Paul Faber, Surgeon Part 34

"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 suns.h.i.+ne; you are nearly dead with cold. I came here this morning, Juliet, to be alone and pray to G.o.d; 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 suns.h.i.+ne, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 G.o.d 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 x.x.xVI.

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 G.o.d 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d 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 n.o.ble: 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 a.s.sertion 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 G.o.d 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."