Paul Faber, Surgeon Part 22

"The lantern is not the light. Perhaps you can not change your horn for gla.s.s, but what if you could better the light? Suppose the boy's father knew all about the country, but you never thought it worth while to send the lad to him for instructions?"

"Suppose I didn't believe he had a father? Suppose he told me he hadn't?"

"Some men would call out to know if there was any body in the house to give the boy a useful hint."

"Oh bother! I'm quite content with my fellow."

"Well, for my part I should count my conscience, were it ten times better than it is, poor company on any journey. Nothing less than the living Truth ever with me can make existence a peace to me,--that's the joy of the Holy Ghost, Miss Meredith.--What if you should find one day, Faber, that, of all facts, the thing you have been so coolly refusing was the most precious and awful?"

Faber had had more than enough of it. There was but one thing precious to him; Juliet was the perfect flower of nature, the apex of law, the last presentment of evolution, the final reason of things! The very soul of the world stood there in the dusk, and there also stood the foolish curate, whirling his little vortex of dust and ashes between him and her!

"It comes to this," said Faber; "what you say moves nothing in me. I am aware of no need, no want of that Being of whom you speak. Surely if in Him I did live and move and have my being, as some old heathen taught your Saul of Tarsus, I should in one mode or another be aware of Him!"

While he spoke, Mr. Drake and Dorothy had come into the room. They stood silent.

"That is a weighty word," said Wingfold. "But what if you feel His presence every moment, only do not recognize it as such?"

"Where would be the good of it to me then?"

"The good of it to you might lie in the blinding. What if any further revelation to one who did not seek it would but obstruct the knowledge of Him? Truly revealed, the word would be read untruly--even as The Word has been read by many in all ages. Only the pure in heart, we are told, shall see Him. The man who, made by Him, does not desire Him--how should he know Him?"

"Why don't I desire Him then?--I don't."

"That is for you to find out."

"I do what I know to be right; even on your theory I ought to get on,"

said Faber, turning from him with a laugh.

"I think so too," replied Wingfold. "Go on, and prosper. Only, if there be untruth in you alongside of the truth--? It might be, and you are not awake to it. It is marvelous what things can co-exist in a human mind."

"In that case, why should not your G.o.d help me?"

"Why not? I think he will. But it may _have_ to be in a way you will not like."

"Well, well! good night. Talk is but talk, whatever be the subject of it.--I beg your pardon," he added, shaking hands with the minister and his daughter; "I did not see you come in. Good night."

"I won't allow that talk is only talk, Faber," Wingfold called after him with a friendly laugh. Then turning to Mr. Drake, "Pardon me," he said, "for treating you with so much confidence. I saw you come in, but believed you would rather have us end our talk than break it off."

"Certainly. But I can't help thinking you grant him too much, Mr.

Wingfold," said the minister seriously.

"I never find I lose by giving, even in argument," said the curate.

"Faber rides his hobby well, but the brute is a sorry jade. He will find one day she has not a sound joint in her whole body."

The man who is anxious to hold every point, will speedily bring a question to a mere dispute about trifles, leaving the real matter, whose elements may appeal to the G.o.dlike in every man, out in the cold. Such a man, having gained his paltry point, will crow like the bantam he is, while the other, who may be the greater, perhaps the better man, although in the wrong, is embittered by his smallness, and turns away with increased prejudice. Human nature can hardly be blamed for its readiness to impute to the case the shallowness of its pleader. Few men do more harm than those who, taking the right side, dispute for personal victory, and argue, as they are sure then to do, ungenerously. But even genuine argument for the truth is not preaching the gospel, neither is he whose unbelief is thus a.s.sailed, likely to be brought thereby into any mood but one unfit for receiving it. Argument should be kept to books; preachers ought to have nothing to do with it--at all events in the pulpit. There let them hold forth light, and let him who will, receive it, and him who will not, forbear. G.o.d alone can convince, and till the full time is come for the birth of the truth in a soul, the words of even the Lord Himself are not there potent.

"The man irritates me, I confess," said Mr. Drake. "I do not say he is self-satisfied, but he is very self-sufficient."

"He is such a good fellow," said Wingfold, "that I think G.o.d will not let him go on like this very long. I think we shall live to see a change upon him. But much as I esteem and love the man, I can not help a suspicion that he has a great lump of pride somewhere about him, which has not a little to do with his denials."

Juliet's blood seemed seething in her veins as she heard her lover thus weighed, and talked over; and therewith came the first rift of a threatened breach betwixt her heart and the friends who had been so good to her. He had done far more for her than any of them, and mere loyalty seemed to call upon her to defend him; but she did not know how, and, dissatisfied with herself as well as indignant with them, she maintained an angry silence.

CHAPTER XXV.

OSTERFIELD PARK.

