Paul Faber, Surgeon by George MacDonald (page 6)

“I have it!” he exclaimed. “You went to church at Nestley last night! Confound them all with their humbug! You have been letting their infernal nonsense get a hold of you again! It has quite upset you–that, and going much too long without your dinner. What _can_ be keeping it?” He left her hurriedly and rang the bell. “You must speak to the cook, my love. She is getting out of the good habits I had so much trouble to teach her. But no–no! you shall not be troubled with _my_ servants. I will speak to her myself. After dinner I will read you some of my favorite passages in Montaigne. No, you shall read to me: your French is so much better than mine.”

Dinner was announced and nothing more was said. Paul ate well, Juliet scarcely at all, but she managed to hide from him the offense. They rose together and returned to the drawing-room.

The moment Faber shut the door Juliet turned in the middle of the room, and as he came up to her said, in a voice much unlike her own:

“Paul, if I _were_ to do any thing very bad, as bad as could be, would you forgive me?”

“Come, my love,” expostulated Faber, speaking more gently than before, for he had had his dinner, “surely you are not going to spoil our evening with any more such nonsense!”

“Answer me, Paul, or I shall think you do not love me,” she said, and the tone of her entreaty verged upon demand. “Would you forgive me if I had done something _very_ bad?”

“Of course I should,” he answered, with almost irritated haste, “–that is, if I could ever bring myself to allow any thing you did was wrong. Only, you would witch me out of opinion and judgment and every thing else with two words from your dear lips.”

“Should I, Paul?” she said; and lifting her face from his shoulder, she looked up in his from the depths of two dark fountains full of tears. Never does the soul so nearly identify itself with matter as when revealing itself through the eyes; never does matter so nearly lose itself in spiritual absorption, as when two eyes like Juliet’s are possessed and glorified by the rush of the soul through their portals. Faber kissed eyes and lips and neck in a glow of delight. She was the vision of a most blessed dream, and she was his, all and altogether his! He never thought then how his own uncreed and the prayer-book were of the same mind that Death would one day part them. There is that in every high and simple feeling that stamps it with eternity. For my own part I believe that, if life has not long before twinned any twain, Death can do nothing to divide them. The nature of each and every pure feeling, even in the man who may sin away the very memory of it, is immortal; and who knows from under what a depth of ashes the love of the saving God may yet revive it!

The next moment the doctor was summoned. When he returned, Juliet was in bed, and pretended to be asleep.

In the morning she appeared at the breakfast table so pale, so worn, so troubled, that her husband was quite anxious about her. All she would confess to was, that she had not slept well, and had a headache. Attributing her condition to a nervous attack, he gave her some medicine, took her to the drawing-room, and prescribed the new piano, which he had already found the best of all sedatives for her. She loathed the very thought of it–could no more have touched it than if the ivory keys had been white hot steel. She watched him from the window while he mounted his horse, but the moment the last red gleam of Ruber vanished, she flung her arms above her head, and with a stifled cry threw herself on a couch, stuffed her handkerchief into her mouth, and in fierce dumb agony, tore it to shreds with hands and teeth. Presently she rose, opened the door almost furtively, and stole softly down the stair, looking this way and that, like one intent on some evil deed. At the bottom she pushed a green baize-covered door, peeped into a passage, then crept on tiptoe toward the surgery. Arrived there she darted to a spot she knew, and stretched a trembling hand toward a bottle full of a dark-colored liquid. As instantly she drew it back, and stood listening with bated breath and terrified look. It _was_ a footstep approaching the outer door of the surgery! She turned and fled from it, still noiseless, and never stopped till she was in her own room. There she shut and locked the door, fell on her knees by the bedside, and pressed her face into the coverlid. She had no thought of praying. She wanted to hide, only to hide. Neither was it from old habit she fell upon her knees, for she had never been given to kneeling. I can not but think, nevertheless, that there was a dumb germ of prayer at the heart of the action–that falling upon her knees, and that hiding of her face. The same moment something took place within her to which she could have given no name, which she could have represented in no words, a something which came she knew not whence, was she knew not what, and went she knew not whither, of which indeed she would never have become aware except for what followed, but which yet so wrought, that she rose from her knees saying to herself, with clenched teeth and burning eyes, “I _will_ tell him.”

As if she had known the moment of her death near, she began mechanically to set every thing in order in the room, and as she came to herself she was saying, “Let him kill me. I wish he would. I am quite willing to die by his hand. He will be kind, and do it gently. He knows so many ways!”

It was a terrible day. She did not go out of her room again. Her mood changed a hundred times. The resolve to confess alternated with wild mockery and laughter, but still returned. She would struggle to persuade herself that her whole condition was one of foolish exaggeration, of senseless excitement about nothing–the merest delirium of feminine fastidiousness; and the next instant would turn cold with horror at a fresh glimpse of the mere fact. What could the wretched matter be to him now–or to her? Who was the worse, or had ever been the worse but herself? And what did it amount to? What claim had any one, what claim could even a God, if such a being there were, have upon the past which had gone from her, was no more in any possible sense within her reach than if it had never been? Was it not as if it had never been? Was the woman to be hurled–to hurl herself into misery for the fault of the girl? It was all nonsense–a trifle at worst–a disagreeable trifle, no doubt, but still a trifle! Only would to God she had died rather–even although then she would never have known Paul!–Tut! she would never have thought of it again but for that horrid woman that lived over the draper’s shop! All would have been well if she had but kept from thinking about it! Nobody would have been a hair the worse then!–But, poor Paul!–to be married to such a woman as she!

If she were to be so foolish as let him know, how would it strike Paul? What would he think of it? Ought she not to be sure of that before she committed herself–before she uttered the irrevocable words? Would he call it a trifle, or would he be ready to kill her? True, he had no right, he _could_ have no right to know; but how horrible that there should be any thought of right between them! still worse, any thing whatever between them that he had no right to know! worst of all, that she did not belong to him so utterly that he must have a right to know _every_ thing about her! She _would_ tell him all! She would! she would! she had no choice! she must!–But she need not tell him now. She was not strong enough to utter the necessary words. But that made the thing very dreadful! If she could not speak the words, how bad it must really be!–Impossible to tell her Paul! That was pure absurdity.–Ah, but she _could_ not! She would be certain to faint–or fall dead at his feet. That would be well!–Yes! that would do! She would take a wine-glass full of laudanum just before she told him; then, if he was kind, she would confess the opium, and he could save her if he pleased; if he was hard, she would say nothing, and die at his feet. She had hoped to die in his arms–all that was left of eternity. But her life was his, he had saved it with his own–oh horror! that it should have been to disgrace him!–and it should not last a moment longer than it was a pleasure to him.

Worn out with thought and agony, she often fell asleep–only to start awake in fresh misery, and go over and over the same torturing round. Long before her husband appeared, she was in a burning fever. When he came, he put her at once to bed, and tended her with a solicitude as anxious as it was gentle. He soothed her to sleep, and then went and had some dinner.

On his return, finding, as he had expected, that she still slept, he sat down by her bedside, and watched. Her slumber was broken with now and then a deep sigh, now and then a moan. Alas, that we should do the things that make for moan!–but at least I understand why we are left to do them: it is because we can. A dull fire was burning in her soul, and over it stood the caldron of her history, and it bubbled in sighs and moans.

Faber was ready enough to attribute every thing human to a physical origin, but as he sat there pondering her condition, recalling her emotion and strange speech of the night before, and watching the state she was now in, an uneasiness began to gather–undefined, but other than concerned her health. Something must be wrong somewhere. He kept constantly assuring himself that at worst it could be but some mere moleheap, of which her lovelily sensitive organization, under the influence of a foolish preachment, made a mountain. Still, it was a huge disorder to come from a trifle! At the same time who knew better than he upon what a merest trifle nervous excitement will fix the attention! or how to the mental eye such a speck will grow and grow until it absorb the universe! Only a certain other disquieting thought, having come once, would keep returning–that, thoroughly as he believed himself acquainted with her mind, he had very little knowledge of her history. He did not know a single friend of hers, had never met a person who knew any thing of her family, or had even an acquaintance with her earlier than his own. The thing he most dreaded was, that the shadow of some old affection had returned upon her soul, and that, in her excessive delicacy, she heaped blame upon herself that she had not absolutely forgotten it. He flung from him in scorn every slightest suggestion of blame. _His_ Juliet! his glorious Juliet! Bah!–But he must get her to say what the matter was–for her own sake; he must help her to reveal her trouble, whatever it might be–else how was he to do his best to remove it! She should find he knew how to be generous!

Thus thinking, he sat patient by her side, watching until the sun of her consciousness should rise and scatter the clouds of sleep. Hour after hour he sat, and still she slept, outwearied with the rack of emotion. Morning had begun to peer gray through the window-curtains, when she woke with a cry.

She had been dreaming. In the little chapel in Nestley Park, she sat listening to the curate’s denouncement of hypocrisy, when suddenly the scene changed: the pulpit had grown to a mighty cloud, upon which stood an archangel with a trumpet in his hand. He cried that the hour of the great doom had come for all who bore within them the knowledge of any evil thing neither bemoaned before God nor confessed to man. Then he lifted the great silver trumpet with a gleam to his lips, and every fiber of her flesh quivered in expectation of the tearing blast that was to follow; when instead, soft as a breath of spring from a bank of primroses, came the words, uttered in the gentlest of sorrowful voices, and the voice seemed that of her unbelieving Paul: “I will arise and go to my Father.” It was no wonder, therefore, that she woke with a cry. It was one of indescribable emotion. When she saw his face bending over her in anxious love, she threw her arms round his neck, burst into a storm of weeping, and sobbed.

“Oh Paul! husband! forgive me. I have sinned against you terribly–the worst sin a woman can commit. Oh Paul! Paul! make me clean, or I am lost.”

“Juliet, you are raving,” he said, bewildered, a little angry, and at her condition not a little alarmed. For the confession, it was preposterous: they had not been many weeks married! “Calm yourself, or you will give me a lunatic for a wife!” he said. Then changing his tone, for his heart rebuked him, when he saw the ashy despair that spread over her face and eyes, “Be still, my precious,” he went on. “All is well. You have been dreaming, and are not yet quite awake. It is the morphia you had last night! Don’t look so frightened. It is only your husband. No one else is near you.”

With the tenderest smile he sought to reassure her, and would have gently released himself from the agonized clasp of her arms about his neck, that he might get her something. But she tightened her hold.

“Don’t leave me, Paul,” she cried. “I was dreaming, but I am wide awake now, and know only too well what I have done.”

“Dreams are nothing. The will is not in them,” he said. But the thought of his sweet wife even dreaming a thing to be repented of in such dismay, tore his heart. For he was one of the many–not all of the purest–who cherish an ideal of woman which, although indeed poverty-stricken and crude, is to their minds of snowy favor, to their judgment of loftiest excellence. I trust in God that many a woman, despite the mud of doleful circumstance, yea, even the defilement that comes first from within, has risen to a radiance of essential innocence ineffably beyond that whose form stood white in Faber’s imagination. For I see and understand a little how God, giving righteousness, makes pure of sin, and that verily–by no theological quibble of imputation, by no play with words, by no shutting of the eyes, no oblivion, willful or irresistible, but by very fact of cleansing, so that the consciousness of the sinner becomes glistering as the raiment of the Lord on the mount of His transfiguration. I do not expect the Pharisee who calls the sinner evil names, and drags her up to judgment, to comprehend this; but, woman, cry to thy Father in Heaven, for He can make thee white, even to the contentment of that womanhood which thou hast thyself outraged.

