Paul Faber, Surgeon Part 35

"It sounds very nice, and would comfort any body that wasn't in trouble," said Juliet; "but you wouldn't care one bit for it all any more than I do, if you had pain and love like mine pulling at your heart."

"I have seen a mother make sad faces enough over the baby at her breast," said Dorothy. "Love and pain seem so strangely one in this world, the wonder is how they will ever get parted. What G.o.d must feel like, with this world hanging on to Him with all its pains and cries--!"

"It's His own fault," said Juliet bitterly. "Why did He make us--or why did He not make us good? I'm sure I don't know where was the use of making me!"

"Perhaps not much yet," replied Dorothy, "but then He hasn't made you, He hasn't done with you yet. He is making you now, and you don't like it."

"No, I don't--if you call this making. Why does He do it? He could have avoided all this trouble by leaving us alone."

"I put something like the same question once to Mr. Wingfold," said Dorothy, "and he told me it was impossible to show any one the truths of the kingdom of Heaven; he must learn them for himself. 'I can do little more,' he said, 'than give you my testimony that it seems to me all right. If G.o.d has not made you good, He has made you with the feeling that you ought to be good, and at least a half-conviction that to Him you have to go for help to become good. When you are good, then you will know why He did not make you good at first, and will be perfectly satisfied with the reason, because you will find it good and just and right--so good that it was altogether beyond the understanding of one who was not good. I don't think,' he said, 'you will ever get a thoroughly satisfactory answer to any question till you go to Himself for it--and then it may take years to make you fit to receive, that is to understand the answer.' Oh Juliet! sometimes I have felt in my heart as if--I am afraid to say it, even to you,--"

"_I_ shan't be shocked at any thing; I am long past that," sighed Juliet.

"It is not of you I am afraid," said Dorothy. "It is a kind of awe of the universe I feel. But G.o.d is the universe; His is the only ear that will hear me; and He knows my thoughts already. Juliet, I feel sometimes as if I _must_ be good for G.o.d's sake; as if I was sorry for Him, because He has such a troublesome nursery of children, that will not or can not understand Him, and will not do what He tells them, and He all the time doing the very best for them He can."

"It may be all very true, or all great nonsense, Dorothy, dear; I don't care a bit about it. All I care for is--I don't know what I care for--I don't care for any thing any more--there is nothing left to care for. I love my husband with a heart like to break--oh, how I wish it would! He hates and despises me and I dare not wish that he wouldn't. If he were to forgive me quite, I should yet feel that he ought to despise me, and that would be all the same as if he did, and there is no help. Oh, how horrid I look to him! I _can't_ bear it. I fancied it was all gone; but there it is, and there it must be forever. I don't care about a G.o.d. If there were a G.o.d, what would He be to me without my Paul?"

"I think, Juliet, you will yet come to say, 'What would my Paul be to me without my G.o.d?' I suspect we have no more idea than that lonely fly on the window there, what it would be _to have a G.o.d_."

"I don't care. I would rather go to h.e.l.l with my Paul than go to Heaven without him," moaned Juliet.

"But what if G.o.d should be the only where to find your Paul?" said Dorothy. "What if the gulf that parts you is just the gulf of a G.o.d not believed in--a universe which neither of you can cross to meet the other--just because you do not believe it is there at all?"

Juliet made no answer--Dorothy could not tell whether from feeling or from indifference. The fact was, the words conveyed no more meaning to Juliet than they will to some of my readers. Why do I write them then?

Because there are some who will understand them at once, and others who will grow to understand them. Dorothy was astonished to find herself saying them. The demands of her new office of comforter gave shape to many half-formed thoughts, substance to many shadowy perceptions, something like music to not a few dim feelings moving within her; but what she said hardly seemed her own at all.

Had it not been for Wingfold's help, Dorothy might not have learned these things in this world; but had it not been for Juliet, they would have taken years more to blossom in her being, and so become her own.

Her faint hope seemed now to break forth suddenly into power. Whether or not she was saying such things as were within the scope of Juliet's apprehension, was a matter of comparatively little moment. As she lay there in misery, rocking herself from side to side on the floor, she would have taken hold of nothing. But love is the first comforter, and where love and truth speak, the love will be felt where the truth is never perceived. Love indeed is the highest in all truth; and the pressure of a hand, a kiss, the caress of a child, will do more to save sometimes than the wisest argument, even rightly understood. Love alone is wisdom, love alone is power; and where love seems to fail it is where self has stepped between and dulled the potency of its rays.

Dorothy thought of another line of expostulation.

"Juliet," she said, "suppose you were to drown yourself and your husband were to repent?"

"That is the only hope left me. You see yourself I have no choice."

"You have no pity, it seems; for what then would become of him? What if he should come to himself in bitter sorrow, in wild longing for your forgiveness, but you had taken your forgiveness with you, where he had no hope of ever finding it? Do you want to punish him? to make him as miserable as yourself? to add immeasurably to the wrong you have done him, by going where no word, no message, no letter can pa.s.s, no cry can cross? No, Juliet--death can set nothing right. But if there be a G.o.d, then nothing can go wrong but He can set it right, and set it right better than it was before."

"He could not make it better than it was."

"What!--is that your ideal of love--a love that fails in the first trial? If He could not better that, then indeed He were no G.o.d worth the name."

"Why then did He make us such--make such a world as is always going wrong?"

