Kitabı oku: «Paul Faber, Surgeon», sayfa 23

CHAPTER XXXVII

THE DOCTOR'S STUDY

Paul Faber's condition, as he sat through the rest of that night in his study, was about as near absolute misery as a man's could well be, in this life, I imagine. The woman he had been watching through the first part of it as his essential bliss, he had left in a swoon, lying naked on the floor, and would not and did not go near her again. How could he? Had he not been duped, sold, married to–?—That way madness lay! His pride was bitterly wounded. Would it had been mortally! but pride seems in some natures to thrive upon wounds, as in others does love. Faber's pride grew and grew as he sat and brooded, or, rather, was brooded upon.

He, Paul Faber, who knew his own worth, his truth, his love, his devotion—he, with his grand ideas of woman and purity and unity, conscious of deserving a woman's best regards—he, whose love (to speak truly his unworded, undefined impression of himself) any woman might be proud to call hers—he to be thus deceived! to have taken to his bosom one who had before taken another to hers, and thought it yet good enough for him! It would not bear thinking! Indignation and bitterest sense of wrong almost crazed him. For evermore he must be a hypocrite, going about with the knowledge of that concerning himself which he would not have known by others! This was how the woman, whom he had brought back from death with the life of his own heart, had served him! Years ago she had sacrificed her bloom to some sneaking wretch who flattered a God with prayers, then enticed and bewitched and married him!

In all this thinking there was no thought but for himself—not one for the woman whose agony had been patent even to his wrath-blinded eyes. In what is the wretchedness of our condition more evident than in this, that the sense of wrong always makes us unjust? It is a most humbling thought. God help us. He forgot how she had avoided him, resisted him, refused to confess the love which his goodness, his importunities, his besieging love had compelled in her heart. It was true she ought either to have refused him absolutely and left him, or confessed and left the matter with him; but he ought to have remembered for another, if ever he had known it for himself, the hardness of some duties; and what duty could be more torturing to a delicate-minded woman than either of those—to leave the man she loved in passionate pain, sore-wounded with a sense of undeserved cruelty, or to give him the strength to send her from him by confessing to his face what she could not recall in the solitude of her own chamber but the agony would break out wet on her forehead! We do our brother, our sister, grievous wrong, every time that, in our selfish justice, we forget the excuse that mitigates the blame. That God never does, for it would be to disregard the truth. As He will never admit a false excuse, so will He never neglect a true one. It may be He makes excuses which the sinner dares not think of; while the most specious of false ones shrivel into ashes before Him. A man is bound to think of all just excuse for his offender, for less than the righteousness of God will not serve his turn.

I would not have my reader set Faber down as heartless, His life showed the contrary. But his pride was roused to such furious self-assertion, that his heart lay beaten down under the sweep of its cyclone. Its turn was only delayed. The heart is always there, and rage is not. The heart is a constant, even when most intermittent force. It can bide its time. Nor indeed did it now lie quite still; for the thought of that white, self-offered sacrifice, let him rave as he would against the stage-trickery of the scene, haunted him so, that once and again he had to rouse an evil will to restrain him from rushing to clasp her to his bosom.

Then there was the question: why now had she told him all—if indeed she had made a clean breast of it? Was it from love to him, or reviving honesty in herself? From neither, he said. Superstition alone was at the root of it. She had been to church, and the preaching of that honest idiotic enthusiast, Wingfold, had terrified her.—Alas! what refuge in her terror had she found with her husband?

Before morning he had made up his mind as to the course he would pursue. He would not publish his own shame, but neither would he leave the smallest doubt in her mind as to what he thought of her, or what he felt toward her. All should be utterly changed between them. He would behave to her with extreme, with marked politeness; he would pay her every attention woman could claim, but her friend, her husband, he would be no more. His thoughts of vengeance took many turns, some of them childish. He would always call her Mrs. Faber. Never, except they had friends, would he sit in the same room with her. To avoid scandal, he would dine with her, if he could not help being at home, but when he rose from the table, it would be to go to his study. If he happened at any time to be in the room with her when she rose to retire, he would light her candle, carry it up stairs for her, open the door, make her a polite bow, and leave her. Never once would he cross the threshold of her bedroom. She should have plenty of money; the purse of an adventuress was a greedy one, but he would do his best to fill it, nor once reproach her with extravagance—of which fault, let me remark, she had never yet shown a sign. He would refuse her nothing she asked of him—except it were in any way himself. As soon as his old aunt died, he would get her a brougham, but never would he sit in it by her side. Such, he thought, would be the vengeance of a gentleman. Thus he fumed and raved and trifled, in an agony of selfish suffering—a proud, injured man; and all the time the object of his vengeful indignation was lying insensible on the spot where she had prayed to him, her loving heart motionless within a bosom of ice.

