THE MINISTER'S STUDY.
Helen was in the way of now and then writing music to any song that
specially took her fancy--not with foolish hankering after publication,
but for the pleasure of brooding in melody upon the words, and singing
them to her husband. One day he brought her a few stanzas, by an unknown
poet, which, he said, seemed to have in them a slightly new element.
They pleased her more than him, and began at once to sing themselves. No
sooner was her husband out of the room than she sat down to her piano
with them. Before the evening, she had written to them an air with a
simple accompaniment. When she now sung the verses to him, he told her,
to her immense delight, that he understood and liked them far better.
The next morning, having carried out one or two little suggestions he
had made, she was singing them by herself in the drawing-room, when
Faber, to whom she had sent because one of her servants was ill,
entered. He made a sign begging her to continue, and she finished the
song.
"Will you let me see the words," he said.
She handed them to him. He read them, laid down the manuscript, and,
requesting to be taken to his patient, turned to the door. Perhaps he
thought she had laid a music-snare for him.
The verses were these:
A YEAR SONG.
Sighing above,
Rustling below,
Through the woods
The winds go.
Beneath, dead crowds;
Above, life bare;
And the besom winds
Sweep the air.
_Heart, leave thy woe;
Let the dead things go._
Through the brown leaves
Gold stars push;
A mist of green
Veils the bush.
Here a twitter,
There a croak!
They are coming--
The spring-folk!
_Heart, be not dumb;
Let the live things come._
Through the beach
The winds go,
With a long speech,
Loud and slow.
The grass is fine,
And soft to lie in;
The sun doth shine
The blue sky in.
_Heart, be alive;
Let the new things thrive._
Round again!
Here now--
A rimy fruit
On a bare bough!
There the winter
And the snow;
And a sighing ever
To fall and go!
_Heart, thy hour shall be;
Thy dead will comfort thee._
Faber was still folded in the atmosphere of the song when, from the
curate's door, he arrived at the minister's, resolved to make that
morning a certain disclosure--one he would gladly have avoided, but felt
bound in honor to make. The minister grew pale as he listened, but held
his peace. Not until the point came at which he found himself personally
concerned, did he utter a syllable.
I will in my own words give the substance of the doctor's communication,
stating the facts a little more fairly to him than his pride would allow
him to put them in his narrative.
Paul Faber was a student of St. Bartholomew's, and during some time held
there the office of assistant house-surgeon. Soon after his appointment,
he being then three and twenty, a young woman was taken into one of the
wards, in whom he gradually grew much interested. Her complaint caused
her much suffering, but was more tedious than dangerous.
Attracted by her sweet looks, but more by her patience, and the
gratitude with which she received the attention shown her, he began to
talk to her a little, especially during a slight operation that had to
be not unfrequently performed. Then he came to giving her books to read,
and was often charmed with the truth and simplicity of the remarks she
would make. She had been earning her living as a clerk, had no friends
in London, and therefore no place to betake herself to in her illness
but the hospital. The day she left it, in the simplicity of her heart,
and with much timidity, she gave him a chain she had made for him of her
hair. On the ground of supplementary attention, partly desirable, partly
a pretext, but unassociated with any evil intent, he visited her after
in her lodging. The joy of her face, the light of her eyes when he
appeared, was enchanting to him. She pleased every gentle element of his
nature; her worship flattered him, her confidence bewitched him. His
feelings toward her were such that he never doubted he was her friend.
He did her no end of kindness; taught her much; gave her good advice as
to her behavior, and the dangers she was in; would have protected her
from every enemy, real and imaginary, while all the time, undesignedly,
he was depriving her of the very nerve of self-defense. He still gave
her books--and good books--Carlyle even, and Tennyson; read poetry with
her, and taught her to read aloud; went to her chapel with her sometimes
of a Sunday evening--for he was then, so he said, and so he imagined, a
thorough believer in revelation. He took her to the theater, to
pictures, to concerts, taking every care of her health, her manners, her
principles. But one enemy he forgot to guard her against: how is a man
to protect even the woman he loves from the hidden god of his
idolatry--his own grand contemptible self?
