[Illustration: PAUL FABER.]
PAUL FABER, SURGEON
BY GEORGE MACDONALD
1900
CONTENTS.
CHAP.
I. THE LANE
II. THE MINISTER'S DOOR
III. THE MANOR HOUSE
IV. THE RECTORY
V. THE ROAD TO OWLKIRK
VI. THE COTTAGE
VII. THE PULPIT
VIII. THE MANOR HOUSE DINING-ROOM
IX. THE RECTORY DRAWING-ROOM
X. MR. DRAKE'S ARBOR
XI. THE CHAMBER AT THE COTTAGE
XII. THE MINISTER'S GARDEN
XIII. THE HEATH AT NESTLEY
XIV. THE GARDEN AT OWLKIRK
XV. THE PARLOR AT OWLKIRK
XVI. THE BUTCHER'S SHOP
XVII. THE PARLOR AGAIN
XVIII. THE PARK AT NESTLEY
XIX. THE RECTORY
XX. AT THE PIANO
XXI. THE PASTOR'S STUDY
XXII. TWO MINDS
XXIII. THE MINISTER'S BEDROOM
XXIV. JULIET'S CHAMBER
XXV. OSTERFIELD PARK
XXVI. THE SURGERY DOOR
XXVII. THE GROANS OF THE INARTICULATE
XXVIII. COW-LANE CHAPEL
XXIX. THE DOCTOR'S HOUSE
XXX. THE PONY-CARRIAGE
XXXI. A CONSCIENCE
XXXII. THE OLD HOUSE AT GLASTON
XXXIII. PAUL FABER'S DRESSING-ROOM
XXXIV. THE BOTTOMLESS POOL
XXXV. A HEART
XXXVI. TWO MORE MINDS
XXXVII. THE DOCTOR'S STUDY
XXXVIII. THE MIND OF JULIET
XXXIX. ANOTHER MIND
XL. A DESOLATION
XLI. THE OLD GARDEN
XLII. THE POTTERY
XLIII. THE GATE-LODGE
XLIV. THE CORNER OF THE BUTCHER'S SHOP
XLV. HERE AND THERE
XLVI. THE MINISTER'S STUDY
XLVII. THE BLOWING OF THE WIND
XLVIII. THE BORDER-LAND
XLIX. EMPTY HOUSES
L. FALLOW FIELDS
LI. THE NEW OLD HOUSE
LII. THE LEVEL OF THE LYTHE
LIII. MY LADY'S CHAMBER
LIV. NOWHERE AND EVERYWHERE
TO
W.C.T.
TUUM EST.
Clear-windowed temple of the God of grace,
From the loud wind to me a hiding-place!
Thee gird broad lands with genial motions rife,
But in thee dwells, high-throned, the Life of life
Thy test no stagnant moat half-filled with mud,
But living waters witnessing in flood!
Thy priestess, beauty-clad, and gospel-shod,
A fellow laborer in the earth with God!
Good will art thou, and goodness all thy arts--
Doves to their windows, and to thee fly hearts!
Take of the corn in thy dear shelter grown,
Which else the storm had all too rudely blown;
When to a higher temple thou shalt mount,
Thy earthly gifts in heavenly friends shall count;
Let these first-fruits enter thy lofty door,
And golden lie upon thy golden floor.
G.M.D.
PORTO FINO, _December_, 1878.
PAUL FABER.
CHAPTER I.
THE LANE.
The rector sat on the box of his carriage, driving his horses toward his
church, the grand old abbey-church of Glaston. His wife was inside, and
an old woman--he had stopped on the road to take her up--sat with her
basket on the foot-board behind. His coachman sat beside him; he never
took the reins when his master was there. Mr. Bevis drove like a
gentleman, in an easy, informal, yet thoroughly business-like way. His
horses were black--large, well-bred, and well-fed, but neither young nor
showy, and the harness was just the least bit shabby. Indeed, the entire
turnout, including his own hat and the coachman's, offered the beholder
that aspect of indifference to show, which, by the suggestion of a
nodding acquaintance with poverty, gave it the right clerical air of
being not of this world. Mrs. Bevis had her basket on the seat before
her, containing, beneath an upper stratum of flowers, some of the first
rhubarb of the season and a pound or two of fresh butter for a poor
relation in the town.
The rector was a man about sixty, with keen gray eyes, a good-humored
mouth, a nose whose enlargement had not of late gone in the direction of
its original design, and a face more than inclining to the rubicund,
suggestive of good living as well as open air. Altogether he had the
look of a man who knew what he was about, and was on tolerable terms
with himself, and on still better with his neighbor. The heart under his
ribs was larger even than indicated by the benevolence of his
countenance and the humor hovering over his mouth. Upon the countenance
of his wife rested a placidity sinking almost into fatuity. Its features
were rather indications than completions, but there was a consciousness
of comfort about the mouth, and the eyes were alive.