In the morning he went to his dressing-room, had his bath, and went down to breakfast, half-desiring his wife's appearance, that he might begin his course of vindictive torture. He could not eat, and was just rising to go out, when the door opened, and the parlor-maid, who served also as Juliet's attendant, appeared.

"I can't find mis'ess nowhere, sir," she said. Faber understood at once that she had left him, and a terror, neither vague nor ill-founded, possessed itself of him. He sprung from his seat, and darted up the stair to her room. Little more than a glance was necessary to assure him that she had gone deliberately, intending it should be forever. The diamond ring lay on her dressing-table, spending itself in flashing back the single ray of the sun that seemed to have stolen between the curtains to find it; her wedding ring lay beside it, and the sparkle of the diamonds stung his heart like a demoniacal laughter over it, the more horrible that it was so silent and so lovely: it was but three days since, in his wife's presence, he had been justifying suicide with every argument he could bring to bear. It was true he had insisted on a proper regard to circumstances, and especially on giving due consideration to the question, whether the act would hurt others more than it would relieve the person contemplating it; but, after the way he had treated her, there could be no doubt how Juliet, if she thought of it at all, was compelled to answer it. He rushed to the stable, saddled Ruber, and galloped wildly away. At the end of the street he remembered that he had not a single idea to guide him. She was lying dead somewhere, but whether to turn east or west or north or south to find her, he had not the slightest notion. His condition was horrible. For a moment or two he was ready to blow his brains out: that, if the orthodox were right, was his only chance for over-taking her. What a laughing-stock he would then be to them all! The strangest, wildest, maddest thoughts came and went as of themselves, and when at last he found himself seated on Ruber in the middle of the street, an hour seemed to have passed. It was but a few moments, and the thought that roused him was: could she have betaken herself to her old lodging at Owlkirk? It was not likely; it was possible: he would ride and see.

"They will say I murdered her," he said to himself as he rode—so little did he expect ever to see her again. "I don't care. They may prove it if they can, and hang me. I shall make no defense. It will be but a fit end to the farce of life."

He laughed aloud, struck his spurs in Ruber's flanks, and rode wildly. He was desperate. He knew neither what he felt nor what he desired. If he had found her alive, he would, I do not doubt, have behaved to her cruelly. His life had fallen in a heap about him; he was ruined, and she had done it, he said, he thought, he believed. He was not aware how much of his misery was occasioned by a shrinking dread of the judgments of people he despised. Had he known it, he would have been yet more miserable, for he would have scorned himself for it. There is so much in us that is beyond our reach!

Before arriving at Owlkirk, he made up his mind that, if she were not there, he would ride to the town of Broughill—not in the hope of any news of her, but because there dwelt the only professional friend he had in the neighborhood—one who sympathized with his view of things, and would not close his heart against him because he did not believe that this horrid, ugly, disjointed thing of a world had been made by a God of love. Generally, he had been in the habit of dwelling on the loveliness of its developments, and the beauty of the gradual adaptation of life to circumstance; but now it was plainer to him than ever, that, if made at all, it was made by an evil being; "—for," he said, and said truly, "a conscious being without a heart must be an evil being." This was the righteous judgment of a man who could, by one tender, consoling word, have made the sun rise upon a glorious world of conscious womanhood, but would not say that word, and left that world lying in the tortured chaos of a slow disintegration. This conscious being with a heart, this Paul Faber, who saw that a God of love was the only God supposable, set his own pride so far above love, that his one idea was, to satisfy the justice of his outraged dignity by the torture of the sinner!—even while all the time dimly aware of rebuke in his soul. If she should have destroyed herself, he said once and again as he rode, was it more than a just sacrifice to his wronged honor? As such he would accept it. If she had, it was best—best for her, and best for him! What so much did it matter! She was very lovely!—true—but what was the quintessence of dust to him? Where either was there any great loss? He and she would soon be wrapped up in the primal darkness, the mother and grave of all things, together!—no, not together; not even in the dark of nothingness could they two any more lie together! Hot tears forced their way into his eyes, whence they rolled down, the lava of the soul, scorching his cheeks. He struck his spurs into Ruber fiercely, and rode madly on.

