TWO MORE MINDS.
Nothing makes a man strong like a call upon him for help--a fact which
points at a unity more delicate and close and profound than heart has
yet perceived. It is but "a modern instance" how a mother, if she be but
a hen, becomes bold as a tigress for her periled offspring. A stranger
will fight for the stranger who puts his trust in him. The most foolish
of men will search his musty brain to find wise saws for his boy. An
anxious man, going to his friend to borrow, may return having lent him
instead. The man who has found nothing yet in the world save food for
the hard, sharp, clear intellect, will yet cast an eye around the
universe to see if perchance there may not be a God somewhere for the
hungering heart of his friend. The poor, but lovely, the doubting, yet
living faith of Dorothy arose, stretched out its crippled wings, and
began to arrange and straighten their disordered feathers. It is a fair
sight, any creature, be it but a fly, dressing its wings! Dorothy's were
feeble, ruffled, their pen-feathers bent and a little crushed; but
Juliet's were full of mud, paralyzed with disuse, and grievously singed
in the smoldering fire of her secret. A butterfly that has burned its
wings is not very unlike a caterpillar again.
"Look here, Juliet," said Dorothy: "there must be some way out of it, or
there is no saving God in the universe.--Now don't begin to say there
isn't, because, you see, it is your only chance. It would be a pity to
make a fool of yourself by being over-wise, to lose every thing by
taking it for granted there is no God. If after all there should be one,
it would be the saddest thing to perish for want of Him. I won't say I
am as miserable as you, for I haven't a husband to trample on my heart;
but I am miserable enough, and want dreadfully to be saved. I don't call
this life worth living. Nothing is right, nothing goes well--there is no
harmony in me. I don't call it life at all. I want music and light in
me. I want a God to save me out of this wretchedness. I want health."
"I thought you were never ill, Dorothy," murmured Juliet listlessly.
"Is it possible you do not know what I mean?" returned Dorothy. "Do you
never feel wretched and sick in your very soul?--disgusted with
yourself, and longing to be lifted up out of yourself into a region of
higher conditions altogether?"
That kind of thing Juliet had been learning to attribute to the state of
her health--had partly learned: it is hard to learn any thing false
_thoroughly_, for it _can not_ so be learned. It is true that it is
often, perhaps it is generally, in troubled health, that such thoughts
come first; but in nature there are facts of color that the cloudy day
reveals. So sure am I that many things which illness has led me to see
are true, that I would endlessly rather never be well than lose sight of
them. "So would any madman say of his fixed idea." I will keep my
madness, then, for therein most do I desire the noble: and to desire
what I desire, if it be but to desire, is better than to have all you
offer us in the name of truth. Through such desire and the hope of its
attainment, all greatest things have been wrought in the earth: I too
have my unbelief as well as you--I can not believe that a lie on the
belief of which has depended our highest development. You may say you
have a higher to bring in. But that higher you have become capable of by
the precedent lie. Yet you vaunt truth! You would sink us low indeed,
making out falsehood our best nourishment--at some period of our
history at least. If, however, what I call true and high, you call false
and low--my assertion that you have never seen that of which I so speak
will not help--then is there nothing left us but to part, each go his
own road, and wait the end--which according to my expectation will show
the truth, according to yours, being nothing, will show nothing.
"I can not help thinking, if we could only get up there," Dorothy went
on,--"I mean into a life of which I can at least dream--if I could but
get my head and heart into the kingdom of Heaven, I should find that
every thing else would come right. I believe it is God Himself I
want--nothing will do but Himself in me. Mr. Wingfold says that we find
things all wrong about us, that they keep going against our will and our
liking, just to drive things right inside us, or at least to drive us
where we can get them put right; and that, as soon as their work is
done, the waves will lie down at our feet, or if not, we shall at least
walk over their crests."
"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 God 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 God 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 God 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 God'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 God. If
there were a God, 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 God?' I suspect we have no more idea than that lonely fly on
the window there, what it would be _to have a God_."
"I don't care. I would rather go to hell with my Paul than go to Heaven
without him," moaned Juliet.
"But what if God should be the only where to find your Paul?" said
Dorothy. "What if the gulf that parts you is just the gulf of a God 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 pass, no cry can
cross? No, Juliet--death can set nothing right. But if there be a God,
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 God 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. Nobody 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
nobody 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 nobody would find you."
