Paul Faber, Surgeon by George MacDonald (page 2)

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 SHOP.

About four years previous to the time of which I am now writing, and while yet Mr. Drake was in high repute among the people of Cowlane chapel, he went to London to visit an old friend, a woman of great practical benevolence, exercised chiefly toward orphans. Just then her thoughts and feelings were largely occupied with a lovely little girl, the chain of whose history had been severed at the last link, and lost utterly.

A poor woman in Southwark had of her own motion, partly from love to children and compassion for both them and their mothers, partly to earn her own bread with pleasure, established a sort of _creche_ in her two rooms, where mothers who had work from home could bring their children in the morning, and leave them till night. The child had been committed to her charge day after day for some weeks. One morning, when she brought her, the mother seemed out of health, and did not appear at night to take her home. The next day the woman heard she was in the small-pox-hospital. For a week or so, the money to pay for the child came almost regularly, in postage-stamps, then ceased altogether, and the woman heard nothing either from or of the mother. After a fortnight she contrived to go to the hospital to inquire after her. No one corresponding to her description was in the place. The name was a common one, and several patients bearing it had lately died and been buried, while others had recovered and were gone. Her inquiries in the neighborhood had no better success: no one knew her, and she did not even discover where she had lived. She could not bear the thought of taking the child to the work-house, and kept her for six or eight weeks, but she had a sickly son, a grown lad, to support, and in dread lest she should be compelled to give her up to the parish, had applied for counsel to the lady I have mentioned. When Mr. Drake arrived, she had for some time been searching about in vain to find a nest for her.

Since his boys had been taken from him, and the unprized girl left behind had grown so precious, Mr. Drake had learned to love children as the little ones of God. He had no doubt, like many people, a dread of children with unknown antecedents: who could tell what root of bitterness, beyond the common inheritance, might spring up in them? But all that was known of this one’s mother was unusually favorable; and when his friend took him to see the child, his heart yearned after her. He took her home to Dorothy, and she had grown up such as we have seen her, a wild, roguish, sweet, forgetful, but not disobedient child–very dear to both the Drakes, who called her their duckling.

As we have seen, however, Mr. Drake had in his adversity grown fearful and faint-hearted, and had begun to doubt whether he had a right to keep her. And of course he had not, if it was to be at the expense of his tradespeople. But he was of an impetuous nature, and would not give even God time to do the thing that needed time to be done well. He saw a crisis was at hand. Perhaps, however, God saw a spiritual, where he saw a temporal crisis.

Dorothy had a small sum, saved by her mother, so invested as to bring her about twenty pounds a year, and of the last payment she had two pounds in hand. Her father had nothing, and quarter-day was two months off. This was the common knowledge of their affairs at which they arrived as they sat at breakfast on the Monday morning, after the saddest Sunday either of them had ever spent. They had just risen from the table, and the old woman was removing the cloth, when a knock came to the lane-door, and she went to open it, leaving the room-door ajar, whereby the minister caught a glimpse of a blue apron, and feeling himself turning sick, sat down again. Lisbeth re-entered with a rather greasy-looking note, which was of course from the butcher, and Mr. Drake’s hand trembled as he opened it. Mr. Jones wrote that he would not have troubled him, had he not asked for his bill; but, if it was quite convenient, he would be glad to have the amount by the end of the week, as he had a heavy payment to make the following Monday. Mr. Drake handed the note to his daughter, rose hastily, and left the room. Dorothy threw it down half-read, and followed him. He was opening the door, his hat in his hand.

“Where are you going in such a hurry, father dear?” she said. “Wait a moment and I’ll go with you.”

“My child, there is not a moment to lose!” he replied excitedly.

“I did not read all the letter,” she returned; “but I think he does not want the money till the end of the week.”

“And what better shall we be then?” he rejoined, almost angrily. “The man looks to me, and where will he find himself on Monday? Let us be as honest at least as we can.”

“But we may be able to borrow it–or–who knows what might happen?”

“There it is, my dear! Who knows what? We can be sure of nothing in this world.”