At length he neared the outskirts of Broughill. He had ridden at a fearful pace across country, leaving all to his horse, who had carried him wisely as well as bravely. But Ruber, although he had years of good work left in him, was not in his first strength, and was getting exhausted with his wild morning. For, all the way, his master, apparently unconscious of every thing else, had been immediately aware of the slightest slackening of muscle under him, the least faltering of the onward pace, and, in the temper of the savage, which wakes the moment the man of civilization is hard put to it, the moment he flagged, still drove the cruel spurs into his flanks, when the grand, unresenting creature would rush forward at straining speed—not, I venture to think, so much in obedience to the pain, as in obedience to the will of his master, fresh recognized through the pain.

Close to the high road, where they were now approaching it through the fields, a rail-fence had just been put up, inclosing a piece of ground which the owner wished to let for building. That the fact might be known, he was about to erect a post with a great board announcing it. For this post a man had dug the hole, and then gone to his dinner. The inclosure lay between Faber and the road, in the direct line he was taking. On went Ruber blindly—more blindly than his master knew, for, with the prolonged running, he had partially lost his sight, so that he was close to the fence before he saw it. But he rose boldly, and cleared it—to light, alas! on the other side with a foreleg in the hole. Down he came with a terrible crash, pitched his master into the road upon his head, and lay groaning with a broken leg. Faber neither spoke nor moved, but lay as he fell. A poor woman ran to his assistance, and finding she could do nothing for him, hurried to the town for help. His friend, who was the first surgeon in the place, flew to the spot, and had him carried to his house. It was a severe case of concussion of the brain.

Poor old Ruber was speedily helped to a world better than this for horses, I trust.

Meantime Glaston was in commotion. The servants had spread the frightful news that their mistress had vanished, and their master ridden off like a madman. "But he won't find her alive, poor lady! I don't think," was the general close of their communication, accompanied by a would-be wise and really sympathetic shake of the head. In this conclusion most agreed, for there was a general impression of something strange about her, partly occasioned by the mysterious way in which Mrs. Puckridge had spoken concerning her illness and the marvelous thing the doctor had done to save her life. People now supposed that she had gone suddenly mad, or, rather, that the latent madness so plain to read in those splendid eyes of hers had been suddenly developed, and that under its influence she had rushed away, and probably drowned herself. Nor were there wanting, among the discontented women of Glaston, some who regarded the event—vaguely to their own consciousness, I gladly admit—as almost a judgment upon Faber for marrying a woman of whom nobody knew any thing.

Hundreds went out to look for the body down the river. Many hurried to an old quarry, half full of water, on the road to Broughill, and peered horror-stricken over the edge, but said nothing. The boys of Glaston were mainly of a mind that the pond at the Old House was of all places the most likely to attract a suicide, for with the fascination of its horrors they were themselves acquainted. Thither therefore they sped; and soon Glaston received its expected second shock in the tidings that a lady's bonnet had been found floating in the frightful pool: while in the wet mass the boys brought back with them, some of her acquaintance recognized with certainty a bonnet they had seen Mrs. Faber wear. There was no room left for doubt; the body of the poor lady was lying at the bottom of the pool! A multitude rushed at once to the spot, although they knew it was impossible to drag the pool, so deep was it, and for its depth so small. Neither would she ever come to the surface, they said, for the pikes and eels would soon leave nothing but the skeleton. So Glaston took the whole matter for ended, and began to settle down again to its own affairs, condoling greatly with the poor gentleman, such a favorite! who, so young, and after such a brief experience of marriage, had lost, in such a sad way, a wife so handsome, so amiable, so clever. But some said a doctor ought to have known better than marry such a person, however handsome, and they hoped it would be a lesson to him. On the whole, so sorry for him was Glaston, that, if the doctor could then have gone about it invisible, he would have found he had more friends and fewer enemies than he had supposed.