Faber unconsciously prided himself on the severity of his requirements of woman, and saw his own image reflected in the polish of his ideal; and now a fear whose presence he would not acknowledge began to gnaw at his heart, a vague suggestion’s horrid image, to which he would yield no space, to flit about his brain.

“Would to God it were a dream, Paul!” answered the stricken wife.

“You foolish child!” returned the nigh trembling husband, “how can you expect me to believe, married but yesterday, you have already got tired of me!”

“Tired of you, Paul! I should desire no other eternal paradise than to lie thus under your eyes forever.”

“Then for my sake, my darling wife, send away this extravagance, this folly, this absurd fancy that has got such a hold of you. It will turn to something serious if you do not resist it. There can be no truth in it, and I am certain that one with any strength of character can do much at least to prevent the deeper rooting of a fixed idea.” But as he spoke thus to her, in his own soul he was as one fighting the demons off with a fan. “Tell me what the mighty matter is,” he went on, “that I may swear to you I love you the more for the worst weakness you have to confess.”

“Ah, my love!” returned Juliet, “how like you are now to the Paul I have dreamed of so often! But you will not be able to forgive me. I have read somewhere that men never forgive–that their honor is before their wives with them. Paul! if you should not be able to forgive me, you must help me to die, and not be cruel to me.”

“Juliet, I will not listen to any more such foolish words. Either tell me plainly what you mean, that I may convince you what a goose you are, or be quiet and go to sleep again.”

“_Can_ it be that after all it does not signify so much?” she said aloud, but only to herself, meditating in the light of a little glow-worm of hope. “Oh if it could be so! And what is it really so much? I have not murdered any body!–I _will_ tell you, Paul!”

She drew his head closer down, laid her lips to his ear, gave a great gasp, and whispered two or three words. He started up, sundering at once the bonds of her clasped hands, cast one brief stare at her, turned, walked, with a great quick stride to his dressing-room, entered, and closed the door.

As if with one rush of a fell wind, they were ages, deserts, empty star-spaces apart! She was outside the universe, in the cold frenzy of infinite loneliness. The wolves of despair were howling in her. But Paul was in the next room! There was only the door between them! She sprung from her bed and ran to a closet. The next moment she appeared in her husband’s dressing-room.

Paul sat sunk together in his chair, his head hanging forward, his teeth set, his whole shape, in limb and feature, carrying the show of profound, of irrecoverable injury. He started to his feet when she entered. She did not once lift her eyes to his face, but sunk on her knees before him, hurriedly slipped her night-gown from her shoulders to her waist, and over her head, bent toward the floor, held up to him a riding-whip.

They were baleful stars that looked down on that naked world beneath them.

To me scarce any thing is so utterly pathetic as the back. That of an animal even is full of sad suggestion. But the human back!–It is the other, the dark side of the human moon; the blind side of the being, defenseless, and exposed to every thing; the ignorant side, turned toward the abyss of its unknown origin; the unfeatured side, eyeless and dumb and helpless–the enduring animal of the marvelous commonwealth, to be given to the smiter, and to bend beneath the burden–lovely in its patience and the tender forms of its strength.

An evil word, resented by the lowest of our sisters, rushed to the man’s lips, but died there in a strangled murmur.

“Paul!” said Juliet, in a voice from whose tone it seemed as if her soul had sunk away, and was crying out of a hollow place of the earth, “take it–take it. Strike me.”

He made no reply–stood utterly motionless, his teeth clenched so hard that he could not have spoken without grinding them. She waited as motionless, her face bowed to the floor, the whip held up over her head.

“Paul!” she said again, “you saved my life once: save my soul now. Whip me and take me again.”

He answered with only a strange unnatural laugh through his teeth.

“Whip me and let me die then,” she said.

He spoke no word. She spoke again. Despair gave her both insight and utterance–despair and great love, and the truth of God that underlies even despair.

“You pressed me to marry you,” she said: “what was I to do? How could I tell you? And I loved you so! I persuaded myself I was safe with you–you were so generous. You would protect me from every thing, even my own past. In your name I sent it away, and would not think of it again. I said to myself you would not wish me to tell you the evil that had befallen me. I persuaded myself you loved me enough even for that. I held my peace trusting you. Oh my husband! my Paul! my heart is crushed. The dreadful thing has come back. I thought it was gone from me, and now it will not leave me any more. I am a horror to myself. There is no one to punish and forgive me but you. Forgive me, my husband. You are the God to whom I pray. If you pardon me I shall be content even with myself. I shall seek no other pardon; your favor is all I care for. If you take me for clean, I _am_ clean for all the world. You can make me clean–you only. Do it, Paul; do it, husband. Make me clean that I may look women in the face. Do, Paul, take the whip and strike me. I long for my deserts at your hand. Do comfort me. I am waiting the sting of it, Paul, to know that you have forgiven me. If I should cry out, it will be for gladness.–Oh, my husband,”–here her voice rose to an agony of entreaty–“I was but a girl–hardly more than a child in knowledge–I did not know what I was doing. He was much older than I was, and I trusted him!–O my God! I hardly know what I knew and what I did not know: it was only when it was too late that I woke and understood. I hate myself. I scorn myself. But am I to be wretched forever because of that one fault, Paul? Will you not be my saviour and forgive me my sin? Oh, do not drive me mad. I am only clinging to my reason. Whip me and I shall be well. Take me again, Paul. I will not, if you like, even fancy myself your wife any more. I will be your slave. You shall do with me whatever you will. I will obey you to the very letter. Oh beat me and let me go.”

She sunk prone on the floor, and clasped and kissed his feet.

He took the whip from her hand.

Of course a man can not strike a woman! He may tread her in the mire; he may clasp her and then scorn her; he may kiss her close, and then dash her from him into a dung-heap, but he must not strike her–that would be unmanly! Oh! grace itself is the rage of the pitiful Othello to the forbearance of many a self-contained, cold-blooded, self-careful slave, that thinks himself a gentleman! Had not Faber been even then full of his own precious self, had he yielded to her prayer or to his own wrath, how many hours of agony would have been saved them both!–“What! would you have had him really strike her?” I would have had him do _any thing_ rather than choose himself and reject his wife: make of it what you will. Had he struck once, had he seen the purple streak rise in the snow, that instant his pride-frozen heart would have melted into a torrent of grief; he would have flung himself on the floor beside her, and in an agony of pity over her and horror at his own sacrilege, would have clasped her to his bosom, and baptized her in the tears of remorse and repentance; from that moment they would have been married indeed.

When she felt him take the whip, the poor lady’s heart gave a great heave of hope; then her flesh quivered with fear. She closed her teeth hard, to welcome the blow without a cry. Would he give her many stripes? Then the last should be welcome as the first. Would it spoil her skin? What matter if it was his own hand that did it!

A brief delay–long to her! then the hiss, as it seemed, of the coming blow! But instead of the pang she awaited, the sharp ring of breaking glass followed: he had thrown the whip through the window into the garden. The same moment he dragged his feet rudely from her embrace, and left the room. The devil and the gentleman had conquered. He had spared her, not in love, but in scorn. She gave one great cry of utter loss, and lay senseless.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE BOTTOMLESS POOL.

She came to herself in the gray dawn. She was cold as ice–cold to the very heart, but she did not feel the cold: there was nothing in her to compare it against; her very being was frozen. The man who had given her life had thrown her from him. He cared less for her than for the tortured dog. She was an outcast, defiled and miserable. Alas! alas! this was what came of speaking the truth–of making confession! The cruel scripture had wrought its own fulfillment, made a mock of her, and ruined her husband’s peace. She knew poor Paul would never be himself again! She had carried the snake so long harmless in her bosom only to let it at last creep from her lips into her husband’s ear, sting the vital core of her universe, and blast it forever! How foolish she had been!–What was left her to do? What would her husband have her to do? Oh misery! he cared no more what she did or did not do. She was alone–utterly alone! But she need not live.

Dimly, vaguely, the vapor of such thoughts as these passed through her despairing soul, as she lifted herself from the floor and tottered back to her room. Yet even then, in the very midst of her freezing misery, there was, although she had not yet begun to recognize it, a nascent comfort in that she had spoken and confessed. She would not really have taken back her confession. And although the torture was greater, yet was it more endurable than that she had been suffering before. She had told him who had a right to know.–But, alas! what a deception was that dream of the trumpet and the voice! A poor trick to entrap a helpless sinner!

Slowly, with benumbed fingers and trembling hands, she dressed herself: that bed she would lie in no more, for she had wronged her husband. Whether before or after he was her husband, mattered nothing. To have ever called him husband was the wrong. She had seemed that she was not, else he would never have loved or sought her; she had outraged his dignity, defiled him; he had cast her off, and she could not, would not blame him. Happily for her endurance of her misery, she did not turn upon her idol and cast him from his pedestal; she did not fix her gaze upon his failure instead of her own; she did not espy the contemptible in his conduct, and revolt from her allegiance.

But was such a man then altogether the ideal of a woman’s soul? Was he a fit champion of humanity who would aid only within the limits of his pride? who, when a despairing creature cried in soul-agony for help, thought first and only of his own honor? The notion men call their honor is the shadow of righteousness, the shape that is where the light is not, the devil that dresses as nearly in angel-fashion as he can, but is none the less for that a sneak and a coward.

She put on her cloak and bonnet: the house was his, not hers. He and she had never been one: she must go and meet her fate. There was one power, at least, the key to the great door of liberty, which the weakest as well as the strongest possessed: she could die. Ah, how welcome would Death be now! Did he ever know or heed the right time to come, without being sent for–without being compelled? In the meantime her only anxiety was to get out of the house: away from Paul she would understand more precisely what she had to do. With the feeling of his angry presence, she could not think. Yet how she loved him–strong in his virtue and indignation! She had not yet begun to pity herself, or to allow to her heart that he was hard upon her.

She was leaving the room when a glitter on her hand caught her eye: the old diamond disk, which he had bought of her in her trouble, and restored to her on her wedding-day, was answering the herald of the sunrise. She drew it off: he must have it again. With it she drew off also her wedding-ring. Together she laid them on the dressing table, turned again, and with noiseless foot and desert heart went through the house, opened the door, and stole into the street. A thin mist was waiting for her. A lean cat, gray as the mist, stood on the steps of the door opposite. No other living thing was to be seen. The air was chill. The autumn rains were at hand. But her heart was the only desolation.

Already she knew where she was going. In the street she turned to the left.

Shortly before, she had gone with Dorothy, for the first time, to see the Old House, and there had had rather a narrow escape. Walking down the garden they came to the pond or small lake, so well known to the children of Glaston as bottomless. Two stone steps led from the end of the principal walk down to the water, which was, at the time, nearly level with the top of the second. On the upper step Juliet was standing, not without fear, gazing into the gulf, which was yet far deeper than she imagined, when, without the smallest preindication, the lower step suddenly sank. Juliet sprung back to the walk, but turned instantly to look again. She saw the stone sinking, and her eyes opened wider and wider, as it swelled and thinned to a great, dull, wavering mass, grew dimmer and dimmer, then melted away and vanished utterly. With “stricken look,” and fright-filled eyes, she turned to Dorothy, who was a little behind her, and said,

“How will you be able to sleep at night? I should be always fancying myself sliding down into it through the darkness.”

