Part 2 (1/2)
”How do you stand this trying spring weather, Mr. Drake? I don't hear the best accounts of you,” said the surgeon, drawing Ruber a pace back from the door.
”I am as well as at my age I can perhaps expect to be,” answered the minister. ”I am getting old--and--and--we all have our troubles, and, I trust, our G.o.d also, to set them right for us,” he added, with a suggesting look in the face of the doctor.
”By Jove!” said Faber to himself, ”the spring weather has roused the wors.h.i.+ping instinct! The clergy are awake to-day! I had better look out, or it will soon be too hot for me.”
”I can't look you in the face, doctor,” resumed the old man after a pause, ”and believe what people say of you. It can't be that you don't even believe there _is_ a G.o.d?”
Faber would rather have said nothing; but his integrity he must keep fast hold of, or perish in his own esteem.
”If there be one,” he replied, ”I only state a fact when I say He has never given me ground sufficient to think so. You say yourselves He has favorites to whom He reveals Himself: I am not one of them, and must therefore of necessity be an unbeliever.”
”But think, Mr. Faber--if there should be a G.o.d, what an insult it is to deny Him existence.”
”I can't see it,” returned the surgeon, suppressing a laugh. ”If there be such a one, would He not have me speak the truth? Anyhow, what great matter can it be to Him that one should say he has never seen Him, and can't therefore believe He is to be seen? A G.o.d should be above that sort of pride.”
The minister was too much shocked to find any answer beyond a sad reproving shake of the head. But he felt almost as if the hearing of such irreverence without withering retort, made him a party to the sin against the Holy Ghost. Was he not now conferring with one of the generals of the army of Antichrist? Ought he not to turn his back upon him, and walk into the house? But a surge of concern for the frank young fellow who sat so strong and alive upon the great horse, broke over his heart, and he looked up at him pitifully.
Faber mistook the cause and object of his evident emotion.
”Come now, Mr. Drake, be frank with me,” he said. ”You are out of health; let me know what is the matter. Though I'm not religious, I'm not a humbug, and only speak the truth when I say I should be glad to serve you. A man must be neighborly, or what is there left of him? Even you will allow that our duty to our neighbor is half the law, and there is some help in medicine, though I confess it is no science yet, and we are but dabblers.”
”But,” said Mr. Drake, ”I don't choose to accept the help of one who looks upon all who think with me as a set of humbugs, and regards those who deny every thing as the only honest men.”
”By Jove! sir, I take you for an honest man, or I should never trouble my head about you. What I say of such as you is, that, having inherited a lot of humbug, you don't know it for such, and do the best you can with it.”
”If such is your opinion of me--and I have no right to complain of it in my own person--I should just like to ask you one question about another,” said Mr. Drake: ”Do you in your heart believe that Jesus Christ was an impostor?”
”I believe, if the story about him be true, that he was a well-meaning man, enormously self-deceived.”
”Your judgment seems to me enormously illogical. That any ordinarily good man should so deceive himself, appears to my mind altogether impossible and incredible.”
”Ah! but he was an extraordinarily good man.”
”Therefore the more likely to think too much of himself?”
”Why not? I see the same thing in his followers all about me.”
”Doubtless the servant shall be as his master,” said the minister, and closed his mouth, resolved to speak no more. But his conscience woke, and goaded him with the truth that had come from the mouth of its enemy--the reproach his disciples brought upon their master, for, in the judgment of the world, the master is as his disciples.
”You Christians,” the doctor went on, ”seem to me to make yourselves, most unnecessarily, the slaves of a fancied ideal. I have no such ideal to contemplate; yet I am not aware that you do better by each other than I am ready to do for any man. I can't pretend to love every body, but I do my best for those I can help. Mr. Drake, I would gladly serve you.”
The old man said nothing. His mood was stormy. Would he accept life itself from the hand of him who denied his Master?--seek to the powers of darkness for cure?--kneel to Antichrist for favor, as if he and not Jesus were lord of life and death? Would _he_ pray a man to whom the Bible was no better than a book of ballads, to come betwixt him and the evils of growing age and disappointment, to lighten for him the gra.s.shopper, and stay the mourners as they went about his streets! He had half turned, and was on the point of walking silent into the house, when he bethought himself of the impression it would make on the unbeliever, if he were thus to meet the offer of his kindness. Half turned, he stood hesitating.
”I have a pa.s.sion for therapeutics,” persisted the doctor; ”and if I can do any thing to ease the yoke upon the shoulders of my fellows--”
Mr. Drake did not hear the end of the sentence: he heard instead, somewhere in his soul, a voice saying, ”My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” He _could_ not let Faber help him.
”Doctor, you have the great gift of a kind heart,” he began, still half turned from him.