For the first two or three days no one was surprised that he did not make his appearance. They thought he was upon some false trail. But when four days had elapsed and no news was heard of him, for his friend knew nothing of what had happened, had written to Mrs. Faber, and the letter lay unopened, some began to hint that he must have had a hand in his wife's disappearance, and to breathe a presentiment that he would never more be seen in Glaston. On the morning of the fifth day, however, his accident was known, and that he was lying insensible at the house of his friend, Dr. May; whereupon, although here and there might be heard the expression of a pretty strong conviction as to the character of the visitation, the sympathy both felt and uttered was larger than before. The other medical men immediately divided his practice amongst them, to keep it together against his possible return, though few believed he would ever again look on scenes darkened by the memory of bliss so suddenly blasted.

For weeks his recovery was doubtful, during which time, even if they had dared, it would have been useless to attempt acquainting him with what all believed the certainty of his loss. But when at length he woke to a memory of the past, and began to desire information, his friend was compelled to answer his questions. He closed his lips, bowed his head on his breast, gave a great sigh, and held his peace. Every one saw that he was terribly stricken.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

THE MIND OF JULIET

There was one, however, who, I must confess, was not a little relieved at the news of what had befallen Faber. For, although far from desiring his death, which indeed would have ruined some of her warmest hopes for Juliet, Dorothy greatly dreaded meeting him. She was a poor dissembler, hated even the shadow of a lie, and here was a fact, which, if truth could conceal it, must not be known. Her dread had been, that, the first time she saw Faber, it would be beyond her power to look innocent, that her knowledge would be legible in her face; and much she hoped their first encounter might be in the presence of Helen or some other ignorant friend, behind whose innocent front she might shelter her conscious secrecy. To truth such a silence must feel like a culpable deception, and I do not think such a painful position can ever arise except from wrong somewhere. Dorothy could not tell a lie. She could not try to tell one; and if she had tried, she would have been instantly discovered through the enmity of her very being to the lie she told; from her lips it would have been as transparent as the truth. It is no wonder therefore that she felt relieved when first she heard of the durance in which Faber was lying. But she felt equal to the withholding from Juliet of the knowledge of her husband's condition for the present. She judged that, seeing she had saved her friend's life, she had some right to think and choose for the preservation of that life.

Meantime she must beware of security, and cultivate caution; and so successful was she, that weeks passed, and not a single doubt associated Dorothy with knowledge where others desired to know. Not even her father had a suspicion in the direction of the fact. She knew he would one day approve both of what she did, and of her silence concerning it. To tell him, thoroughly as he was to be trusted, would be to increase the risk; and besides, she had no right to reveal a woman's secret to a man.

It was a great satisfaction, however, notwithstanding her dread of meeting him, to hear that Faber had at length returned to Glaston; for if he had gone away, how could they have ever known what to do? For one thing, if he were beyond their knowledge, he might any day, in full confidence, go and marry again.

Her father not unfrequently accompanied her to the Old House, but Juliet and she had arranged such signals, and settled such understandings, that the simple man saw nothing, heard nothing, forefelt nothing. Now and then a little pang would quaver through Dorothy's bosom, when she caught sight of him peering down into the terrible dusk of the pool, or heard him utter some sympathetic hope for the future of poor Faber; but she comforted herself with the thought of how glad he would be when she was able to tell him all, and how he would laugh over the story of their precautions against himself.

Her chief anxiety was for Juliet's health, even more for the sake of avoiding discovery, than for its own. When the nights were warm she would sometimes take her out in the park, and every day, one time or another, would make her walk in the garden while she kept watch on the top of the steep slope. Her father would sometimes remark to a friend how Dorothy's love of solitude seemed to grow upon her; but the remark suggested nothing, and slowly Juliet was being forgotten at Glaston.

It seemed to Dorothy strange that she did not fall ill. For the first few days she was restless and miserable as human being could be. She had but one change of mood: either she would talk feverously, or sit in the gloomiest silence, now and then varied with a fit of abandoned weeping. Every time Dorothy came from Glaston, she would overwhelm her with questions—which at first Dorothy could easily meet, for she spoke absolute fact when she said she knew nothing concerning her husband. When at length the cause of his absence was understood, she told her he was with his friend, Dr. May, at Broughill. Knowing the universal belief that she had committed suicide, nothing could seem more natural. But when, day after day, she heard the same thing for weeks, she began to fear he would never be able to resume his practice, at least at Glaston, and wept bitterly at the thought of the evil she had brought upon him who had given her life, and love to boot. For her heart was a genuine one, and dwelt far more on the wrong her too eager love had done him, than on the hardness with which he had resented it. Nay, she admired him for the fierceness of his resentment, witnessing, in her eyes, to the purity of the man whom his neighbors regarded as wicked.