To this place of terror she was now on the road. When consciousness returned to her as she lay on the floor of her husband’s dressing-room, it brought with it first the awful pool and the sinking stone. She seemed to stand watching it sink, lazily settling with a swing this way and a sway that, into the bosom of the earth, down and down, and still down. Nor did the vision leave her as she came more to herself. Even when her mental eyes were at length quite open to the far more frightful verities of her condition, half of her consciousness was still watching the ever sinking stone; until at last she seemed to understand that it was showing her a door out of her misery, one easy to open.

She went the same way into the park that Dorothy had then taken her–through a little door of privilege which she had shown her how to open, and not by the lodge. The light was growing fast, but the sun was not yet up. With feeble steps but feverous haste she hurried over the grass. Her feet were wet through her thin shoes. Her dress was fringed with dew. But there was no need for taking care of herself now; she felt herself already beyond the reach of sickness. The still pond would soon wash off the dew.

Suddenly, with a tremor of waking hope, came the thought that, when she was gone from his sight, the heart of her husband would perhaps turn again toward her a little. For would he not then be avenged? would not his justice be satisfied? She had been well drilled in the theological lie, that punishment is the satisfaction of justice.

“Oh, now I thank you, Paul!” she said, as she hastened along. “You taught me the darkness, and made me brave to seek its refuge. Think of me sometimes, Paul. I will come back to you if I can–but no, there is no coming back, no greeting more, no shadows even to mingle their loves, for in a dream there is but one that dreams. I shall be the one that does not dream. There is nothing where I am going–not even the darkness–nothing but nothing. Ah, would I were in it now! Let me make haste. All will be one, for all will be none when I am there. Make you haste too, and come into the darkness, Paul. It is soothing and soft and cool. It will wash away the sin of the girl and leave you a—-nothing.”

While she was hurrying toward the awful pool, her husband sat in his study, sunk in a cold fury of conscious disgrace–not because of his cruelty, not because he had cast a woman into hell–but because his honor, his self-satisfaction in his own fate, was thrown to the worms. Did he fail thus in consequence of having rejected the common belief? No; something far above the _common_ belief it must be, that would have enabled him to act otherwise. But had he _known_ the Man of the gospel, he could not have left her. He would have taken her to his sorrowful bosom, wept with her, forgotten himself in pitiful grief over the spot upon her whiteness; he would have washed her clean with love and husband-power. He would have welcomed his shame as his hold of her burden, whereby to lift it, with all its misery and loss, from her heart forever. Had Faber done so as he was, he would have come close up to the gate of the kingdom of Heaven, for he would have been like-minded with Him who sought not His own. His honor, forsooth! Pride is a mighty honor! His pride was great indeed, but it was not grand! Nothing reflected, nothing whose object is self, has in it the poorest element of grandeur. Our selves are ours that we may lay them on the altar of love. Lying there, bound and bleeding and burning if need be, they are grand indeed–for they are in their noble place, and rejoicing in their fate. But this man was miserable, because, the possessor of a priceless jewel, he had found it was not such as would pass for flawless in the judgment of men–judges themselves unjust, whose very hearts were full of bribes. He sat there an injured husband, a wronged, woman-cheated, mocked man–he in whose eyes even a smutch on her face would have lowered a woman–who would not have listened to an angel with a broken wing-feather!

Let me not be supposed to make a little of Juliet’s loss! What that amounted to, let Juliet feel!–let any woman say, who loves a man, and would be what that man thinks her! But I read, and think I understand, the words of the perfect Purity: “Neither do I condemn thee: go and sin no more.”

CHAPTER XXXV.

A HEART.

If people were both observant and memorious, they would cease, I fancy, to be astonished at coincidences. Rightly regarded, the universe is but one coincidence–only where will has to be developed, there is need for human play, and room for that must be provided in its spaces. The works of God being from the beginning, and all his beginnings invisible either from greatness or smallness or nearness or remoteness, numberless coincidences may pass in every man’s history, before he becomes capable of knowing either the need or the good of them, or even of noting them.

The same morning there was another awake and up early. When Juliet was about half-way across the park, hurrying to the water, Dorothy was opening the door of the empty house, seeking solitude that she might find the one Dweller therein. She went straight to one of the upper rooms looking out upon the garden, and kneeling prayed to her Unknown God. As she kneeled, the first rays of the sunrise visited her face. That face was in itself such an embodied prayer, that had any one seen it, he might, when the beams fell upon it, have imagined he saw prayer and answer meet. It was another sunrise Dorothy was looking for, but she started and smiled when the warm rays touched her; they too came from the home of answers. As the daisy mimics the sun, so is the central fire of our system but a flower that blossoms in the eternal effulgence of the unapproachable light.

The God to whom we pray is nearer to us than the very prayer itself ere it leaves the heart; hence His answers may well come to us through the channel of our own thoughts. But the world too being itself one of His thoughts, He may also well make the least likely of His creatures an angel of His own will to us. Even the blind, if God be with him, that is, if he knows he is blind and does not think he sees, may become a leader of the blind up to the narrow gate. It is the blind who says _I see_, that leads his fellow into the ditch.

The window near which Dorothy kneeled, and toward which in the instinct for light she had turned her face, looked straight down the garden, at the foot of which the greater part of the circumference of the pond was visible. But Dorothy, busy with her prayers, or rather with a weight of hunger and thirst, from which like a burst of lightning skyward from the overcharged earth, a prayer would now and then break and rush heavenward, saw nothing of the outer world: between her and a sister soul in mortal agony, hung the curtains of her eyelids. But there were no shutters to her ears, and in at their portals all of a sudden darted a great and bitter cry, as from a heart in the gripe of a fierce terror. She had been so absorbed, and it so startled and shook her, that she never could feel certain whether the cry she heard was of this world or not. Half-asleep one hears such a cry, and can not tell whether it entered his consciousness by the ear, or through some hidden channel of the soul. Assured that waking ears heard nothing, he remains, it may be, in equal doubt, whether it came from the other side of life or was the mere cry of a dream. Before Dorothy was aware of a movement of her will, she was on her feet, and staring from the window. Something was lying on the grass beyond the garden wall, close to the pond: it looked like a woman. She darted from the house, out of the garden, and down the other side of the wall. When she came nearer she saw it was indeed a woman, evidently insensible. She was bare-headed. Her bonnet was floating in the pond; the wind had blown it almost to the middle of it. Her face was turned toward the water. One hand was in it. The bank overhung the pond, and with a single movement more she would probably have been beyond help from Dorothy. She caught her by the arm, and dragged her from the brink, before ever she looked in her face. Then to her amazement she saw it was Juliet. She opened her eyes, and it was as if a lost soul looked out of them upon Dorothy–a being to whom the world was nothing, so occupied was it with some torment, which alone measured its existence–far away, although it hung attached to the world by a single hook of brain and nerve.

“Juliet, my darling!” said Dorothy, her voice trembling with the love which only souls that know trouble can feel for the troubled, “come with me. I will take care of you.”

At the sound of her voice, Juliet shuddered. Then a better light came into her eyes, and feebly she endeavored to get up. With Dorothy’s help she succeeded, but stood as if ready to sink again to the earth. She drew her cloak about her, turned and stared at the water, turned again and stared at Dorothy, at last threw herself into her arms, and sobbed and wailed. For a few moments Dorothy held her in a close embrace. Then she sought to lead her to the house, and Juliet yielded at once. She took her into one of the lower rooms, and got her some water–it was all she could get for her, and made her sit down on the window-seat. It seemed a measureless time before she made the least attempt to speak; and again and again when she began to try, she failed. She opened her mouth, but no sounds would come. At length, interrupted with choking gasps, low cries of despair, and long intervals of sobbing, she said something like this:

“I was going to drown myself. When I came in sight of the water, I fell down in a half kind of faint. All the time I lay, I felt as if some one was dragging me nearer and nearer to the pool. Then something came and drew me back–and it was you, Dorothy. But you ought to have left me. I am a wretch. There is no room for me in this world any more.” She stopped a moment, then fixing wide eyes on Dorothy’s, said, “Oh Dorothy, dear! there are awful things in the world! as awful as any you ever read in a book!”

“I know that, dear. But oh! I am sorry if any of them have come your way. Tell me what is the matter. I _will_ help you if I can.”

“I dare not; I dare not! I should go raving mad if I said a word about it.”

“Then don’t tell me, my dear. Come with me up stairs; there is a warmer room there–full of sunshine; you are nearly dead with cold. I came here this morning, Juliet, to be alone and pray to God; and see what He has sent me! You, dear! Come up stairs. Why, you are quite wet! You will get your death of cold!”

“Then it would be all right. I would rather not kill myself if I could die without. But it must be somehow.”

“We’ll talk about it afterward. Come now.”

With Dorothy’s arm round her waist, Juliet climbed trembling to the warmer room. On a rickety wooden chair, Dorothy made her sit in the sunshine, while she went and gathered chips and shavings and bits of wood left by the workmen. With these she soon kindled a fire in the rusty grate. Then she took off Juliet’s shoes and stockings, and put her own upon her. She made no resistance, only her eyes followed Dorothy’s bare feet going to and fro, as if she felt something was wrong, and had not strength to inquire into it.

But Dorothy’s heart rebuked her for its own lightness. It had not been so light for many a day. It seemed as if God was letting her know that He was there. She spread her cloak on a sunny spot of the floor, made Juliet lie down upon it, put a bundle of shavings under her head, covered her with her own cloak, which she had dried at the fire, and was leaving the room.

“Where are you going, Dorothy?” cried Juliet, seeming all at once to wake up.

“I am going to fetch your husband, dear,” answered Dorothy.

She gave a great cry, rose to her knees, and clasped Dorothy round hers.

“No, no, no!” she screamed. “You shall not. If you do, I swear I will run straight to the pond.”

Notwithstanding the wildness of her voice and look, there was an evident determination in both.

“I will do nothing you don’t like, dear,” said Dorothy. “I thought that was the best thing I could do for you.”

“No! no! no! any thing but that!”

“Then of course I won’t. But I must go and get you something to eat.”

“I could not swallow a mouthful; it would choke me. And where would be the good of it, when life is over!”

“Don’t talk like that, dear. Life can’t be over till it is taken from us.”

“Ah, you would see it just as I do, if you knew all!”

“Tell me all, then.”

“Where is the use, when there is no help?”

“No help!” echoed Dorothy.–The words she had so often uttered in her own heart, coming from the lips of another, carried in them an incredible contradiction.–Could God make or the world breed the irreparable?–“Juliet,” she went on, after a little pause, “I have often said the same myself, but–“

“You!” interrupted Juliet; “you who always professed to believe!”

Dorothy’s ear could not distinguish whether the tone was of indignation or of bitterness.

“You never heard me, Juliet,” she answered, “profess any thing. If my surroundings did so for me, I could not help that. I never dared say I believed any thing. But I hope–and, perhaps,” she went on with a smile, “seeing Hope is own sister to Faith, she may bring me to know her too some day. Paul says—-“

Dorothy had been brought up a dissenter, and never said _St._ this one or that, any more than the Christians of the New Testament.