It was a long time since Mr. Drake and Dorothy had had such a talk together, or had spent such a pleasant evening as that on which they went into Osterfield Park to be alone with a knowledge of their changed fortunes. The anxiety of each, differing so greatly from that of the other, had tended to shut up each in loneliness beyond the hearing of the other; so that, while there was no breach in their love, it was yet in danger of having long to endure

"an expansion, Like gold to airy thinness beat."

But this evening their souls rushed together. The father's anxiety was chiefly elevated; the daughter's remained much what it was before; yet these anxieties no longer availed to keep them apart.

Each relation of life has its peculiar beauty of holiness; but that beauty is the expression of its essential truth, and the essence itself is so strong that it bestows upon its embodiment even the power of partial metamorphosis with all other vital relations. How many daughters have in the devotion of their tenderness, become as mothers to their own fathers! Who has not known some sister more of a wife to a man than she for whose sake he neglected her? But it will take the loves of all the relations of life gathered in one, to shadow the love which, in the kingdom of heaven, is recognized as due to each from each human being _per se_. It is for the sake of the essential human, that all human relations and all forms of them exist--that we may learn what it is, and become capable of loving it aright.

Dorothy would now have been as a mother to her father, had she had but a good hope, if no more, of finding her Father in heaven. She was not at peace enough to mother any body. She had indeed a grasp of the skirt of His robe--only she could not be sure it was not the mere fringe of a cloud she held. Not the less was her father all her care, and pride, and joy. Of his faults she saw none: there was enough of the n.o.ble and generous in him to hide them from a less partial beholder than a daughter. They had never been serious in comparison with his virtues. I do not mean that every fault is not so serious that a man must be willing to die twenty deaths to get rid of it; but that, relatively to the getting rid of it, a fault is serious or not, in proportion to the depth of its root, rather than the amount of its foliage. Neither can that be the worst-conditioned fault, the man's own suspicion of which would make him hang his head in shame; those are his worst faults which a man will start up to defend; those are the most dangerous moral diseases whose symptoms are regarded as the signs of health.

Like lovers they walked out together, with eyes only for each other, for the good news had made them shy--through the lane, into the cross street, and out into Pine street, along which they went westward, meeting the gaze of the low sun, which wrapped them round in a veil of light and dark, for the light made their eyes dark, so that they seemed feeling their way out of the light into the shadow.

"This is like life," said the pastor, looking down at the precious face beside him: "our eyes can best see from under the shadow of afflictions."

"I would rather it were from under the shadow of G.o.d's wings," replied Dorothy timidly.

"So it is! so it is! Afflictions are but the shadow of His wings," said her father eagerly. "Keep there, my child, and you will never need the afflictions I have needed. I have been a hard one to save."

But the child thought within herself, "Alas, father! you have never had any afflictions which you or I either could not bear tenfold better than what I have to bear." She was perhaps right. Only she did not know that when she got through, all would be transfigured with the light of her resurrection, just as her father's poverty now was in the light of his plenty.

Little more pa.s.sed between them in the street. All the way to the entrance of the park they were silent. There they exchanged a few words with the sweet-faced little dwarf-woman that opened the gate, and those few words set the currents of their thoughts singing yet more sweetly as they flowed. They entered the great park, through the trees that bordered it, still in silence, but when they reached the wide expanse of gra.s.s, with its clumps of trees and thickets, simultaneously they breathed a deep breath of the sweet wind, and the fountains of their deeps were broken up. The evening was lovely, they wandered about long in delight, and much was the trustful converse they held. It was getting dark before they thought of returning.

The father had been telling the daughter how he had mourned and wept when his boys were taken from him, never thinking at all of the girl who was left him.

"And now," he said, "I would not part with my Dorothy to have them back the finest boys in the world. What would my old age be without you, my darling?"

Dorothy's heart beat high. Surely there must be a Father in heaven too!

They walked a while in a great silence, for the heart of each was full.

And all the time scarce an allusion had been made to the money.

As they returned they pa.s.sed the new house, at some distance, on the highest point in the park. It stood unfinished, with all its windows boarded up.

"The walls of that house," said Mr. Drake, "were scarcely above ground when I came to Glaston. So they had been for twenty years, and so they remained until, as you remember, the building was recommenced some three or four years ago. Now, again, it is forsaken, and only the wind is at home in it."

"They tell me the estate is for sale," said Dorothy. "Those building-lots, just where the lane leads into Pine street, I fancy belong to it."

"I wish," returned her father, "they would sell me that tumble-down place in the hollow they call the Old House of Glaston. I shouldn't mind paying a good sum for it. What a place it would be to live in! And what a pleasure there would be in the making of it once more habitable, and watching order dawn out of neglect!"

"It would be delightful," responded Dorothy. "When I was a child, it was one of my dreams that that house was my papa's--with the wild garden and all the fruit, and the terrible lake, and the ghost of the lady that goes about in the sack she was drowned in. But would you really buy it, father, if you could get it?"