"Mr. Wingfold says it is always going righter the same time it is going wrong. I grant He would have had no right to make a world that might go further wrong than He could set right at His own cost. But if at His own cost He turn its ills into goods? its ugliness into favor? Ah, if it should be so, Juliet! It _may_ be so. I do not know. I have not found Him yet. Help me to find Him. Let us seek Him together. If you find Him you can not lose your husband. If Love is Lord of the world, love must yet be Lord in his heart. It will wake, if not sooner, yet when the bitterness has worn itself out, as Mr. Wingfold says all evil must, because its heart is death and not life."

"I don't care a straw for life. If I could but find my husband, I would gladly die forever in his arms. It is not true that the soul longs for immortality. I don't. I long only for love--for forgiveness--for my husband."

"But would you die so long as there was the poorest chance of regaining your place in his heart?"

"No. Give me the feeblest chance of that, and I will live. I could live forever on the mere hope of it."

"I can't give you any hope, but I have hope of it in my own heart."

Juliet rose on her elbow.

"But I am disgraced!" she said, almost indignantly. "It would be disgrace to him to take me again! I remember one of the officers'

wives----. No, no! he hates and despises me. Besides I could never look one of his friends in the face again. Every body will say I ran away with some one--or that he sent me away because I was wicked. You all had a prejudice against me from the very first."

"Yes, in a way," confessed Dorothy. "It always seemed as if we did not know you and could not get at you, as if you avoided us--with your heart, I mean;--as if you had resolved we should not know you--as if you had something you were afraid we should discover."

"Ah, there it was, you see!" cried Juliet. "And now the hidden thing is revealed! That was it: I never could get rid of the secret that was gnawing at my life. Even when I was hardly aware of it, it was there.

Oh, if I had only been ugly, then Paul would never have thought of me!"

She threw herself down again and buried her face.

"Hide me; hide me," she went on, lifting to Dorothy her hands clasped in an agony, while her face continued turned from her. "Let me stay here.

Let me die in peace. n.o.body would ever think I was here."

"That is just what has been coming and going in my mind," answered Dorothy. "It is a strange old place: you might be here for months and n.o.body know."

"Oh! wouldn't you mind it? I shouldn't live long. I couldn't, you know!"

"I will be your very sister, if you will let me," replied Dorothy; "only then you must do what I tell you--and begin at once by promising not to leave the house till I come back to you."

As she spoke she rose.

"But some one will come," said Juliet, half-rising, as if she would run after her.

"No one will. But if any one should--come here, I will show you a place where n.o.body would find you."

She helped her to rise, and led her from the room to a door in a rather dark pa.s.sage. This she opened, and, striking a light, showed an ordinary closet, with pegs for hanging garments upon. The sides of it were paneled, and in one of them, not readily distinguishable, was another door. It opened into a room lighted only by a little window high up in a wall, through whose dusty, cobwebbed panes, crept a modic.u.m of second-hand light from a stair.

"There!" said Dorothy. "If you should hear any sound before I come back, run in here. See what a bolt there is to the door. Mind you shut both.

You can close that shutter over the window too if you like--only n.o.body can look in at it without getting a ladder, and there isn't one about the place. I don't believe any one knows of this room but myself."

Juliet was too miserable to be frightened at the look of it--which was wretched enough. She promised not to leave the house, and Dorothy went.

Many times before she returned had Juliet fled from the sounds of imagined approach, and taken refuge in the musty dusk of the room withdrawn. When at last Dorothy came, she found her in it trembling.

She came, bringing a basket with every thing needful for breakfast. She had not told her father any thing: he was too simple, she said to herself, to keep a secret with comfort; and she would risk any thing rather than discovery while yet she did not clearly know what ought to be done. Her version of the excellent French proverb--_Dans le doute, abstiens-toi_--was, _When you are not sure, wait_--which goes a little further, inasmuch as it indicates expectation, and may imply faith. With difficulty she prevailed upon her to take some tea, and a little bread and b.u.t.ter, feeding her like a child, and trying to comfort her with hope. Juliet sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, the very picture of despair, white like alabaster, rather than marble--with a bluish whiteness. Her look was of one utterly lost.

"We'll let the fire out now," said Dorothy; "for the sun is s.h.i.+ning in warm, and there had better be no smoke. The wood is rather scarce too. I will get you some more, and here are matches: you can light it again when you please."

She then made her a bed on the floor with a quant.i.ty of wood shavings, and some shawls she had brought, and when she had lain down upon it, kneeled beside her, and covering her face with her hands, tried to pray.

But it seemed as if all the misery of humanity was laid upon her, and G.o.d would not speak: not a sound would come from her throat, till she burst into tears and sobs. It struck a strange chord in the soul of the wife to hear the maiden weeping over her. But it was no private trouble, it was the great need common to all men that opened the fountain of her tears. It was hunger after the light that slays the darkness, after a comfort to confront every woe, a life to lift above death, an antidote to all wrong. It was one of the groanings of the spirit that can not be uttered in words articulate, or even formed into thoughts defined. But Juliet was filled only with the thought of herself and her husband, and the tears of her friend but bedewed the leaves of her bitterness, did not reach the dry roots of her misery.

Dorothy's spirit revived when she found herself once more alone in the park on her way home the second time. She must be of better courage, she said to herself. Struggling in the Slough of Despond, she had come upon one worse mired than she, for whose sake she must search yet more vigorously after the hidden stepping-stones--the peaks whose bases are the center of the world.

"G.o.d help me!" she said ever and anon as she went, and every time she said it, she quickened her pace and ran.