Surgeon Paul Faber, George MacDonald [ereader manga .TXT] 📗

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 learned it. But he never doubted that his work as much as his bread would be given him, never rushed out wildly snatching at something to do for God, never helped a lazy man to break stones, never preached to foxes. It was what the Father gave him to do that he cared to do, and that only. It was the man next him that he helped-the neighbor in need of the help he had. He did not trouble himself greatly about the happiness of men, but when the time and the opportunity arrived in which to aid the struggling birth of the eternal bliss, the whole strength of his being responded to the call. And now, having felt a thread vibrate, like a sacred spider he sat in the center of his web of love, and waited and watched.

In proportion as the love is pure, and only in proportion to that, can such be a pure and real calling. The least speck of self will defile it-a little more may ruin its most hopeful effort.

Two days after, he heard, from some of the boys hurrying to the pond, that Mrs. Faber was missing. He followed them, and from a spot beyond the house, looking down upon the lake, watched their proceedings. He saw them find her bonnet-a result which left him room to doubt. Almost the next moment a wavering film of blue smoke rising from the Old House caught his eye. It did not surprise him, for he knew Dorothy Drake was in the habit of going there-knew also by her face for what she went: accustomed to seek solitude himself, he knew the relations of it. Very little had passed between them. Sometimes two persons are like two drops running alongside of each other down a window-pane: one marvels how it is they can so long escape running together. Persons fit to be bosom friends will meet and part for years, and never say much beyond good-morning and good-night.

But he bethought him that he had not before known her light a fire, and the day certainly was not a cold one. Again, how was it that with the cries of the boys in her ears, searching for a sight of the body in her very garden, she had never come from the house, or even looked from a window? Then it came to his mind what a place for concealment the Old House was: he knew every corner of it; and thus he arrived at what was almost the conviction that Mrs. Faber was there. When a day or two had passed, he was satisfied that, for some reason or other, she was there for refuge. The reason must be a good one, else Dorothy would not be aiding-and it must of course have to do with her husband.

He next noted how, for some time, Dorothy never went through his gate, although he saw reason to believe she went to the Old House every day. After a while, however, she went through it every day. They always exchanged a few words as she passed, and he saw plainly enough that she carried a secret. By and by he began to see the hover of words unuttered about her mouth; she wished to speak about something but could not quite make up her mind to it. He would sometimes meet her look with the corresponding look of "Well, what is it?" but thereupon she would invariably seem to change her mind, would bid him good morning, and pass on.


CHAPTER XL.

A DESOLATION.


When Faber at length returned to Glaston, his friends were shocked at his appearance. Either the hand of the Lord, or the hand of crushing chance, had been heavy upon him. A pale, haggard, worn, enfeebled man, with an eye of suffering, and a look that shrunk from question, he repaired to his desolate house. In the regard of his fellow-townsmen he was as Job appeared to the eyes of his friends; and some of them, who knew no more of religion than the sound of its name, pitied him that he had not the comfort of it. All Glaston was tender to him. He walked feebly, seldom showed the ghost of a smile, and then only from kindness, never from pleasure. His face was now almost as white as that of his lost Juliet. His brother doctors behaved with brotherly truth. They had attended to all his patients, poor as well as rich, and now insisted that he should resume his labors gradually, while they fulfilled his lack. So at first he visited only his patients in the town, for he was unable to ride; and his grand old horse, Ruber, in whom he trusted, and whom he would have ventured sooner to mount than Niger, was gone! For weeks he looked like a man of fifty; and although by degrees the restorative influences of work began to tell upon him, he never recovered the look of his years. Nobody tried to comfort him. Few dared, for very reverence, speak to the man who carried in him such an awful sorrow. Who would be so heartless as counsel him to forget it? and what other counsel was there for one who refused like him? Who could have brought himself to say to him-"There is loveliness yet left, and within thy reach: take the good, etc.; forget the nothing that has been, in the something that may yet for awhile avoid being nothing too; comfort thy heart with a fresh love: the time will come to forget both, in the everlasting tomb of the ancient darkness"? Few men would consent to be comforted in accordance with their professed theories of life; and more than most would Faber, at this period of his suffering, have scorned such truth for comfort. As it was, men gave him a squeeze of the hand, and women a tearful look; but from their sympathy he derived no faintest pleasure, for he knew he deserved nothing that came from heart of tenderness. Not that he had begun to condemn himself for his hardness to the woman who, whatever her fault, yet honored him by confessing it, or to bemoan her hard fate to whom a man had not been a hiding-place from the wind, a covert from the tempest of life, a shadow-shelter from the scorching of her own sin. As he recovered from the double shock, and, his strength slowly returning, his work increased, bringing him again into the run of common life, his sense of desolation increased. As his head ached less, his heart ached the more, nor did the help he ministered to his fellows any longer return in comfort to himself. Hitherto his regard of annihilation had been as of something so distant, that its approach was relatively by degrees infinitesimal, but as the days went on, he began to derive a gray consolation from the thought that he must at length cease to exist. He would not hasten the end; he would be brave, and see the play out. Only it was all so dull! If a woman looked kindly at him, if for a moment it gave him pleasure, the next it was as an arrow in his heart. What a white splendor was vanished from his life! Where were those great liquid orbs of radiating darkness?-where was that smile with its flash of whiteness?-that form so lithe, yet so stately, so perfect in modulation?-where were those hands and feet that spoke without words, and took their own way with his heart?-those arms-? His being shook to its center. One word of tenderness and forgiveness, and all would have been his own still!-But on what terms?-Of dishonor and falsehood, he said, and grew hard again. He was sorry for Juliet, but she and not he was to blame. She had ruined his life, as well as lost her own, and his was the harder case, for he had to live on, and she had taken with her all the good the earth had for him. She had been the sole object of his worship; he had acknowledged no other divinity; she was the loveliness of all things; but she had dropped from her pedestal, and gone down in the sea that flows waveless and windless and silent around the worlds. Alas for life! But he would bear on till its winter came. The years would be as tedious as hell; but nothing that ends can be other than brief. Not willingly even yet would he fail of what work was his. The world was bad enough; he would not leave it worse than he had found it. He would work life out, that he might die in peace. Fame truly there was none for him, but his work would not be lost. The wretched race of men would suffer a little the less that he had lived. Poor comfort, if more of health but ministered to the potency of such anguish as now burrowed in him like a mole of fire!

There had been a time when, in the young pathos of things, he would shut his eyes