After the first day, she paid even less heed to any thing of a religious kind with which Dorothy, in the strength of her own desire after a perfect stay, sought to rouse or console her. When Dorothy ventured on such ground, which grew more and more seldom, she would sit listless, heedless, with a far-away look. Sometimes when Dorothy fancied she had been listening a little, her next words would show that her thoughts had been only with her husband. When the subsiding of the deluge of her agony, allowed words to carry meaning to her, any hint at supernal consolation made her angry, and she rejected every thing Dorothy said, almost with indignation. To seem even to accept such comfort, she would have regarded as traitorous to her husband. Not the devotion of the friend who gave up to her all of her life she could call her own, sufficed to make her listen even with a poor patience. So absorbed was she in her trouble, that she had no feeling of what poor Dorothy had done for her. How can I blame her, poor lady! If existence was not a thing to be enjoyed, as for her it certainly was not at present, how was she to be thankful for what seemed its preservation? There was much latent love to Dorothy in her heart; I may go further and say there was much latent love to God in her heart, only the latter was very latent as yet. When her heart was a little freer from grief and the agony of loss, she would love Dorothy; but God must wait with his own patience—wait long for the child of His love to learn that her very sorrow came of His dearest affection. Who wants such affection as that? says the unloving. No one, I answer; but every one who comes to know it, glorifies it as the only love that ever could satisfy his being.

Dorothy, who had within her the chill of her own doubt, soon yielded to Juliet's coldness, and ceased to say anything that could be called religious. She saw that it was not the time to speak; she must content herself with being. Nor had it ever been any thing very definite she could say. She had seldom gone beyond the expression of her own hope, and the desire that her friend would look up. She could say that all the men she knew, from books or in life, of the most delicate honesty, the most genuine repentance, the most rigid self-denial, the loftiest aspiration, were Christian men; but she could neither say her knowledge of history or of life was large, nor that, of the men she knew who professed to believe, the greater part were honest, or much ashamed, or rigid against themselves, or lofty toward God. She saw that her part was not instruction, but ministration, and that in obedience to Jesus in whom she hoped to believe. What matter that poor Juliet denied Him? If God commended His love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us,' He would be pleased with the cup of cold water given to one that was not a disciple. Dorothy dared not say she was a disciple herself; she dared only say that right gladly would she become one, if she could. If only the lovely, the good, the tender, the pure, the grand, the adorable, were also the absolutely true!—true not in the human idea only, but in absolute fact, in divine existence! If the story of Jesus was true, then joy to the universe, for all was well! She waited, and hoped, and prayed and ministered.

There is a great power in quiet, for God is in it. Not seldom He seems to lay His hand on one of His children, as a mother lays hers on the restless one in the crib, to still him. Then the child sleeps, but the man begins to live up from the lower depths of his nature. So the winter comes to still the plant whose life had been rushing to blossom and fruit. When the hand of God is laid upon a man, vain moan, and struggle and complaint, it may be indignant outcry follows; but when, outwearied at last, he yields, if it be in dull submission to the inexorable, and is still, then the God at the heart of him, the God that is there or the man could not be, begins to grow. This point Juliet had not yet reached, and her trouble went on. She saw no light, no possible outlet. Her cries, her longings, her agonies, could not reach even the ears, could never reach the heart of the man who had cast her off. He believed her dead, might go and marry another, and what would be left her then? Nothing but the death from which she now restrained herself, lest, as Dorothy had taught her, she should deny him the fruits of a softening heart and returning love. The moment she heard that he sought another, she would seek Death and assuredly find him. One letter she would write to leave behind her, and then go. He should see and understand that the woman he despised for the fault of the girl, was yet capable of the noblest act of a wife: she would die that he might live—that it might be well with her husband. Having entertained, comprehended and settled this idea in her mind, she became quieter. After this, Dorothy might have spoken without stirring up so angry an opposition. But it was quite as well she did not know it, and did not speak.