At the sound of the name, Juliet burst into tears, the first she shed, for the word _Paul_, like the head of the javelin torn from the wound, brought the whole fountain after it. She cast herself down again, and lay and wept. Dorothy kneeled beside her, and laid a hand on her shoulder. It was the only way she could reach her at all.

“You see,” she said at last, for the weeping went on and on, “there is nothing will do you any good but your husband.”

“No, no; he has cast me from him forever!” she cried, in a strange wail that rose to a shriek.

“The wretch!” exclaimed Dorothy, clenching a fist whose little bones looked fierce through the whitened skin.

“No,” returned Juliet, suddenly calmed, in a voice almost severe; “it is I who am the wretch, to give you a moment in which to blame him. He has done nothing but what is right.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I deserved it.”

“I am sure you did not. I would believe a thousand things against him before I would believe one against you, my poor white queen!” cried Dorothy, kissing her hand.

She snatched it away, and covered her face with both hands.

“I should only need to tell you one thing to convince you,” she sobbed from behind them.

“Then tell it me, that I may not be unjust to him.”

“I can not.”

“I won’t take your word against yourself,” returned Dorothy determinedly. “You will have to tell me, or leave me to think the worst of him.” She was moved by no vulgar curiosity: how is one to help without knowing? “Tell me, my dear,” she went on after a little; “tell me all about it, and in the name of the God in whom I hope to believe, I promise to give myself to your service.”

Thus adjured, Juliet found herself compelled. But with what heart-tearing groans and sobs, with what intervals of dumbness, in which the truth seemed unutterable for despair and shame, followed by what hurrying of wild confession, as if she would cast it from her, the sad tale found its way into Dorothy’s aching heart, I will not attempt to describe. It is enough that at last it was told, and that it had entered at the wide-open, eternal doors of sympathy. If Juliet had lost a husband, she had gained a friend, and that was something–indeed no little thing–for in her kind the friend was more complete than the husband. She was truer, more entire–in friendship nearly perfect. When a final burst of tears had ended the story of loss and despair, a silence fell.

“Oh, those men! those men!” said Dorothy, in a low voice of bitterness, as if she knew them and their ways well, though never had kiss of man save her father lighted on her cheek. “–My poor darling!” she said after another pause, “–and he cast you from him!–I suppose a woman’s heart,” she went on after a third pause, “can never make up for the loss of a man’s, but here is mine for you to go into the very middle of, and lie down there.”

Juliet had, as she told her story, risen to her knees. Dorothy was on hers too, and as she spoke she opened wide her arms, and clasped the despised wife to her bosom. None but the arms of her husband, Juliet believed, could make her alive with forgiveness, yet she felt a strange comfort in that embrace. It wrought upon her as if she had heard a far-off whisper of the words: _Thy sins be forgiven thee_. And no wonder: there was the bosom of one of the Lord’s clean ones for her to rest upon! It was her first lesson in the mighty truth that sin of all things is mortal, and purity alone can live for evermore.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

TWO MORE MINDS.

Nothing makes a man strong like a call upon him for help–a fact which points at a unity more delicate and close and profound than heart has yet perceived. It is but “a modern instance” how a mother, if she be but a hen, becomes bold as a tigress for her periled offspring. A stranger will fight for the stranger who puts his trust in him. The most foolish of men will search his musty brain to find wise saws for his boy. An anxious man, going to his friend to borrow, may return having lent him instead. The man who has found nothing yet in the world save food for the hard, sharp, clear intellect, will yet cast an eye around the universe to see if perchance there may not be a God somewhere for the hungering heart of his friend. The poor, but lovely, the doubting, yet living faith of Dorothy arose, stretched out its crippled wings, and began to arrange and straighten their disordered feathers. It is a fair sight, any creature, be it but a fly, dressing its wings! Dorothy’s were feeble, ruffled, their pen-feathers bent and a little crushed; but Juliet’s were full of mud, paralyzed with disuse, and grievously singed in the smoldering fire of her secret. A butterfly that has burned its wings is not very unlike a caterpillar again.

“Look here, Juliet,” said Dorothy: “there must be some way out of it, or there is no saving God in the universe.–Now don’t begin to say there isn’t, because, you see, it is your only chance. It would be a pity to make a fool of yourself by being over-wise, to lose every thing by taking it for granted there is no God. If after all there should be one, it would be the saddest thing to perish for want of Him. I won’t say I am as miserable as you, for I haven’t a husband to trample on my heart; but I am miserable enough, and want dreadfully to be saved. I don’t call this life worth living. Nothing is right, nothing goes well–there is no harmony in me. I don’t call it life at all. I want music and light in me. I want a God to save me out of this wretchedness. I want health.”

“I thought you were never ill, Dorothy,” murmured Juliet listlessly.

“Is it possible you do not know what I mean?” returned Dorothy. “Do you never feel wretched and sick in your very soul?–disgusted with yourself, and longing to be lifted up out of yourself into a region of higher conditions altogether?”

That kind of thing Juliet had been learning to attribute to the state of her health–had partly learned: it is hard to learn any thing false _thoroughly_, for it _can not_ so be learned. It is true that it is often, perhaps it is generally, in troubled health, that such thoughts come first; but in nature there are facts of color that the cloudy day reveals. So sure am I that many things which illness has led me to see are true, that I would endlessly rather never be well than lose sight of them. “So would any madman say of his fixed idea.” I will keep my madness, then, for therein most do I desire the noble: and to desire what I desire, if it be but to desire, is better than to have all you offer us in the name of truth. Through such desire and the hope of its attainment, all greatest things have been wrought in the earth: I too have my unbelief as well as you–I can not believe that a lie on the belief of which has depended our highest development. You may say you have a higher to bring in. But that higher you have become capable of by the precedent lie. Yet you vaunt truth! You would sink us low indeed, making out falsehood our best nourishment–at some period of our history at least. If, however, what I call true and high, you call false and low–my assertion that you have never seen that of which I so speak will not help–then is there nothing left us but to part, each go his own road, and wait the end–which according to my expectation will show the truth, according to yours, being nothing, will show nothing.

“I can not help thinking, if we could only get up there,” Dorothy went on,–“I mean into a life of which I can at least dream–if I could but get my head and heart into the kingdom of Heaven, I should find that every thing else would come right. I believe it is God Himself I want–nothing will do but Himself in me. Mr. Wingfold says that we find things all wrong about us, that they keep going against our will and our liking, just to drive things right inside us, or at least to drive us where we can get them put right; and that, as soon as their work is done, the waves will lie down at our feet, or if not, we shall at least walk over their crests.”

“It sounds very nice, and would comfort any body that wasn’t in trouble,” said Juliet; “but you wouldn’t care one bit for it all any more than I do, if you had pain and love like mine pulling at your heart.”

“I have seen a mother make sad faces enough over the baby at her breast,” said Dorothy. “Love and pain seem so strangely one in this world, the wonder is how they will ever get parted. What God must feel like, with this world hanging on to Him with all its pains and cries–!”

“It’s His own fault,” said Juliet bitterly. “Why did He make us–or why did He not make us good? I’m sure I don’t know where was the use of making me!”

“Perhaps not much yet,” replied Dorothy, “but then He hasn’t made you, He hasn’t done with you yet. He is making you now, and you don’t like it.”

“No, I don’t–if you call this making. Why does He do it? He could have avoided all this trouble by leaving us alone.”

“I put something like the same question once to Mr. Wingfold,” said Dorothy, “and he told me it was impossible to show any one the truths of the kingdom of Heaven; he must learn them for himself. ‘I can do little more,’ he said, ‘than give you my testimony that it seems to me all right. If God has not made you good, He has made you with the feeling that you ought to be good, and at least a half-conviction that to Him you have to go for help to become good. When you are good, then you will know why He did not make you good at first, and will be perfectly satisfied with the reason, because you will find it good and just and right–so good that it was altogether beyond the understanding of one who was not good. I don’t think,’ he said, ‘you will ever get a thoroughly satisfactory answer to any question till you go to Himself for it–and then it may take years to make you fit to receive, that is to understand the answer.’ Oh Juliet! sometimes I have felt in my heart as if–I am afraid to say it, even to you,–“

“_I_ shan’t be shocked at any thing; I am long past that,” sighed Juliet.

“It is not of you I am afraid,” said Dorothy. “It is a kind of awe of the universe I feel. But God is the universe; His is the only ear that will hear me; and He knows my thoughts already. Juliet, I feel sometimes as if I _must_ be good for God’s sake; as if I was sorry for Him, because He has such a troublesome nursery of children, that will not or can not understand Him, and will not do what He tells them, and He all the time doing the very best for them He can.”

“It may be all very true, or all great nonsense, Dorothy, dear; I don’t care a bit about it. All I care for is–I don’t know what I care for–I don’t care for any thing any more–there is nothing left to care for. I love my husband with a heart like to break–oh, how I wish it would! He hates and despises me and I dare not wish that he wouldn’t. If he were to forgive me quite, I should yet feel that he ought to despise me, and that would be all the same as if he did, and there is no help. Oh, how horrid I look to him! I _can’t_ bear it. I fancied it was all gone; but there it is, and there it must be forever. I don’t care about a God. If there were a God, what would He be to me without my Paul?”

“I think, Juliet, you will yet come to say, ‘What would my Paul be to me without my God?’ I suspect we have no more idea than that lonely fly on the window there, what it would be _to have a God_.”

“I don’t care. I would rather go to hell with my Paul than go to Heaven without him,” moaned Juliet.

“But what if God should be the only where to find your Paul?” said Dorothy. “What if the gulf that parts you is just the gulf of a God not believed in–a universe which neither of you can cross to meet the other–just because you do not believe it is there at all?”

Juliet made no answer–Dorothy could not tell whether from feeling or from indifference. The fact was, the words conveyed no more meaning to Juliet than they will to some of my readers. Why do I write them then? Because there are some who will understand them at once, and others who will grow to understand them. Dorothy was astonished to find herself saying them. The demands of her new office of comforter gave shape to many half-formed thoughts, substance to many shadowy perceptions, something like music to not a few dim feelings moving within her; but what she said hardly seemed her own at all.

Had it not been for Wingfold’s help, Dorothy might not have learned these things in this world; but had it not been for Juliet, they would have taken years more to blossom in her being, and so become her own. Her faint hope seemed now to break forth suddenly into power. Whether or not she was saying such things as were within the scope of Juliet’s apprehension, was a matter of comparatively little moment. As she lay there in misery, rocking herself from side to side on the floor, she would have taken hold of nothing. But love is the first comforter, and where love and truth speak, the love will be felt where the truth is never perceived. Love indeed is the highest in all truth; and the pressure of a hand, a kiss, the caress of a child, will do more to save sometimes than the wisest argument, even rightly understood. Love alone is wisdom, love alone is power; and where love seems to fail it is where self has stepped between and dulled the potency of its rays.

Dorothy thought of another line of expostulation.

“Juliet,” she said, “suppose you were to drown yourself and your husband were to repent?”

“That is the only hope left me. You see yourself I have no choice.”

“You have no pity, it seems; for what then would become of him? What if he should come to himself in bitter sorrow, in wild longing for your forgiveness, but you had taken your forgiveness with you, where he had no hope of ever finding it? Do you want to punish him? to make him as miserable as yourself? to add immeasurably to the wrong you have done him, by going where no word, no message, no letter can pass, no cry can cross? No, Juliet–death can set nothing right. But if there be a God, then nothing can go wrong but He can set it right, and set it right better than it was before.”