She helped her to rise, and led her from the room to a door in a rather
dark passage. 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 modicum 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 nobody
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 butter, 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 shining 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 quantity 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
God 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.
"God help me!" she said ever and anon as she went, and every time she
said it, she quickened her pace and ran.
It was just breakfast-time when she reached the house. Her father was
coming down the stair.
"Would you mind, father," she said as they sat, "if I were to make a
room at the Old House a little comfortable?"
"I mind nothing you please to do, Dorothy," he answered. "But you must
not become a recluse. In your search for God, you must not forsake your
neighbor."
"If only I could find my neighbor!" she returned, with a rather sad
smile. "I shall never be able even to look for him, I think, till I have
found One nearer first."
"You have surely found your neighbor when you have found his wounds, and
your hand is on the oil-flask," said her father, who knew her
indefatigable in her ministrations.
"I don't feel it so," she answered. "When I am doing things for people,
my arms seem to be miles long."
As soon as her father left the table, she got her basket again, filled
it from the larder and store-room, laid a book or two on the top, and
telling Lisbeth she was going to the Old House for the rest of the day,
set out on her third journey thither. To her delight she found Juliet
fast asleep. She sat down, rather tired, and began to reflect. Her great
fear was that Juliet would fall ill, and then what was to be done? How
was she to take the responsibility of nursing her? But she remembered
how the Lord had said she was to take no thought for the morrow; and
therewith she began to understand the word. She saw that one can not
_do_ any thing in to-morrow, and that all care which can not be put into
the work of to-day, is taken out of it. One thing seemed clear--that, so
long as it was Juliet's desire to remain concealed from her husband, she
had no right to act against that desire. Whether Juliet was right or
wrong, a sense of security was for the present absolutely necessary to
quiet her mind. It seemed therefore, the first thing she had to do was
to make that concealed room habitable for her. It was dreadful to think
of her being there alone at night, but her trouble was too great to
leave much room for fear--and anyhow there was no choice. So while
Juliet slept, she set about cleaning it, and hard work she found it.
Great also was the labor afterward, when, piece by piece, at night or in
the early morning, she carried thither every thing necessary to make
abode in it clean and warm and soft.
The labor of love is its own reward, but Dorothy received much more.
For, in the fresh impulse and freedom born of this service, she soon
found, not only that she thought better and more clearly on the points
that troubled her, but that, thus spending herself, she grew more able
to believe there must be One whose glory is perfect ministration. Also,
her anxious concentration of thought upon the usurping thoughts of
others, with its tendency to diseased action in the logical powers, was
thereby checked, much to her relief. She was not finding an atom of what
is called proof; but when the longing heart finds itself able to hope
that the perfect is the fact, that the truth is alive, that the lovely
is rooted in eternal purpose, it can go on without such proof as belongs
to a lower stratum of things, and can not be had in these. When we rise
into the mountain air, we require no other testimony than that of our
lungs that we are in a healthful atmosphere. We do not find it necessary
to submit it to a quantitative analysis; we are content that we breathe
with joy, that we grow in strength, become lighter-hearted and
better-tempered. Truth is a very different thing from fact; it is the
loving contact of the soul with spiritual fact, vital and potent. It
does its work in the soul independently of all faculty or qualification
there for setting it forth or defending it. Truth in the inward parts is
a power, not an opinion. It were as poor a matter as any held by those
who deny it, if it had not its vitality in itself, if it depended upon
any buttressing of other and lower material.
How should it be otherwise? If God be so near as the very idea of Him
necessitates, what other availing proof of His existence can there be,
than such _awareness_ as must come of the developing relation between
Him and us? The most satisfying of intellectual proofs, if such were to
be had, would be of no value. God would be no nearer to us for them all.
They would bring about no blossoming of the mighty fact. While He was in
our very souls, there would yet lie between Him and us a gulf of misery,
of no-knowledge.
Peace is for those who _do_ the truth, not those who opine it. The true
man troubled by intellectual doubt, is so troubled unto further health
and growth. Let him be alive and hopeful, above all obedient, and he
will be able to wait for the deeper content which must follow with
completer insight. Men may say such a man but deceives himself, that
there is nothing of the kind he pleases himself with imagining; but this
is at least worth reflecting upon--that while the man who aspires fears
he may be deceiving himself, it is the man who does not aspire who
asserts that he is. One day the former may be sure, and the latter may
cease to deny, and begin to doubt.