I have said that Dorothy wondered she did not fall ill. There was a hope in Juliet's mind of which she had not spoken, but upon which, though vaguely, she built further hope, and which may have had part in her physical endurance: the sight of his baby might move the heart of her husband to pardon her!

But the time, even with the preoccupation of misery, grew very dreary. She had never had any resources in herself except her music, and even if here she had had any opportunity of drawing upon that, what is music but a mockery to a breaking heart? Was music ever born of torture, of misery? It is only when the cloud of sorrow is sinking in the sun-rays, that the song-larks awake and ascend. A glory of some sort must fringe the skirts of any sadness, the light of the sorrowing soul itself must be shed upon it, and the cloud must be far enough removed to show the reflected light, before it will yield any of the stuff of which songs are made. And this light that gathers in song, what is it but hope behind the sorrow—hope so little recognized as such, that it is often called despair? It is reviving and not decay that sings even the saddest of songs.

Juliet had had little consciousness of her own being as an object of reflection. Joy and sorrow came and went; she had never brooded. Never until now, had she known any very deep love. Even that she bore her father had not ripened into the grand love of the woman-child. She forgot quickly; she hoped easily; she had had some courage, and naturally much activity; she faced necessity by instinct, and took almost no thought for the morrow—but this after the fashion of the birds, not after the fashion required of those who can consider the birds; it is one thing to take no thought, for want of thought, and another to take no thought, from sufficing thought, whose flower is confidence. The one way is the lovely way of God in the birds—the other, His lovelier way in his men and women. She had in her the making of a noble woman—only that is true of every woman; and it was no truer of her than of every other woman, that, without religion, she could never be, in any worthy sense, a woman at all. I know how narrow and absurd this will sound to many of my readers, but such simply do not know what religion means, and think I do not know what a woman means. Hitherto her past had always turned to a dream as it glided away from her; but now, in the pauses of her prime agony, the tide rose from the infinite sea to which her river ran, and all her past was borne back upon her, even to her far-gone childish quarrels with her silly mother, and the neglect and disobedience she had too often been guilty of toward her father. And the center of her memories was the hot coal of that one secret; around that they all burned and hissed. Now for the first time her past was, and she cowered and fled from it, a slave to her own history, to her own deeds, to her own concealment. Alas, like many another terror-stricken child, to whom the infinite bosom of tenderness and love stretches out arms of shelter and healing and life, she turned to the bosom of death, and imagined there a shelter of oblivious darkness! For life is a thing so deep, so high, so pure, so far above the reach of common thought, that, although shadowed out in all the harmonic glories of color, and speech, and song, and scent, and motion, and shine, yea, even of eyes and loving hands, to common minds—and the more merely intellectual, the commoner are they—it seems but a phantasm. To unchildlike minds, the region of love and worship, to which lead the climbing stairs of duty, is but a nephelocockygia; they acknowledge the stairs, however, thank God, and if they will but climb, a hand will be held out to them. Now, to pray to a God, the very thought of whose possible existence might seem enough to turn the coal of a dead life into a diamond of eternal radiance, is with many such enough to stamp a man a fool. It will surprise me nothing in the new world to hear such men, finding they are not dead after all, begin at once to argue that they were quite right in refusing to act upon any bare possibility—forgetting that the questioning of possibilities has been the source of all scientific knowledge. They may say that to them there seemed no possibility; upon which will come the question—whence arose their incapacity for seeing it? In the meantime, that the same condition which constitutes the bliss of a child, should also be the essential bliss of a man, is incomprehensible to him in whom the child is dead, or so fast asleep that nothing but a trumpet of terror can awake him. That the rules of the nursery—I mean the nursery where the true mother is the present genius, not the hell at the top of a London house—that the rules of the nursery over which broods a wise mother with outspread wings of tenderness, should be the laws also of cosmic order, of a world's well-being, of national greatness, and of all personal dignity, may well be an old-wives'-fable to the man who dabbles at saving the world by science, education, hygiene and other economics. There is a knowledge that will do it, but of that he knows so little, that he will not allow it to be a knowledge at all. Into what would he save the world? His paradise would prove a ten times more miserable condition than that out of which he thought to rescue it.