They were passing at a good speed through a varying country--now a
thicket of hazel, now great patches of furze upon open common, and anon
well-kept farm-hedges, and clumps of pine, the remnants of ancient
forest, when, halfway through a lane so narrow that the rector felt
every yard toward the other end a gain, his horses started, threw up
their heads, and looked for a moment wild as youth. Just in front of
them, in the air, over a high hedge, scarce touching the topmost twigs
with his hoofs, appeared a great red horse. Down he came into the road,
bringing with him a rather tall, certainly handsome, and even at first
sight, attractive rider. A dark brown mustache upon a somewhat smooth
sunburned face, and a stern settling of the strong yet delicately
finished features gave him a military look; but the sparkle of his blue
eyes contradicted his otherwise cold expression. He drew up close to the
hedge to make room for the carriage, but as he neared him Mr. Bevis
slackened his speed, and during the following talk they were moving
gently along with just room for the rider to keep clear of the off fore
wheel.
"Heigh, Faber," said the clergyman, "you'll break your neck some day!
You should think of your patients, man. That wasn't a jump for any man
in his senses to take."
"It is but fair to give my patients a chance now and then," returned the
surgeon, who never met the rector but there was a merry passage between
them.
"Upon my word," said Mr. Bevis, "when you came over the hedge there, I
took you for Death in the Revelations, that had tired out his own and
changed horses with t'other one."
As he spoke, he glanced back with a queer look, for he found himself
guilty of a little irreverence, and his conscience sat behind him in the
person of his wife. But that conscience was a very easy one, being
almost as incapable of seeing a joke as of refusing a request.
"--How many have you bagged this week?" concluded the rector.
"I haven't counted up yet," answered the surgeon. "--_You_'ve got one
behind, I see," he added, signing with his whip over his shoulder.
"Poor old thing!" said the rector, as if excusing himself, "she's got a
heavy basket, and we all need a lift sometimes--eh, doctor?--into the
world and out again, at all events."
There was more of the reflective in this utterance than the parson was
in the habit of displaying; but he liked the doctor, and, although as
well as every one else he knew him to be no friend to the church, or to
Christianity, or even to religious belief of any sort, his liking,
coupled with a vague sense of duty, had urged him to this most
unassuming attempt to cast the friendly arm of faith around the
unbeliever.
"I plead guilty to the former," answered Faber, "but somehow I have
never practiced the euthanasia. The instincts of my profession, I
suppose are against it. Besides, that ought to be your business."
"Not altogether," said the rector, with a kindly look from his box,
which, however, only fell on the top of the doctor's hat.
Faber seemed to feel the influence of it notwithstanding, for he
returned,
"If all clergymen were as liberal as you, Mr. Bevis, there would be more
danger of some of us giving in."
The word _liberal_ seemed to rouse the rector to the fact that his
coachman sat on the box, yet another conscience, beside him. _Sub divo_
one must not be _too_ liberal. There was a freedom that came out better
over a bottle of wine than over the backs of horses. With a word he
quickened the pace of his cleric steeds, and the doctor was dropped
parallel with the carriage window. There, catching sight of Mrs. Bevis,
of whose possible presence he had not thought once, he paid his
compliments, and made his apologies, then trotted his gaunt Ruber again
beside the wheel, and resumed talk, but not the same talk, with the
rector. For a few minutes it turned upon the state of this and that
ailing parishioner; for, while the rector left all the duties of public
service to his curate, he ministered to the ailing and poor upon and
immediately around his own little property, which was in that corner of
his parish furthest from the town; but ere long, as all talk was sure to
do between the parson and any body who owned but a donkey, it veered
round in a certain direction.
"You don't seem to feed that horse of yours upon beans, Faber," he said.
"I don't seem, I grant," returned the doctor; "but you should see him
feed! He eats enough for two, but he _can't_ make fat: all goes to
muscle and pluck."
"Well, I must allow the less fat he has to carry the better, if you're
in the way of heaving him over such hedges on to the hard road. In my
best days I should never have faced a jump like that in cold blood,"
said the rector.
"I've got no little belongings of wife or child to make a prudent man of
me, you see," returned the surgeon. "At worst it's but a knock on the
head and a longish snooze."
The rector fancied he felt his wife's shudder shake the carriage, but
the sensation was of his own producing. The careless defiant words
wrought in him an unaccountable kind of terror: it seemed almost as if
they had rushed of themselves from his own lips.
"Take care, my dear sir," he said solemnly. "There may be something to
believe, though you don't believe it."
"I must take the chance," replied Faber. "I will do my best to make
calamity of long life, by keeping the rheumatic and epileptic and
phthisical alive, while I know how. Where nothing _can_ be known, I
prefer not to intrude."
A pause followed. At length said the rector,
"You are so good a fellow, Faber, I wish you were better. When will you
come and dine with me?"
"Soon, I hope," answered the surgeon, "but I am too busy at present. For
all her sweet ways and looks, the spring is not friendly to man, and my
work is to wage war with nature."
A second pause followed. The rector would gladly have said something,
but nothing would come.
"By the by," he said at length, "I thought I saw you pass the gate--let
me see--on Monday: why did you not look in?"
"I hadn't a moment's time. I was sent for to a patient in the village."
"Yes, I know; I heard of that. I wish you would give me your impression
of the lady. She is a stranger here.--John, that gate is swinging across
the road. Get down and shut it.--Who and what is she?"