“He could not make it better than it was.”

“What!–is that your ideal of love–a love that fails in the first trial? If He could not better that, then indeed He were no God worth the name.”

“Why then did He make us such–make such a world as is always going wrong?”

“Mr. Wingfold says it is always going righter the same time it is going wrong. I grant He would have had no right to make a world that might go further wrong than He could set right at His own cost. But if at His own cost He turn its ills into goods? its ugliness into favor? Ah, if it should be so, Juliet! It _may_ be so. I do not know. I have not found Him yet. Help me to find Him. Let us seek Him together. If you find Him you can not lose your husband. If Love is Lord of the world, love must yet be Lord in his heart. It will wake, if not sooner, yet when the bitterness has worn itself out, as Mr. Wingfold says all evil must, because its heart is death and not life.”

“I don’t care a straw for life. If I could but find my husband, I would gladly die forever in his arms. It is not true that the soul longs for immortality. I don’t. I long only for love–for forgiveness–for my husband.”

“But would you die so long as there was the poorest chance of regaining your place in his heart?”

“No. Give me the feeblest chance of that, and I will live. I could live forever on the mere hope of it.”

“I can’t give you any hope, but I have hope of it in my own heart.”

Juliet rose on her elbow.

“But I am disgraced!” she said, almost indignantly. “It would be disgrace to him to take me again! I remember one of the officers’ wives—-. No, no! he hates and despises me. Besides I could never look one of his friends in the face again. Every body will say I ran away with some one–or that he sent me away because I was wicked. You all had a prejudice against me from the very first.”

“Yes, in a way,” confessed Dorothy. “It always seemed as if we did not know you and could not get at you, as if you avoided us–with your heart, I mean;–as if you had resolved we should not know you–as if you had something you were afraid we should discover.”

“Ah, there it was, you see!” cried Juliet. “And now the hidden thing is revealed! That was it: I never could get rid of the secret that was gnawing at my life. Even when I was hardly aware of it, it was there. Oh, if I had only been ugly, then Paul would never have thought of me!”

She threw herself down again and buried her face.

“Hide me; hide me,” she went on, lifting to Dorothy her hands clasped in an agony, while her face continued turned from her. “Let me stay here. Let me die in peace. Nobody would ever think I was here.”

“That is just what has been coming and going in my mind,” answered Dorothy. “It is a strange old place: you might be here for months and nobody know.”

“Oh! wouldn’t you mind it? I shouldn’t live long. I couldn’t, you know!”

“I will be your very sister, if you will let me,” replied Dorothy; “only then you must do what I tell you–and begin at once by promising not to leave the house till I come back to you.”

As she spoke she rose.

“But some one will come,” said Juliet, half-rising, as if she would run after her.

“No one will. But if any one should–come here, I will show you a place where nobody would find you.”

She helped her to rise, and led her from the room to a door in a rather dark passage. This she opened, and, striking a light, showed an ordinary closet, with pegs for hanging garments upon. The sides of it were paneled, and in one of them, not readily distinguishable, was another door. It opened into a room lighted only by a little window high up in a wall, through whose dusty, cobwebbed panes, crept a modicum of second-hand light from a stair.

“There!” said Dorothy. “If you should hear any sound before I come back, run in here. See what a bolt there is to the door. Mind you shut both. You can close that shutter over the window too if you like–only nobody can look in at it without getting a ladder, and there isn’t one about the place. I don’t believe any one knows of this room but myself.”

Juliet was too miserable to be frightened at the look of it–which was wretched enough. She promised not to leave the house, and Dorothy went. Many times before she returned had Juliet fled from the sounds of imagined approach, and taken refuge in the musty dusk of the room withdrawn. When at last Dorothy came, she found her in it trembling.

She came, bringing a basket with every thing needful for breakfast. She had not told her father any thing: he was too simple, she said to herself, to keep a secret with comfort; and she would risk any thing rather than discovery while yet she did not clearly know what ought to be done. Her version of the excellent French proverb–_Dans le doute, abstiens-toi_–was, _When you are not sure, wait_–which goes a little further, inasmuch as it indicates expectation, and may imply faith. With difficulty she prevailed upon her to take some tea, and a little bread and butter, feeding her like a child, and trying to comfort her with hope. Juliet sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, the very picture of despair, white like alabaster, rather than marble–with a bluish whiteness. Her look was of one utterly lost.

“We’ll let the fire out now,” said Dorothy; “for the sun is shining in warm, and there had better be no smoke. The wood is rather scarce too. I will get you some more, and here are matches: you can light it again when you please.”

She then made her a bed on the floor with a quantity of wood shavings, and some shawls she had brought, and when she had lain down upon it, kneeled beside her, and covering her face with her hands, tried to pray. But it seemed as if all the misery of humanity was laid upon her, and God would not speak: not a sound would come from her throat, till she burst into tears and sobs. It struck a strange chord in the soul of the wife to hear the maiden weeping over her. But it was no private trouble, it was the great need common to all men that opened the fountain of her tears. It was hunger after the light that slays the darkness, after a comfort to confront every woe, a life to lift above death, an antidote to all wrong. It was one of the groanings of the spirit that can not be uttered in words articulate, or even formed into thoughts defined. But Juliet was filled only with the thought of herself and her husband, and the tears of her friend but bedewed the leaves of her bitterness, did not reach the dry roots of her misery.

Dorothy’s spirit revived when she found herself once more alone in the park on her way home the second time. She must be of better courage, she said to herself. Struggling in the Slough of Despond, she had come upon one worse mired than she, for whose sake she must search yet more vigorously after the hidden stepping-stones–the peaks whose bases are the center of the world.

“God help me!” she said ever and anon as she went, and every time she said it, she quickened her pace and ran.

It was just breakfast-time when she reached the house. Her father was coming down the stair.

“Would you mind, father,” she said as they sat, “if I were to make a room at the Old House a little comfortable?”

“I mind nothing you please to do, Dorothy,” he answered. “But you must not become a recluse. In your search for God, you must not forsake your neighbor.”

“If only I could find my neighbor!” she returned, with a rather sad smile. “I shall never be able even to look for him, I think, till I have found One nearer first.”

“You have surely found your neighbor when you have found his wounds, and your hand is on the oil-flask,” said her father, who knew her indefatigable in her ministrations.

“I don’t feel it so,” she answered. “When I am doing things for people, my arms seem to be miles long.”

As soon as her father left the table, she got her basket again, filled it from the larder and store-room, laid a book or two on the top, and telling Lisbeth she was going to the Old House for the rest of the day, set out on her third journey thither. To her delight she found Juliet fast asleep. She sat down, rather tired, and began to reflect. Her great fear was that Juliet would fall ill, and then what was to be done? How was she to take the responsibility of nursing her? But she remembered how the Lord had said she was to take no thought for the morrow; and therewith she began to understand the word. She saw that one can not _do_ any thing in to-morrow, and that all care which can not be put into the work of to-day, is taken out of it. One thing seemed clear–that, so long as it was Juliet’s desire to remain concealed from her husband, she had no right to act against that desire. Whether Juliet was right or wrong, a sense of security was for the present absolutely necessary to quiet her mind. It seemed therefore, the first thing she had to do was to make that concealed room habitable for her. It was dreadful to think of her being there alone at night, but her trouble was too great to leave much room for fear–and anyhow there was no choice. So while Juliet slept, she set about cleaning it, and hard work she found it. Great also was the labor afterward, when, piece by piece, at night or in the early morning, she carried thither every thing necessary to make abode in it clean and warm and soft.

The labor of love is its own reward, but Dorothy received much more. For, in the fresh impulse and freedom born of this service, she soon found, not only that she thought better and more clearly on the points that troubled her, but that, thus spending herself, she grew more able to believe there must be One whose glory is perfect ministration. Also, her anxious concentration of thought upon the usurping thoughts of others, with its tendency to diseased action in the logical powers, was thereby checked, much to her relief. She was not finding an atom of what is called proof; but when the longing heart finds itself able to hope that the perfect is the fact, that the truth is alive, that the lovely is rooted in eternal purpose, it can go on without such proof as belongs to a lower stratum of things, and can not be had in these. When we rise into the mountain air, we require no other testimony than that of our lungs that we are in a healthful atmosphere. We do not find it necessary to submit it to a quantitative analysis; we are content that we breathe with joy, that we grow in strength, become lighter-hearted and better-tempered. Truth is a very different thing from fact; it is the loving contact of the soul with spiritual fact, vital and potent. It does its work in the soul independently of all faculty or qualification there for setting it forth or defending it. Truth in the inward parts is a power, not an opinion. It were as poor a matter as any held by those who deny it, if it had not its vitality in itself, if it depended upon any buttressing of other and lower material.

How should it be otherwise? If God be so near as the very idea of Him necessitates, what other availing proof of His existence can there be, than such _awareness_ as must come of the developing relation between Him and us? The most satisfying of intellectual proofs, if such were to be had, would be of no value. God would be no nearer to us for them all. They would bring about no blossoming of the mighty fact. While He was in our very souls, there would yet lie between Him and us a gulf of misery, of no-knowledge.

Peace is for those who _do_ the truth, not those who opine it. The true man troubled by intellectual doubt, is so troubled unto further health and growth. Let him be alive and hopeful, above all obedient, and he will be able to wait for the deeper content which must follow with completer insight. Men may say such a man but deceives himself, that there is nothing of the kind he pleases himself with imagining; but this is at least worth reflecting upon–that while the man who aspires fears he may be deceiving himself, it is the man who does not aspire who asserts that he is. One day the former may be sure, and the latter may cease to deny, and begin to doubt.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

THE DOCTOR’S STUDY.

Paul Faber’s condition, as he sat through the rest of that night in his study, was about as near absolute misery as a man’s could well be, in this life, I imagine. The woman he had been watching through the first part of it as his essential bliss, he had left in a swoon, lying naked on the floor, and would not and did not go near her again. How could he? Had he not been duped, sold, married to—-?–That way madness lay! His pride was bitterly wounded. Would it had been mortally! but pride seems in some natures to thrive upon wounds, as in others does love. Faber’s pride grew and grew as he sat and brooded, or, rather, was brooded upon.

He, Paul Faber, who knew his own worth, his truth, his love, his devotion–he, with his grand ideas of woman and purity and unity, conscious of deserving a woman’s best regards–he, whose love (to speak truly his unworded, undefined impression of himself) any woman might be proud to call hers–he to be thus deceived! to have taken to his bosom one who had before taken another to hers, and thought it yet good enough for him! It would not bear thinking! Indignation and bitterest sense of wrong almost crazed him. For evermore he must be a hypocrite, going about with the knowledge of that concerning himself which he would not have known by others! This was how the woman, whom he had brought back from death with the life of his own heart, had served him! Years ago she had sacrificed her bloom to some sneaking wretch who flattered a God with prayers, then enticed and bewitched and married _him_!

