A HEART.
If people were both observant and memorious, they would cease, I fancy,
to be astonished at coincidences. Rightly regarded, the universe is but
one coincidence--only where will has to be developed, there is need for
human play, and room for that must be provided in its spaces. The works
of God being from the beginning, and all his beginnings invisible either
from greatness or smallness or nearness or remoteness, numberless
coincidences may pass in every man's history, before he becomes capable
of knowing either the need or the good of them, or even of noting them.
The same morning there was another awake and up early. When Juliet was
about half-way across the park, hurrying to the water, Dorothy was
opening the door of the empty house, seeking solitude that she might
find the one Dweller therein. She went straight to one of the upper
rooms looking out upon the garden, and kneeling prayed to her Unknown
God. As she kneeled, the first rays of the sunrise visited her face.
That face was in itself such an embodied prayer, that had any one seen
it, he might, when the beams fell upon it, have imagined he saw prayer
and answer meet. It was another sunrise Dorothy was looking for, but she
started and smiled when the warm rays touched her; they too came from
the home of answers. As the daisy mimics the sun, so is the central fire
of our system but a flower that blossoms in the eternal effulgence of
the unapproachable light.
The God to whom we pray is nearer to us than the very prayer itself ere
it leaves the heart; hence His answers may well come to us through the
channel of our own thoughts. But the world too being itself one of His
thoughts, He may also well make the least likely of His creatures an
angel of His own will to us. Even the blind, if God be with him, that
is, if he knows he is blind and does not think he sees, may become a
leader of the blind up to the narrow gate. It is the blind who says _I
see_, that leads his fellow into the ditch.
The window near which Dorothy kneeled, and toward which in the instinct
for light she had turned her face, looked straight down the garden, at
the foot of which the greater part of the circumference of the pond was
visible. But Dorothy, busy with her prayers, or rather with a weight of
hunger and thirst, from which like a burst of lightning skyward from the
overcharged earth, a prayer would now and then break and rush
heavenward, saw nothing of the outer world: between her and a sister
soul in mortal agony, hung the curtains of her eyelids. But there were
no shutters to her ears, and in at their portals all of a sudden darted
a great and bitter cry, as from a heart in the gripe of a fierce terror.
She had been so absorbed, and it so startled and shook her, that she
never could feel certain whether the cry she heard was of this world or
not. Half-asleep one hears such a cry, and can not tell whether it
entered his consciousness by the ear, or through some hidden channel of
the soul. Assured that waking ears heard nothing, he remains, it may be,
in equal doubt, whether it came from the other side of life or was the
mere cry of a dream. Before Dorothy was aware of a movement of her will,
she was on her feet, and staring from the window. Something was lying on
the grass beyond the garden wall, close to the pond: it looked like a
woman. She darted from the house, out of the garden, and down the other
side of the wall. When she came nearer she saw it was indeed a woman,
evidently insensible. She was bare-headed. Her bonnet was floating in
the pond; the wind had blown it almost to the middle of it. Her face was
turned toward the water. One hand was in it. The bank overhung the pond,
and with a single movement more she would probably have been beyond help
from Dorothy. She caught her by the arm, and dragged her from the brink,
before ever she looked in her face. Then to her amazement she saw it was
Juliet. She opened her eyes, and it was as if a lost soul looked out of
them upon Dorothy--a being to whom the world was nothing, so occupied
was it with some torment, which alone measured its existence--far away,
although it hung attached to the world by a single hook of brain and
nerve.
"Juliet, my darling!" said Dorothy, her voice trembling with the love
which only souls that know trouble can feel for the troubled, "come with
me. I will take care of you."
At the sound of her voice, Juliet shuddered. Then a better light came
into her eyes, and feebly she endeavored to get up. With Dorothy's help
she succeeded, but stood as if ready to sink again to the earth. She
drew her cloak about her, turned and stared at the water, turned again
and stared at Dorothy, at last threw herself into her arms, and sobbed
and wailed. For a few moments Dorothy held her in a close embrace. Then
she sought to lead her to the house, and Juliet yielded at once. She
took her into one of the lower rooms, and got her some water--it was all
she could get for her, and made her sit down on the window-seat. It
seemed a measureless time before she made the least attempt to speak;
and again and again when she began to try, she failed. She opened her
mouth, but no sounds would come. At length, interrupted with choking
gasps, low cries of despair, and long intervals of sobbing, she said
something like this:
"I was going to drown myself. When I came in sight of the water, I fell
down in a half kind of faint. All the time I lay, I felt as if some one
was dragging me nearer and nearer to the pool. Then something came and
drew me back--and it was you, Dorothy. But you ought to have left me. I
am a wretch. There is no room for me in this world any more." She
stopped a moment, then fixing wide eyes on Dorothy's, said, "Oh Dorothy,
dear! there are awful things in the world! as awful as any you ever read
in a book!"
"I know that, dear. But oh! I am sorry if any of them have come your
way. Tell me what is the matter. I _will_ help you if I can."
"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 sunshine; you are nearly dead with cold. I came here
this morning, Juliet, to be alone and pray to God; 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
sunshine, 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 God 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 God 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 snatched 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 God 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 friendship 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.