"That I should be glad to learn from you. All I know is that she is a
lady. There can not be two opinions as to that."
"They tell me she is a beauty," said the parson.
The doctor nodded his head emphatically.
"Haven't you seen her?" he said.
"Scarcely--only her back. She walks well. Do you know nothing about her?
Who has she with her?"
"Nobody."
"Then Mrs. Bevis shall call upon her."
"I think at present she had better not. Mrs. Puckridge is a good old
soul, and pays her every attention."
"What is the matter with her? Nothing infectious?"
"Oh, no! She has caught a chill. I was afraid of pneumonia yesterday."
"Then she is better?"
"I confess I am a little anxious about her. But I ought not to be
dawdling like this, with half my patients to see. I must bid you good
morning.--Good morning, Mrs. Bevis."
As he spoke, Faber drew rein, and let the carriage pass; then turned his
horse's head to the other side of the way, scrambled up the steep bank
to the field above, and galloped toward Glaston, whose great church rose
high in sight. Over hedge and ditch he rode straight for its tower.
"The young fool!" said the rector, looking after him admiringly, and
pulling up his horses that he might more conveniently see him ride.
"Jolly old fellow!" said the surgeon at his second jump. "I wonder how
much he believes now of all the rot! Enough to humbug himself with--not
a hair more. He has no passion for humbugging other people. There's that
curate of his now believes every thing, and would humbug the whole world
if he could! How any man can come to fool himself so thoroughly as that
man does, is a mystery to me!--I wonder what the rector's driving into
Glaston for on a Saturday."
Paul Faber was a man who had espoused the cause of science with all the
energy of a suppressed poetic nature. He had such a horror of all kinds
of intellectual deception or mistake, that he would rather run the risk
of rejecting any number of truths than of accepting one error. In this
spirit he had concluded that, as no immediate communication had ever
reached his eye, or ear, or hand from any creator of men, he had no
ground for believing in the existence of such a creator; while a
thousand unfitnesses evident in the world, rendered the existence of one
perfectly wise and good and powerful, absolutely impossible. If one said
to him that he believed thousands of things he had never himself known,
he answered he did so upon testimony. If one rejoined that here too we
have testimony, he replied it was not credible testimony, but founded on
such experiences as he was justified in considering imaginary, seeing
they were like none he had ever had himself. When he was asked whether,
while he yet believed there was such a being as his mother told him of,
he had ever set himself to act upon that belief, he asserted himself
fortunate in the omission of what might have riveted on him the fetters
of a degrading faith. For years he had turned his face toward all
speculation favoring the non-existence of a creating Will, his back
toward all tending to show that such a one might be. Argument on the
latter side he set down as born of prejudice, and appealing to weakness;
on the other, as springing from courage, and appealing to honesty. He
had never put it to himself which would be the worse deception--to
believe there was a God when there was none; or to believe there was no
God when there was one.
He had, however, a large share of the lower but equally indispensable
half of religion--that, namely, which has respect to one's fellows. Not
a man in Glaston was readier, by day or by night, to run to the help of
another, and that not merely in his professional capacity, but as a
neighbor, whatever the sort of help was needed.
Thomas Wingfold, the curate, had a great respect for him. Having himself
passed through many phases of serious, and therefore painful doubt, he
was not as much shocked by the surgeon's unbelief as some whose real
faith was even less than Faber's; but he seldom laid himself out to
answer his objections. He sought rather, but as yet apparently in vain,
to cause the roots of those very objections to strike into, and thus
disclose to the man himself, the deeper strata of his being. This might
indeed at first only render him the more earnest in his denials, but at
length it would probably rouse in him that spiritual nature to which
alone such questions really belong, and which alone is capable of coping
with them. The first notable result, however, of the surgeon's
intercourse with the curate was, that, whereas he had till then kept his
opinions to himself in the presence of those who did not sympathize with
them, he now uttered his disbelief with such plainness as I have shown
him using toward the rector. This did not come of aggravated antagonism,
but of admiration of the curate's openness in the presentment of truths
which must be unacceptable to the majority of his congregation.
There had arisen therefore betwixt the doctor and the curate a certain
sort of intimacy, which had at length come to the rector's ears. He had,
no doubt, before this heard many complaints against the latter, but he
had laughed them aside. No theologian himself, he had found the
questions hitherto raised in respect of Wingfold's teaching, altogether
beyond the pale of his interest. He could not comprehend why people
should not content themselves with being good Christians, minding their
own affairs, going to church, and so feeling safe for the next world.
What did opinion matter as long as they were good Christians? He did not
exactly know what he believed himself, but he hoped he was none the less
of a Christian for that! Was it not enough to hold fast whatever lay in
the apostles', the Nicene, and the Athanasian creed, without splitting
metaphysical hairs with your neighbor? But was it decent that his curate
should be hand and glove with one who denied the existence of God? He
did not for a moment doubt the faith of Wingfold; but a man must have
some respect for appearances: appearances were facts as well as
realities were facts. An honest man must not keep company with a thief,
if he would escape the judgment of being of thievish kind. Something
must be done; probably something said would be enough, and the rector
was now on his way to say it.