In all this thinking there was no thought but for himself–not one for the woman whose agony had been patent even to his wrath-blinded eyes. In what is the wretchedness of our condition more evident than in this, that the sense of wrong always makes us unjust? It is a most humbling thought. God help us. He forgot how she had avoided him, resisted him, refused to confess the love which his goodness, his importunities, his besieging love had compelled in her heart. It was true she ought either to have refused him absolutely and left him, or confessed and left the matter with him; but he ought to have remembered for another, if ever he had known it for himself, the hardness of some duties; and what duty could be more torturing to a delicate-minded woman than either of those–to leave the man she loved in passionate pain, sore-wounded with a sense of undeserved cruelty, or to give him the strength to send her from him by confessing to his face what she could not recall in the solitude of her own chamber but the agony would break out wet on her forehead! We do our brother, our sister, grievous wrong, every time that, in our selfish justice, we forget the excuse that mitigates the blame. That God never does, for it would be to disregard the truth. As He will never admit a false excuse, so will He never neglect a true one. It may be He makes excuses which the sinner dares not think of; while the most specious of false ones shrivel into ashes before Him. A man is bound to think of all just excuse for his offender, for less than the righteousness of God will not serve his turn.

I would not have my reader set Faber down as heartless, His life showed the contrary. But his pride was roused to such furious self-assertion, that his heart lay beaten down under the sweep of its cyclone. Its turn was only delayed. The heart is always there, and rage is not. The heart is a constant, even when most intermittent force. It can bide its time. Nor indeed did it now lie quite still; for the thought of that white, self-offered sacrifice, let him rave as he would against the stage-trickery of the scene, haunted him so, that once and again he had to rouse an evil will to restrain him from rushing to clasp her to his bosom.

Then there was the question: why now had she told him all–if indeed she had made a clean breast of it? Was it from love to him, or reviving honesty in herself? From neither, he said. Superstition alone was at the root of it. She had been to church, and the preaching of that honest idiotic enthusiast, Wingfold, had terrified her.–Alas! what refuge in her terror had she found with her husband?

Before morning he had made up his mind as to the course he would pursue. He would not publish his own shame, but neither would he leave the smallest doubt in her mind as to what he thought of her, or what he felt toward her. All should be utterly changed between them. He would behave to her with extreme, with marked politeness; he would pay her every attention woman could claim, but her friend, her husband, he would be no more. His thoughts of vengeance took many turns, some of them childish. He would always call her _Mrs. Faber_. Never, except they had friends, would he sit in the same room with her. To avoid scandal, he would dine with her, if he could not help being at home, but when he rose from the table, it would be to go to his study. If he happened at any time to be in the room with her when she rose to retire, he would light her candle, carry it up stairs for her, open the door, make her a polite bow, and leave her. Never once would he cross the threshold of her bedroom. She should have plenty of money; the purse of an adventuress was a greedy one, but he would do his best to fill it, nor once reproach her with extravagance–of which fault, let me remark, she had never yet shown a sign. He would refuse her nothing she asked of him–except it were in any way himself. As soon as his old aunt died, he would get her a brougham, but never would he sit in it by her side. Such, he thought, would be the vengeance of a gentleman. Thus he fumed and raved and trifled, in an agony of selfish suffering–a proud, injured man; and all the time the object of his vengeful indignation was lying insensible on the spot where she had prayed to him, her loving heart motionless within a bosom of ice.

In the morning he went to his dressing-room, had his bath, and went down to breakfast, half-desiring his wife’s appearance, that he might begin his course of vindictive torture. He could not eat, and was just rising to go out, when the door opened, and the parlor-maid, who served also as Juliet’s attendant, appeared.

“I can’t find mis’ess nowhere, sir,” she said. Faber understood at once that she had left him, and a terror, neither vague nor ill-founded, possessed itself of him. He sprung from his seat, and darted up the stair to her room. Little more than a glance was necessary to assure him that she had gone deliberately, intending it should be forever. The diamond ring lay on her dressing-table, spending itself in flashing back the single ray of the sun that seemed to have stolen between the curtains to find it; her wedding ring lay beside it, and the sparkle of the diamonds stung his heart like a demoniacal laughter over it, the more horrible that it was so silent and so lovely: it was but three days since, in his wife’s presence, he had been justifying suicide with every argument he could bring to bear. It was true he had insisted on a proper regard to circumstances, and especially on giving due consideration to the question, whether the act would hurt others more than it would relieve the person contemplating it; but, after the way he had treated her, there could be no doubt how Juliet, if she thought of it at all, was compelled to answer it. He rushed to the stable, saddled Ruber, and galloped wildly away. At the end of the street he remembered that he had not a single idea to guide him. She was lying dead somewhere, but whether to turn east or west or north or south to find her, he had not the slightest notion. His condition was horrible. For a moment or two he was ready to blow his brains out: that, if the orthodox were right, was his only chance for over-taking her. What a laughing-stock he would then be to them all! The strangest, wildest, maddest thoughts came and went as of themselves, and when at last he found himself seated on Ruber in the middle of the street, an hour seemed to have passed. It was but a few moments, and the thought that roused him was: could she have betaken herself to her old lodging at Owlkirk? It was not likely; it was possible: he would ride and see.

“They will say I murdered her,” he said to himself as he rode–so little did he expect ever to see her again. “I don’t care. They may prove it if they can, and hang me. I shall make no defense. It will be but a fit end to the farce of life.”

He laughed aloud, struck his spurs in Ruber’s flanks, and rode wildly. He was desperate. He knew neither what he felt nor what he desired. If he had found her alive, he would, I do not doubt, have behaved to her cruelly. His life had fallen in a heap about him; he was ruined, and she had done it, he said, he thought, he believed. He was not aware how much of his misery was occasioned by a shrinking dread of the judgments of people he despised. Had he known it, he would have been yet more miserable, for he would have scorned himself for it. There is so much in us that is beyond our reach!

Before arriving at Owlkirk, he made up his mind that, if she were not there, he would ride to the town of Broughill–not in the hope of any news of her, but because there dwelt the only professional friend he had in the neighborhood–one who sympathized with his view of things, and would not close his heart against him because he did not believe that this horrid, ugly, disjointed thing of a world had been made by a God of love. Generally, he had been in the habit of dwelling on the loveliness of its developments, and the beauty of the gradual adaptation of life to circumstance; but now it was plainer to him than ever, that, if made at all, it was made by an evil being; “–for,” he said, and said truly, “a conscious being without a heart must be an evil being.” This was the righteous judgment of a man who could, by one tender, consoling word, have made the sun rise upon a glorious world of conscious womanhood, but would not say that word, and left that world lying in the tortured chaos of a slow disintegration. This conscious being with a heart, this Paul Faber, who saw that a God of love was the only God supposable, set his own pride so far above love, that his one idea was, to satisfy the justice of his outraged dignity by the torture of the sinner!–even while all the time dimly aware of rebuke in his soul. If she should have destroyed herself, he said once and again as he rode, was it more than a just sacrifice to his wronged honor? As such he would accept it. If she had, it was best–best for her, and best for him! What so much did it matter! She was very lovely!–true–but what was the quintessence of dust to him? Where either was there any great loss? He and she would soon be wrapped up in the primal darkness, the mother and grave of all things, together!–no, not together; not even in the dark of nothingness could they two any more lie together! Hot tears forced their way into his eyes, whence they rolled down, the lava of the soul, scorching his cheeks. He struck his spurs into Ruber fiercely, and rode madly on.

At length he neared the outskirts of Broughill. He had ridden at a fearful pace across country, leaving all to his horse, who had carried him wisely as well as bravely. But Ruber, although he had years of good work left in him, was not in his first strength, and was getting exhausted with his wild morning. For, all the way, his master, apparently unconscious of every thing else, had been immediately aware of the slightest slackening of muscle under him, the least faltering of the onward pace, and, in the temper of the savage, which wakes the moment the man of civilization is hard put to it, the moment he flagged, still drove the cruel spurs into his flanks, when the grand, unresenting creature would rush forward at straining speed–not, I venture to think, so much in obedience to the pain, as in obedience to the will of his master, fresh recognized through the pain.

Close to the high road, where they were now approaching it through the fields, a rail-fence had just been put up, inclosing a piece of ground which the owner wished to let for building. That the fact might be known, he was about to erect a post with a great board announcing it. For this post a man had dug the hole, and then gone to his dinner. The inclosure lay between Faber and the road, in the direct line he was taking. On went Ruber blindly–more blindly than his master knew, for, with the prolonged running, he had partially lost his sight, so that he was close to the fence before he saw it. But he rose boldly, and cleared it–to light, alas! on the other side with a foreleg in the hole. Down he came with a terrible crash, pitched his master into the road upon his head, and lay groaning with a broken leg. Faber neither spoke nor moved, but lay as he fell. A poor woman ran to his assistance, and finding she could do nothing for him, hurried to the town for help. His friend, who was the first surgeon in the place, flew to the spot, and had him carried to his house. It was a severe case of concussion of the brain.

Poor old Ruber was speedily helped to a world better than this for horses, I trust.

Meantime Glaston was in commotion. The servants had spread the frightful news that their mistress had vanished, and their master ridden off like a madman. “But he won’t find her alive, poor lady! I don’t think,” was the general close of their communication, accompanied by a would-be wise and really sympathetic shake of the head. In this conclusion most agreed, for there was a general impression of something strange about her, partly occasioned by the mysterious way in which Mrs. Puckridge had spoken concerning her illness and the marvelous thing the doctor had done to save her life. People now supposed that she had gone suddenly mad, or, rather, that the latent madness so plain to read in those splendid eyes of hers had been suddenly developed, and that under its influence she had rushed away, and probably drowned herself. Nor were there wanting, among the discontented women of Glaston, some who regarded the event–vaguely to their own consciousness, I gladly admit–as _almost a judgment_ upon Faber for marrying a woman of whom nobody knew any thing.

Hundreds went out to look for the body down the river. Many hurried to an old quarry, half full of water, on the road to Broughill, and peered horror-stricken over the edge, but said nothing. The boys of Glaston were mainly of a mind that the pond at the Old House was of all places the most likely to attract a suicide, for with the fascination of its horrors they were themselves acquainted. Thither therefore they sped; and soon Glaston received its expected second shock in the tidings that a lady’s bonnet had been found floating in the frightful pool: while in the wet mass the boys brought back with them, some of her acquaintance recognized with certainty a bonnet they had seen Mrs. Faber wear. There was no room left for doubt; the body of the poor lady was lying at the bottom of the pool! A multitude rushed at once to the spot, although they knew it was impossible to drag the pool, so deep was it, and for its depth so small. Neither would she ever come to the surface, they said, for the pikes and eels would soon leave nothing but the skeleton. So Glaston took the whole matter for ended, and began to settle down again to its own affairs, condoling greatly with the poor gentleman, such a favorite! who, so young, and after such a brief experience of marriage, had lost, in such a sad way, a wife so handsome, so amiable, so clever. But some said a doctor ought to have known better than marry such a person, however handsome, and they hoped it would be a lesson to him. On the whole, so sorry for him was Glaston, that, if the doctor could then have gone about it invisible, he would have found he had more friends and fewer enemies than he had supposed.

For the first two or three days no one was surprised that he did not make his appearance. They thought he was upon some false trail. But when four days had elapsed and no news was heard of him, for his friend knew nothing of what had happened, had written to Mrs. Faber, and the letter lay unopened, some began to hint that he must have had a hand in his wife’s disappearance, and to breathe a presentiment that he would never more be seen in Glaston. On the morning of the fifth day, however, his accident was known, and that he was lying insensible at the house of his friend, Dr. May; whereupon, although here and there might be heard the expression of a pretty strong conviction as to the character of the visitation, the sympathy both felt and uttered was larger than before. The other medical men immediately divided his practice amongst them, to keep it together against his possible return, though few believed he would ever again look on scenes darkened by the memory of bliss so suddenly blasted.

