Paul Faber, Surgeon Part 19

"I hope not," she answered. There was a strange light on her face, like that of a sunless sky on a deep, shadowed well. "But I am a little alarmed about him. He has suffered much of late. Ah, Mr. Wingfold, you don't know how good he is! Of course, being no friend to the church--"

"I don't wonder at that, the church is so little of a friend to herself," interrupted the curate, relieved to find her so composed, for as he came along he had dreaded something terrible.

"He wants very much to see you. He thinks perhaps you may be able to help him. I am sure if you can't n.o.body can. But please don't heed much what he says about himself. He is feverish and excited. There is such a thing--is there not?--as a morbid humility? I don't mean a false humility, but one that pa.s.ses over into a kind of self disgust."

"I know what you mean," answered the curate, laying down his hat: he never took his hat into a sick-room.

Dorothy led the way up the narrow creaking stairs.

It was a lowly little chamber in which the once popular preacher lay--not so good as that he had occupied when a boy, two stories above his father's shop. That shop had been a thorn in his spirit in the days of his worldly success, but again and again this morning he had been remembering it as a very haven of comfort and peace. He almost forgot himself into a dream of it once; for one blessed moment, through the upper half of the window he saw the snow falling in the street, while he sat inside and half under the counter, reading Robinson Crusoe! Could any thing short of heaven be so comfortable?

As the curate stepped in, a grizzled head turned toward him a haggard face with dry, bloodshot eyes, and a long hand came from the bed to greet him.

"Ah, Mr. Wingfold!" cried the minister, "G.o.d has forsaken me. If He had only forgotten me, I could have borne that, I think; for, as Job says, the time would have come when He would have had a desire to the work of His hands. But He has turned His back upon me, and taken His free Spirit from me. He has ceased to take His own way, to do His will with me, and has given me my way and my will. Sit down, Mr. Wingfold. You can not comfort me, but you are a true servant of G.o.d, and I will tell you my sorrow. I am no friend to the church, as you know, but--"

"So long as you are a friend of its Head, that goes for little with me,"

said the curate. "But if you will allow me, I should like to say just one word on the matter."

He wished to try what a diversion of thought might do; not that he foolishly desired to make him forget his trouble, but that he knew from experience any gap might let in comfort.

"Say on, Mr. Wingfold. I am a worm and no man."

"It seems, then, to me a mistake for any community to spend precious energy upon even a just finding of fault with another. The thing is, to trim the lamp and clean the gla.s.s of our own, that it may be a light to the world. It is just the same with communities as with individuals. The community which casts if it be but the mote out of its own eye, does the best thing it can for the beam in its neighbor's. For my part, I confess that, so far as the clergy form and represent the Church of England, it is and has for a long time been doing its best--not its worst, thank G.o.d--to serve G.o.d and Mammon."

"Ah! that's my beam!" cried the minister. "I have been serving Mammon a.s.siduously. I served him not a little in the time of my prosperity, with confidence and show, and then in my adversity with fears and complaints. Our Lord tells us expressly that we are to take no thought for the morrow, because we can not serve G.o.d and Mammon. I have been taking thought for a hundred morrows, and that not patiently, but grumbling in my heart at His dealings with me. Therefore now He has cast me off."

"How do you know that He has cast you off?" asked the curate.

"Because He has given me my own way with such a vengeance. I have been pulling, pulling my hand out of His, and He has let me go, and I lie in the dirt."

"But you have not told me your grounds for concluding so."

"Suppose a child had been crying and fretting after his mother for a spoonful of jam," said the minister, quite gravely, "and at last she set him down to a whole pot--what would you say to that?"

"I should say she meant to give him a sharp lesson, perhaps a reproof as well--certainly not that she meant to cast him off," answered Wingfold, laughing. "But still I do not understand."

"Have you not heard then? Didn't Dorothy tell you?"

"She has told me nothing."

"Not that my old uncle has left me a hundred thousand pounds and more?"

The curate was on the point of saying, "I am very glad to hear it,"

when the warning Dorothy had given him returned to his mind, and with it the fear that the pastor was under a delusion--that, as a rich man is sometimes not unnaturally seized with the mania of imagined poverty, so this poor man's mental barometer had, from excess of poverty, turned its index right round again to riches.

"Oh!" he returned, lightly and soothingly, "perhaps it is not so bad as that. You may have been misinformed. There may be some mistake."

"No, no!" returned the minister; "it is true, every word of it. You shall see the lawyers' letter. Dorothy has it, I think. My uncle was an ironmonger in a country town, got on, and bought a little bit of land in which he found iron. I knew he was flouris.h.i.+ng, but he was a churchman and a terrible Tory, and I never dreamed he would remember me. There had been no communication between our family and his for many years. He must have fancied me still a flouris.h.i.+ng London minister, with a rich wife!

If he had had a suspicion of how sorely I needed a few pounds, I can not believe he would have left me a farthing. He did not save his money to waste it on bread and cheese, I can fancy him saying."

Although a look almost of despair kept coming and going upon his face, he lay so still, and spoke so quietly and collectedly, that Wingfold began to wonder whether there might not be some fact in his statement.

He did not well know what to say.

"When I heard the news from Dorothy--she read the letter first," Mr.

Drake went on, "--old fool that I was I was filled with such delight that, although I could not have said whether I believed or not, the very idea of the thing made me weep. Alas! Mr. Wingfold, I have had visions of G.o.d in which the whole world would not have seemed worth a salt tear!