“And what in the next, father?”

The minister was silent. If God was anywhere, he was here as much as there! That was not the matter in hand, however. He owed the money, and was bound to let the man know that he could not pay it by the end of the week. Without another word to Dorothy, he walked from the house, and, like a man afraid of cowardice, went straight at the object of his dismay. He was out of the lane and well into Pine street before he thought to put on his hat.

From afar he saw the butcher, standing in front of his shop–a tall, thin man in blue. His steel glittered by his side, and a red nightcap hung its tassel among the curls of his gray hair. He was discussing, over a small joint of mutton, some point of economic interest with a country customer in a check-shawl. To the minister’s annoyance the woman was one of his late congregation, and he would gladly have passed the shop, had he had the courage. When he came near, the butcher turned from the woman, and said, taking his nightcap by the tassel in rudimentary obeisance.

“At your service, sir.”

His courtesy added to Mr. Drake’s confusion: it was plain the man imagined he had brought him his money! Times were indeed changed since his wife used to drive out in her brougham to pay the bills! Was this what a man had for working in the vineyard the better part of a lifetime? The property he did not heed. That had been the portion of the messengers of heaven from the first. But the shame!–what was he to do with that? Who ever heard of St. Paul not being able to pay a butcher’s bill! No doubt St. Paul was a mighty general, and he but a poor subaltern, but in the service there was no respect of persons. On the other hand, who ever heard of St. Paul having any bills to pay!–or for that matter, indeed, of his marrying a rich wife, and getting into expensive habits through popularity! Who ever heard of his being dependent on a congregation! He accepted help sometimes, but had always his goats’-hair and his tent-making to fall back upon!–Only, after all, was the Lord never a hard master? Had he not let it come to this?

Much more of the sort went through his mind in a flash. The country woman had again drawn the attention of the butcher with a parting word.

“You don’t want a chicken to-day–do you, Mr. Drake?” she said, as she turned to go.

“No, thank you, Mrs. Thomson. How is your husband?”

“Better, I thank you sir. Good morning, sir.”

“Mr. Jones,” said the minister–and as he spoke, he stepped inside the shop, removed his hat, and wiped his forehead, “I come to you with shame. I have not money enough to pay your bill. Indeed I can not even pay a portion of it till next quarter-day.”

“Don’t mention it, Mr. Drake, sir.”

“But your bill on Monday, Mr. Jones!”

“Oh! never mind that. I shall do very well, I dare say. I have a many as owes me a good deal more than you do, sir, and I’m much obliged to you for letting of me know at once. You see, sir, if you hadn’t–“

“Yes, I know: I asked for it! I am the sorrier I can’t pay it after all. It is quite disgraceful, but I simply can’t help it.”

“Disgraceful, sir!” exclaimed Mr. Jones, almost as if hurt: “I wish they thought as you do as has ten times the reason, sir!”

“But I have a request to make,” the pastor went on, heedless of the butcher’s remark, and pulling out a large and handsome gold watch: “Would you oblige me by taking this watch in security until I do pay you? It is worth a great deal more than your bill. It would add much to the obligation, if you would put it out of sight somewhere, and say nothing about it. If I should die before paying your bill, you will be at liberty to sell it; and what is over, after deducting interest, you will kindly hand to my daughter.”

Mr. Jones stared with open mouth. He thought the minister had lost his senses.

“What do you make of me, sir?” he said at last. “You go for to trust me with a watch like that, and fancy I wouldn’t trust you with a little bill that ain’t been owing three months yet! You make me that I don’t know myself, sir! Never you mention the bill to me again, sir. I’ll ask for it, all in good time. Can I serve you with any thing to-day, sir?”

“No, I thank you. I must at least avoid adding to my debt.”

“I hope what you do have, you’ll have of me, sir. I don’t mind waiting a goodish bit for my money, but what cuts me to the heart is to see any one as owes me money a goin’ over the way, as if ‘e ‘adn’t ‘a’ found my meat good enough to serve his turn, an’ that was why he do it. That does rile me!”