For weeks his recovery was doubtful, during which time, even if they had dared, it would have been useless to attempt acquainting him with what all believed the certainty of his loss. But when at length he woke to a memory of the past, and began to desire information, his friend was compelled to answer his questions. He closed his lips, bowed his head on his breast, gave a great sigh, and held his peace. Every one saw that he was terribly stricken.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

THE MIND OF JULIET.

There was one, however, who, I must confess, was not a little relieved at the news of what had befallen Faber. For, although far from desiring his death, which indeed would have ruined some of her warmest hopes for Juliet, Dorothy greatly dreaded meeting him. She was a poor dissembler, hated even the shadow of a lie, and here was a fact, which, if truth could conceal it, must not be known. Her dread had been, that, the first time she saw Faber, it would be beyond her power to look innocent, that her knowledge would be legible in her face; and much she hoped their first encounter might be in the presence of Helen or some other ignorant friend, behind whose innocent front she might shelter her conscious secrecy. To truth such a silence must feel like a culpable deception, and I do not think such a painful position can ever arise except from wrong somewhere. Dorothy could not tell a lie. She could not try to tell one; and if she had tried, she would have been instantly discovered through the enmity of her very being to the lie she told; from her lips it would have been as transparent as the truth. It is no wonder therefore that she felt relieved when first she heard of the durance in which Faber was lying. But she felt equal to the withholding from Juliet of the knowledge of her husband’s condition for the present. She judged that, seeing she had saved her friend’s life, she had some right to think and choose for the preservation of that life.

Meantime she must beware of security, and cultivate caution; and so successful was she, that weeks passed, and not a single doubt associated Dorothy with knowledge where others desired to know. Not even her father had a suspicion in the direction of the fact. She knew he would one day approve both of what she did, and of her silence concerning it. To tell him, thoroughly as he was to be trusted, would be to increase the risk; and besides, she had no right to reveal a woman’s secret to a man.

It was a great satisfaction, however, notwithstanding her dread of meeting him, to hear that Faber had at length returned to Glaston; for if he had gone away, how could they have ever known what to do? For one thing, if he were beyond their knowledge, he might any day, in full confidence, go and marry again.

Her father not unfrequently accompanied her to the Old House, but Juliet and she had arranged such signals, and settled such understandings, that the simple man saw nothing, heard nothing, forefelt nothing. Now and then a little pang would quaver through Dorothy’s bosom, when she caught sight of him peering down into the terrible dusk of the pool, or heard him utter some sympathetic hope for the future of poor Faber; but she comforted herself with the thought of how glad he would be when she was able to tell him all, and how he would laugh over the story of their precautions against himself.

Her chief anxiety was for Juliet’s health, even more for the sake of avoiding discovery, than for its own. When the nights were warm she would sometimes take her out in the park, and every day, one time or another, would make her walk in the garden while she kept watch on the top of the steep slope. Her father would sometimes remark to a friend how Dorothy’s love of solitude seemed to grow upon her; but the remark suggested nothing, and slowly Juliet was being forgotten at Glaston.

It seemed to Dorothy strange that she did not fall ill. For the first few days she was restless and miserable as human being could be. She had but one change of mood: either she would talk feverously, or sit in the gloomiest silence, now and then varied with a fit of abandoned weeping. Every time Dorothy came from Glaston, she would overwhelm her with questions–which at first Dorothy could easily meet, for she spoke absolute fact when she said she knew nothing concerning her husband. When at length the cause of his absence was understood, she told her he was with his friend, Dr. May, at Broughill. Knowing the universal belief that she had committed suicide, nothing could seem more natural. But when, day after day, she heard the same thing for weeks, she began to fear he would never be able to resume his practice, at least at Glaston, and wept bitterly at the thought of the evil she had brought upon him who had given her life, and love to boot. For her heart was a genuine one, and dwelt far more on the wrong her too eager love had done him, than on the hardness with which he had resented it. Nay, she admired him for the fierceness of his resentment, witnessing, in her eyes, to the purity of the man whom his neighbors regarded as wicked.

After the first day, she paid even less heed to any thing of a religious kind with which Dorothy, in the strength of her own desire after a perfect stay, sought to rouse or console her. When Dorothy ventured on such ground, which grew more and more seldom, she would sit listless, heedless, with a far-away look. Sometimes when Dorothy fancied she had been listening a little, her next words would show that her thoughts had been only with her husband. When the subsiding of the deluge of her agony, allowed words to carry meaning to her, any hint at supernal consolation made her angry, and she rejected every thing Dorothy said, almost with indignation. To seem even to accept such comfort, she would have regarded as traitorous to her husband. Not the devotion of the friend who gave up to her all of her life she could call her own, sufficed to make her listen even with a poor patience. So absorbed was she in her trouble, that she had no feeling of what poor Dorothy had done for her. How can I blame her, poor lady! If existence was not a thing to be enjoyed, as for her it certainly was not at present, how was she to be thankful for what seemed its preservation? There was much latent love to Dorothy in her heart; I may go further and say there was much latent love to God in her heart, only the latter was very latent as yet. When her heart was a little freer from grief and the agony of loss, she would love Dorothy; but God must wait with his own patience–wait long for the child of His love to learn that her very sorrow came of His dearest affection. Who wants such affection as that? says the unloving. No one, I answer; but every one who comes to know it, glorifies it as the only love that ever could satisfy his being.

Dorothy, who had within her the chill of her own doubt, soon yielded to Juliet’s coldness, and ceased to say anything that could be called religious. She saw that it was not the time to speak; she must content herself with being. Nor had it ever been any thing very definite she could say. She had seldom gone beyond the expression of her own hope, and the desire that her friend would look up. She could say that all the men she knew, from books or in life, of the most delicate honesty, the most genuine repentance, the most rigid self-denial, the loftiest aspiration, were Christian men; but she could neither say her knowledge of history or of life was large, nor that, of the men she knew who professed to believe, the greater part were honest, or much ashamed, or rigid against themselves, or lofty toward God. She saw that her part was not instruction, but ministration, and that in obedience to Jesus in whom she hoped to believe. What matter that poor Juliet denied Him? If God commended His love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us,’ He would be pleased with the cup of cold water given to one that was not a disciple. Dorothy dared not say she was a disciple herself; she dared only say that right gladly would she become one, if she could. If only the lovely, the good, the tender, the pure, the grand, the adorable, were also the absolutely true!–true not in the human idea only, but in absolute fact, in divine existence! If the story of Jesus was true, then joy to the universe, for all was well! She waited, and hoped, and prayed and ministered.

There is a great power in quiet, for God is in it. Not seldom He seems to lay His hand on one of His children, as a mother lays hers on the restless one in the crib, to still him. Then the child sleeps, but the man begins to live up from the lower depths of his nature. So the winter comes to still the plant whose life had been rushing to blossom and fruit. When the hand of God is laid upon a man, vain moan, and struggle and complaint, it may be indignant outcry follows; but when, outwearied at last, he yields, if it be in dull submission to the inexorable, and is still, then the God at the heart of him, the God that is there or the man could not be, begins to grow. This point Juliet had not yet reached, and her trouble went on. She saw no light, no possible outlet. Her cries, her longings, her agonies, could not reach even the ears, could never reach the heart of the man who had cast her off. He believed her dead, might go and marry another, and what would be left her then? Nothing but the death from which she now restrained herself, lest, as Dorothy had taught her, she should deny him the fruits of a softening heart and returning love. The moment she heard that he sought another, she would seek Death and assuredly find him. One letter she would write to leave behind her, and then go. He should see and understand that the woman he despised for the fault of the girl, was yet capable of the noblest act of a wife: she would die that he might live–that it might be well with her husband. Having entertained, comprehended and settled this idea in her mind, she became quieter. After this, Dorothy might have spoken without stirring up so angry an opposition. But it was quite as well she did not know it, and did not speak.

I have said that Dorothy wondered she did not fall ill. There was a hope in Juliet’s mind of which she had not spoken, but upon which, though vaguely, she built further hope, and which may have had part in her physical endurance: the sight of his baby might move the heart of her husband to pardon her!

But the time, even with the preoccupation of misery, grew very dreary. She had never had any resources in herself except her music, and even if here she had had any opportunity of drawing upon that, what is music but a mockery to a breaking heart? Was music ever born of torture, of misery? It is only when the cloud of sorrow is sinking in the sun-rays, that the song-larks awake and ascend. A glory of some sort must fringe the skirts of any sadness, the light of the sorrowing soul itself must be shed upon it, and the cloud must be far enough removed to show the reflected light, before it will yield any of the stuff of which songs are made. And this light that gathers in song, what is it but hope behind the sorrow–hope so little recognized as such, that it is often called despair? It is reviving and not decay that sings even the saddest of songs.

Juliet had had little consciousness of her own being as an object of reflection. Joy and sorrow came and went; she had never brooded. Never until now, had she known any very deep love. Even that she bore her father had not ripened into the grand love of the woman-child. She forgot quickly; she hoped easily; she had had some courage, and naturally much activity; she faced necessity by instinct, and took almost no thought for the morrow–but this after the fashion of the birds, not after the fashion required of those who can consider the birds; it is one thing to take no thought, for want of thought, and another to take no thought, from sufficing thought, whose flower is confidence. The one way is the lovely way of God in the birds–the other, His lovelier way in his men and women. She had in her the making of a noble woman–only that is true of every woman; and it was no truer of her than of every other woman, that, without religion, she could never be, in any worthy sense, a woman at all. I know how narrow and absurd this will sound to many of my readers, but such simply do not know what religion means, and think I do not know what a woman means. Hitherto her past had always turned to a dream as it glided away from her; but now, in the pauses of her prime agony, the tide rose from the infinite sea to which her river ran, and all her past was borne back upon her, even to her far-gone childish quarrels with her silly mother, and the neglect and disobedience she had too often been guilty of toward her father. And the center of her memories was the hot coal of that one secret; around that they all burned and hissed. Now for the first time her past _was_, and she cowered and fled from it, a slave to her own history, to her own deeds, to her own concealment. Alas, like many another terror-stricken child, to whom the infinite bosom of tenderness and love stretches out arms of shelter and healing and life, she turned to the bosom of death, and imagined there a shelter of oblivious darkness! For life is a thing so deep, so high, so pure, so far above the reach of common thought, that, although shadowed out in all the harmonic glories of color, and speech, and song, and scent, and motion, and shine, yea, even of eyes and loving hands, to common minds–and the more merely intellectual, the commoner are they–it seems but a phantasm. To unchildlike minds, the region of love and worship, to which lead the climbing stairs of duty, is but a nephelocockygia; they acknowledge the stairs, however, thank God, and if they will but climb, a hand will be held out to them. Now, to pray to a God, the very thought of whose possible existence might seem enough to turn the coal of a dead life into a diamond of eternal radiance, is with many such enough to stamp a man a fool. It will surprise me nothing in the new world to hear such men, finding they are not dead after all, begin at once to argue that they were quite right in refusing to act upon any bare possibility–forgetting that the questioning of possibilities has been the source of all scientific knowledge. They may say that to them there seemed no possibility; upon which will come the question–whence arose their incapacity for seeing it? In the meantime, that the same condition which constitutes the bliss of a child, should also be the essential bliss of a man, is incomprehensible to him in whom the child is dead, or so fast asleep that nothing but a trumpet of terror can awake him. That the rules of the nursery–I mean the nursery where the true mother is the present genius, not the hell at the top of a London house–that the rules of the nursery over which broods a wise mother with outspread wings of tenderness, should be the laws also of cosmic order, of a world’s well-being, of national greatness, and of all personal dignity, may well be an old-wives’-fable to the man who dabbles at saving the world by science, education, hygiene and other economics. There is a knowledge that will do it, but of that he knows so little, that he will not allow it to be a knowledge at all. Into what would he save the world? His paradise would prove a ten times more miserable condition than that out of which he thought to rescue it.

