Part 36 (1/2)
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 G.o.d, 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 quant.i.tative a.n.a.lysis; 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 b.u.t.tressing of other and lower material.
How should it be otherwise? If G.o.d 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. G.o.d 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 a.s.serts that he is. One day the former may be sure, and the latter may cease to deny, and begin to doubt.
CHAPTER x.x.xVII.
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 G.o.d 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. G.o.d 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 pa.s.sionate 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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-a.s.sertion, 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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. Superst.i.tion 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 a.s.sure him that she had gone deliberately, intending it should be forever. The diamond ring lay on her dressing-table, spending itself in flas.h.i.+ng 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 pa.s.sed. 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.