; "and perhaps a weaker life in the flower would have yielded sooner. I may have carried too far an analogy I was seeking to establish between it and the human heart, in which repression is so much more dangerous than mere oppression. Many a heart has withered like my poor little bud, because it did not know its friend when it saw him."

Dorothy was frightened. He knew something! Or did he only suspect? Perhaps