But any thing that gives objectivity to trouble, that lifts the cloud so far that, if but for a moment, it shows itself a cloud, instead of being felt an enveloping, penetrating, palsying mist–setting it where the mind can in its turn prey upon it, can play with it, paint it, may come to sing of it, is a great help toward what health may yet be possible for the troubled soul. With a woman’s instinct, Dorothy borrowed from the curate a volume of a certain more attractive edition of Shakespeare than she herself possessed, and left it in Juliet’s way, so arranged that it should open at the tragedy of Othello. She thought that, if she could be drawn into sympathy with suffering like, but different and apart from her own, it would take her a little out of herself, and might lighten the pressure of her load. Now Juliet had never read a play of Shakespeare in her life, and knew Othello only after the vulgar interpretation, as the type, that is, of jealousy; but when, in a pause of the vague reverie of feeling which she called thought, a touch of ennui supervening upon suffering, she began to read the play, the condition of her own heart afforded her the insight necessary for descrying more truly the Othello of Shakespeare’s mind. She wept for Desdemona’s innocence and hard fate; but she pitied more the far harder fate of Othello, and found the death of both a consolation for the trouble their troubles had stirred up in her.

The curate was in the habit of scribbling on his books, and at the end of the play, which left a large blank on the page, had written a few verses: as she sat dreaming over the tragedy, Juliet almost unconsciously took them in. They were these:

In the hot hell o’
Jealousy shines Othello–
Love in despair,
An angel in flames!
While pure Desdemona
Waits him alone, a
Ghost in the air,
White with his blames.

Becoming suddenly aware of their import, she burst out weeping afresh, but with a very different weeping–Ah, if it might be so! Soon then had the repentant Othello, rushing after his wife, explained all, and received easiest pardon: he had but killed her. Her Paul would not even do that for her! He did not love her enough for that. If she had but thrown herself indeed into the lake, then perhaps–who could tell!–she might now be nearer to him than she should ever be in this world.

All the time, Dorothy was much and vainly exercised as to what might become possible for the bringing of them together again. But it was not as if any misunderstanding had arisen between them: such a difficulty might any moment be removed by an explanation. The thing that divided them was the original misunderstanding, which lies, deep and black as the pit, between every soul and the soul next it, where self and not God is the final thought. The gulf is forever crossed by “bright shoots of everlastingness,” the lightnings of involuntary affection; but nothing less than the willed love of an infinite devotion will serve to close it; any moment it may be lighted up from beneath, and the horrible distance between them be laid bare. Into this gulf it was that, with absolute gift of himself, the Lord, doing like his Father, cast Himself; and by such devotion alone can His disciples become fellow-workers with Him, help to slay the evil self in the world, and rouse the holy self to like sacrifice, that the true, the eternal life of men, may arise jubilant and crowned. Then is the old man of claims and rights and disputes and fears, re-born a child whose are all things and who claims and fears nothing.

In ignorance of Faber’s mood, whether he mourned over his harshness, or justified himself in resentment, Dorothy could but wait, and turned herself again to think what could be done for the consolation of her friend.

Could she, knowing her prayer might be one which God would not grant, urge her to pray! For herself, she knew, if there was a God, what she desired must be in accordance with His will; but if Juliet cried to him to give her back her husband, and He did not, would not the silent refusal, the deaf ear of Heaven, send back the cry in settled despair upon her spirit? With her own fear Dorothy feared for her friend. She had not yet come to see that, in whatever trouble a man may find himself, the natural thing being to make his request known, his brother may heartily tell him to pray. Why, what can a man do but pray? He is here–helpless; and his Origin, the breather of his soul, his God, may be somewhere. And what else should he pray about but the thing that troubles him? Not surely the thing that does not trouble him? What is the trouble there for, but to make him cry? It is the pull of God at his being. Let a man only pray. Prayer is the sound to which not merely is the ear of the Father open, but for which that ear is listening. Let him pray for the thing he thinks he needs: for what else, I repeat, can he pray? Let a man cry for that in whose loss life is growing black: the heart of the Father is open. Only let the man know that, even for his prayer, the Father will not give him a stone. But let the man pray, and let God see to it how to answer him. If in his childishness and ignorance he should ask for a serpent, he will not give him a serpent. But it may yet be the Father will find some way of giving him his heart’s desire. God only knows how rich God is in power of gift. See what He has done to make Himself able to give to His own heart’s desire. The giving of His Son was as the knife with which He would divide Himself amongst His children. He knows, He only, the heart, the needs, the deep desires, the hungry eternity, of each of them all. Therefore let every man ask of God, Who giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not–and see at least what will come of it.

But he will speak like one of the foolish if he say thus: “Let God hear me, and give me my desire, and I will trust in Him.” That would be to tempt the Lord his God. If a father gives his children their will instead of his, they may well turn on him again and say: “Was it then the part of a father to give me a scorpion because, not knowing what it was, I asked for it? I besought him for a fancied joy, and lo! it is a sorrow for evermore!”

But it may be that sometimes God indeed does so, and to such a possible complaint has this reply in Himself: “I gave thee what thou wouldst, because not otherwise could I teach the stiff-necked his folly. Hadst thou been patient, I would have made the thing a joy ere I gave it thee; I would have changed the scorpion into a golden beetle, set with rubies and sapphires. Have thou patience now.”

One thing is clear, that poor Juliet, like most women, and more men, would never have begun to learn any thing worth learning, if she had not been brought into genuine, downright trouble. Indeed I am not sure but some of those who seem so good as to require no trouble, are just those who have already been most severely tried.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

ANOTHER MIND.

But while the two ladies were free of all suspicion of danger, and indeed were quite safe, they were not alone in the knowledge of their secret. There was one who, for some time, had been on the track of it, and had long ago traced it with certainty to its covert: indeed he had all but seen into it from the first. But, although to his intimate friends known as a great and indeed wonderful talker, he was generally regarded as a somewhat silent man, and in truth possessed to perfection the gift of holding his tongue. Except that his outward insignificance was so great as to pass the extreme, he was not one to attract attention; but those who knew Wingfold well, heard him speak of Mr. Polwarth, the gate-keeper, oftener than of any other; and from what she heard him say, Dorothy had come to have a great reverence for the man, although she knew him very little.

In returning from Nestley with Juliet by her side, Helen had taken the road through Osterfield Park. When they reached Polwarth’s gate, she had, as a matter of course, pulled up, that they might have a talk with the keeper. He had, on the few occasions on which he caught a passing glimpse of Miss Meredith, been struck with a something in her that to him seemed to take from her beauty–that look of strangeness, namely, which every one felt, and which I imagine to have come of the consciousness of her secret, holding her back from blending with the human wave; and now, therefore, while the carriage stood, he glanced often at her countenance.

From long observation, much silence and gentle pondering; from constant illness, and frequent recurrence of great suffering; from loving acceptance of the same, and hence an overflowing sympathy with every form of humanity, even that more dimly revealed in the lower animals, and especially suffering humanity; from deep acquaintance with the motions of his own spirit, and the fullest conviction that one man is as another; from the entire confidence of all who knew him, and the results of his efforts to help them; above all, from persistently dwelling in the secret place of the Most High, and thus entering into the hidden things of life from the center whence the issues of them diverged–from all these had been developed in him, through wisest use, an insight into the natures of men, a power of reading the countenance, an apprehension of what was moving in the mind, a contact, almost for the moment a junction with the goings on of their spirits, which at times revealed to him not only character, and prevailing purpose or drift of nature, but even the main points of a past moral history. Sometimes indeed he would recoil with terror from what seemed the threatened dawn in him of a mysterious power, probably latent in every soul, of reading the future of a person brought within certain points of spiritual range. What startled him, however, may have been simply an involuntary conclusion, instantaneously drawn, from the plain convergence of all the forces in and upon the individual toward a point of final deliverance or of near catastrophe: when “the mortal instruments” are steadily working for evil, the only hope of deliverance lies in catastrophe.

When Polwarth had thus an opportunity of reading Juliet’s countenance, it was not wearing its usual expression: the ferment set at work in her mind by the curate’s sermon had intensified the strangeness of it, even to something almost of definement; and it so arrested him that after the ponies had darted away like birds, he stood for a whole minute in the spot and posture in which they had left him.

“I never saw Polwarth look _distrait_ before,” said the curate, and was about to ask Juliet whether she had not been bewitching him, when the far-away, miserable look of her checked him, and he dropped back into his seat in silence.

But Polwarth had had no sudden insight into Juliet’s condition; all he had seen was, that she was strangely troubled–and that with no single feeling; that there was an undecided contest in her spirit; that something was required of her which she had not yet resolved to yield. Almost the moment she vanished from his sight, it dawned upon him that she had a secret. As one knows by the signs of the heavens that the matter of a storm is in them and must break out, so Polwarth had read in Juliet’s sky the inward throes of a pent convulsion.

He knew something of the doctor, for he had met him again and again where he himself was trying to serve; but they had never had conversation together. Faber had not an idea of what was in the creature who represented to him one of Nature’s failures at man-making; while Polwarth, from what he heard and saw of the doctor, knew him better than he knew himself; and although the moment when he could serve him had not begun to appear, looked for such a moment to come. There was so much good in the man, that his heart longed to give him something worth having. How Faber would have laughed at the notion! But Polwarth felt confident that one day the friendly doctor would be led out of the miserable desert where he cropped thistles and sage and fancied himself a hero. And now in the drawn look of his wife’s face, in the broken lights of her eye, in the absorption and the start, he thought he perceived the quarter whence unwelcome deliverance might be on its way, and resolved to keep attention awake for what might appear. In his inmost being he knew that the mission of man is to help his neighbors. But in as much as he was ready to help, he recoiled from meddling. To meddle is to destroy the holy chance. Meddlesomeness is the very opposite of helpfulness, for it consists in forcing your self into another self, instead of opening your self as a refuge to the other. They are opposite extremes, and, like all extremes, touch. It is not correct that extremes meet; they lean back to back. To Polwarth, a human self was a shrine to be approached with reverence, even when he bore deliverance in his hand. Anywhere, everywhere, in the seventh heaven or the seventh hell, he could worship God with the outstretched arms of love, the bended knees of joyous adoration, but in helping his fellow, he not only worshiped but served God–ministered, that is, to the wants of God–doing it unto Him in the least of His. He knew that, as the Father unresting works for the weal of men, so every son, following the Master-Son, must work also. Through weakness and suffering he had