And now!--I jumped out of bed, and hurried on my clothes, but by the time I came to kneel at my bedside, G.o.d was away. I could not speak a word to Him! I had lost all the trouble that kept me crying after Him like a little child at his mother's heels, the bond was broken and He was out of sight. I tried to be thankful, but my heart was so full of the money, it lay like a stuffed bag. But I dared not go even to my study till I had prayed. I tramped up and down this little room, thinking more about paying my butcher's bill than any thing else. I would give him a silver snuff-box; but as to G.o.d and His goodness my heart felt like a stone; I _could not_ lift it up. All at once I saw how it was: He had heard my prayers in anger! Mr. Wingfold, the Lord has sent me this money as He sent the quails to the Israelites: while it was yet, as it were, between my teeth, He smote me with hardness of heart. O my G.o.d! how shall I live in the world with a hundred thousand pounds instead of my Father in heaven! If it were only that He had hidden His face, I should be able to pray somehow! He has given me over to the Mammon I was wors.h.i.+ping! Hypocrite that I am! how often have I not pointed out to my people, while yet I dwelt in the land of Goshen, that to fear poverty was the same thing as to love money, for that both came of lack of faith in the living G.o.d! Therefore has He taken from me the light of His countenance, which yet, Mr. Wingfold, with all my sins and shortcomings, yea, and my hypocrisy, is the all in all to me!"

He looked the curate in the face with such wild eyes as convinced him that, even if perfectly sane at present, he was in no small danger of losing his reason.

"Then you would willingly give up this large fortune," he said, "and return to your former condition?"

"Rather than not be able to pray--I would! I would!" he cried; then paused and added, "--if only He would give me enough to pay my debts and not have to beg of other people."

Then, with a tone suddenly changed to one of agonized effort, with clenched hands, and eyes shut tight, he cried vehemently, as if in the face of a lingering unwillingness to encounter again the miseries through which he had been pa.s.sing.

"No, no, Lord! Forgive me. I will not think of conditions. Thy will be done! Take the money and let me be a debtor and a beggar if Thou wilt, only let me pray to Thee; and do Thou make it up to my creditors."

Wingfold's spirit was greatly moved. Here was victory! Whether the fortune was a fact or fancy, made no feature of difference. He thanked G.o.d and took courage. The same instant the door opened, and Dorothy came in hesitating, and looking strangely anxious. He threw her a face-question. She gently bowed her head, and gave him a letter with a broad black border which she held in her hand.

He read it. No room for rational doubt was left. He folded it softly, gave it back to her, and rising, kneeled down by the bedside, near the foot, and said--

"Father, whose is the fullness of the earth, I thank Thee that Thou hast set my brother's heel on the neck of his enemy. But the suddenness of Thy relief from holy poverty and evil care, has so shaken his heart and brain, or rather, perhaps, has made him think so keenly of his lack of faith in his Father in heaven, that he fears Thou hast thrown him the gift in disdain, as to a dog under the table, though never didst Thou disdain a dog, and not given it as to a child, from Thy hand into his.

Father, let Thy spirit come with the gift, or take it again, and make him poor and able to pray."--Here came an _amen_, groaned out as from the bottom of a dungeon.--"Pardon him, Father," the curate prayed on, "all his past discontent and the smallness of his faith. Thou art our Father, and Thou knowest us tenfold better than we know ourselves; we pray Thee not only to pardon us, but to make all righteous excuse for us, when we dare not make any for ourselves, for Thou art the truth. We will try to be better children. We will go on climbing the mount of G.o.d through all the cloudy darkness that swaths it, yea, even in the face of the worst terrors--that when we reach the top, we shall find no one there."--Here Dorothy burst into sobs.--"Father!" thus the curate ended his prayer, "take pity on Thy children. Thou wilt not give them a piece of bread, in place of a stone--to poison them! The egg Thou givest will not be a serpent's. We are Thine, and Thou art ours: in us be Thy will done! Amen."

As he rose from his knees, he saw that the minister had turned his face to the wall, and lay perfectly still. Rightly judging that he was renewing the vain effort to rouse, by force of the will, feelings which had been stunned by the strange shock, he ventured to try a more authoritative mode of address.

"And now, Mr. Drake, you have got to spend this money," he said, "and the sooner you set about it the better. Whatever may be your ideas about the princ.i.p.al, you are bound to spend at least every penny of the income."

The sad-hearted man stared at the curate.

"How is a man to do any thing whom G.o.d has forsaken?" he said.

"If He had forsaken you, for as dreary work as it would be, you would have to try to do your duty notwithstanding. But He has not forsaken you. He has given you a very sharp lesson, I grant, and as such you must take it, but that is the very opposite of forsaking you. He has let you know what it is not to trust in Him, and what it would be to have money that did not come from His hand. You did not conquer in the fight with Mammon when you were poor, and G.o.d has given you another chance: He expects you to get the better of him now you are rich. If G.o.d had forsaken you, I should have found you strutting about and glorying over imagined enemies."

"Do you really think that is the mind of G.o.d toward me?" cried the poor man, starting half up in bed. "_Do_ you think so?" he repeated, staring at the curate almost as wildly as at first, but with a different expression.

"I do," said Wingfold; "and it will be a bad job indeed if you fail in both trials. But that I am sure you will not. It is your business now to get this money into your hands as soon as possible, and proceed to spend it."

"Would there be any harm in ordering a few things from the tradespeople?" asked Dorothy.

"How should there be?" returned Wingfold.

"Because, you see," answered Dorothy, "we can't be sure of a bird in the bush."

"Can you be sure of it in your hands? It may spread its wings when you least expect it. But Helen will be delighted to take the risk--up to a few hundreds," he added laughing.

"Somebody may dispute the will: they do sometimes," said Dorothy.

"They do very often," answered Wingfold. "It does not look likely in the present case; but our trust must be neither in the will nor in the fortune, but in the living G.o.d. You have to get all the _good_ out of this money you can. If you will walk over to the rectory with me now, while your father gets up, we will carry the good news to my wife, and she will lend you what money you like, so that you need order nothing without paying for it."