“Take my word for it, Mr. Jones–all the meat we have we shall have of you. But we must be careful. You see I am not quite so–so–“

He stopped with a sickly smile.

“Look ye here, Mr. Drake!” broke in the butcher: “you parsons ain’t proper brought up. You ain’t learned to take care of yourselves. Now us tradespeople, we’re learned from the first to look arter number one, and not on no account to forget which _is_ number one. But you parsons, now,–you’ll excuse me, sir; I don’t mean no offense; you ain’t brought up to ‘t, an’ it ain’t to be expected of you–but it’s a great neglect in your eddication, sir; an’ the consekence is as how us as knows better ‘as to take care on you as don’t know no better. I can’t say I think much o’ them ‘senters: they don’t stick by their own; but you’re a honest man, sir, if ever there was a honest man as was again’ the church, an’ ask you for that money, I never will, acause I know when you can pay, it’s pay you will. Keep your mind easy, sir: _I_ shan’t come to grief for lack o’ what you owe me! Only don’t you go a starving of yourself, Mr. Drake. I don’t hold with that nohow. Have a bit o’ meat when you want it, an’ don’t think over it twice. There!”

The minister was just able to thank his new friend and no more. He held out his hand to him, forgetful of the grease that had so often driven him from the pavement to the street. The butcher gave it a squeeze that nearly shot it out of his lubricated grasp, and they parted, both better men for the interview.

When Mr. Drake reached home, he met his daughter coming out to find him. He took her hand, led her into the house and up to his study, and closed the door.

“Dorothy,” he said, “it is sweet to be humbled. The Spirit can bring water from the rock, and grace from a hard heart. I mean mine, not the butcher’s. He has behaved to me as I don’t see how any but a Christian could, and that although his principles are scarcely those of one who had given up all for the truth. He is like the son in the parable who said, I go not, but went; while I, much I fear me, am like the other who said, I go, sir, but went not. Alas! I have always found it hard to be grateful; there is something in it unpalatable to the old Adam; but from the bottom of my heart I thank Mr. Jones, and I will pray God for him ere I open a book. Dorothy, I begin to doubt our way of church-membership. It _may_ make the good better; but if a bad one gets in, it certainly makes him worse. I begin to think too, that every minister ought to be independent of his flock–I do not mean by the pay of the state, God forbid! but by having some trade or profession, if no fortune. Still, if I had had the money to pay that bill, I should now be where I am glad not to be–up on my castletop, instead of down at the gate. He has made me poor that He might send me humility, and that I find unspeakably precious. Perhaps He will send me the money next. But may it not be intended also to make us live more simply–on vegetables perhaps? Do you not remember how it fared with Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, when they refused the meat and the wine, and ate pulse instead? At the end of ten days their countenances appeared fairer and fatter in flesh than all the children which did eat the portion of the king’s meat. Pulse, you know, means peas and beans, and every thing of that kind–which is now proved to be almost as full of nourishment as meat itself, and to many constitutions more wholesome. Let us have a dinner of beans. You can buy haricot beans at the grocer’s–can you not? If Ducky does not thrive on them, or they don’t agree with you, my Dorothy, you will have only to drop them. I am sure they will agree with me. But let us try, and then the money I owe Mr. Jones, will not any longer hang like a millstone about my neck.”

“We will begin this very day,” said Dorothy, delighted to see her father restored to equanimity. “I will go and see after a dinner of herbs.–We shall have love with it anyhow, father!” she added, kissing him.

That day the minister, who in his earlier days had been allowed by his best friends to be a little particular about his food, and had been no mean connoisseur in wines, found more pleasure at his table, from lightness of heart, and the joy of a new independence, than he had had for many a day. It added much also to his satisfaction with the experiment, that, instead of sleeping, as his custom was, after dinner, he was able to read without drowsiness even. Perhaps Dorothy’s experience was not quite so satisfactory, for she looked weary when they sat down to tea.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE PARLOR AGAIN.