It is needless to set the foot of narration upon every step of the
slow-descending stair. With all his tender feelings and generous love of
his kind, Paul Faber had not yet learned the simplest lesson of
humanity--that he who would not be a murderer, must be his brother's
keeper--still more his sister's, protecting every woman first of all
from himself--from every untruth in him, chiefly from every unhallowed
approach of his lower nature, from every thing that calls itself love
and is but its black shadow, its demon ever murmuring _I love_, that it
may devour. The priceless reward of such honesty is the power to love
better; but let no man insult his nature by imagining himself noble for
so carrying himself. As soon let him think himself noble that he is no
swindler. Doubtless Faber said to himself as well as to her, and said it
yet oftener when the recoil of his selfishness struck upon the door of
his conscience and roused Don Worm, that he would be true to her
forever. But what did he mean by the words? Did he know? Had they any
sense of which he would not have been ashamed even before the girl
herself? Would such truth as he contemplated make of him her
hiding-place from the wind, her covert from the tempest? He never even
thought whether to marry her or not, never vowed even in his heart not
to marry another. All he could have said was, that at the time he had no
intention of marrying another, and that he had the intention of keeping
her for himself indefinitely, which may be all the notion some people
have of _eternally_. But things went well with them, and they seemed to
themselves, notwithstanding the tears shed by one of them in secret,
only the better for the relation between them.
At length a child was born. The heart of a woman is indeed infinite, but
time, her presence, her thoughts, her hands are finite: she could not
_seem_ so much a lover as before, because she must be a mother now: God
only can think of two things at once. In his enduring selfishness, Faber
felt the child come between them, and reproached her neglect, as he
called it. She answered him gently and reasonably; but now his bonds
began to weary him. She saw it, and in the misery of the waste vision
opening before her eyes, her temper, till now sweet as devoted, began to
change. And yet, while she loved her child the more passionately that
she loved her forebodingly, almost with the love of a woman already
forsaken, she was nearly mad sometimes with her own heart, that she
could not give herself so utterly as before to her idol.
It took but one interview after he had confessed it to himself, to
reveal the fact to her that she had grown a burden to him. He came a
little seldomer, and by degrees which seemed to her terribly rapid, more
and more seldom. He had never recognized duty in his relation to her. I
do not mean that he had not done the effects of duty toward her; love
had as yet prevented the necessity of appeal to the stern daughter of
God. But what love with which our humanity is acquainted can keep
healthy without calling in the aid of Duty? Perfect Love is the mother
of all duties and all virtues, and needs not be admonished of her
children; but not until Love is perfected, may she, casting out Fear,
forget also Duty. And hence are the conditions of such a relation
altogether incongruous. For the moment the man, not yet debased, admits
a thought of duty, he is aware that far more is demanded of him than,
even for the sake of purest right, he has either the courage or the
conscience to yield. But even now Faber had not the most distant
intention of forsaking her; only why should he let her burden him, and
make his life miserable? There were other pleasures besides the company
of the most childishly devoted of women: why should he not take them?
Why should he give all his leisure to one who gave more than the half of
it to her baby?
He had money of his own, and, never extravagant upon himself, was more
liberal to the poor girl than ever she desired. But there was nothing
mercenary in her. She was far more incapable of turpitude than he, for
she was of a higher nature, and loved much where he loved only a little.
She was nobler, sweetly prouder than he. She had sacrificed all to him
for love--could accept nothing from him without the love which alone is
the soul of any gift, alone makes it rich. She would not, could not see
him unhappy. In her fine generosity, struggling to be strong, she said
to herself, that, after all, she would leave him richer than she was
before--richer than he was now. He would not want the child he had given
her; she would, and she could, live for her, upon the memory of two
years of such love as, comforting herself in sad womanly pride, she
flattered herself woman had seldom enjoyed. She would not throw the past
from her because the weather of time had changed; she would not mar
every fair memory with the inky sponge of her present loss. She would
turn her back upon her sun ere he set quite, and carry with her into the
darkness the last gorgeous glow of his departure. While she had his
child, should she never see him again, there remained a bond between
them--a bond that could never be broken. He and she met in that child's
life--her being was the eternal fact of their unity.
Both she and he had to learn that there was yet a closer bond between
them, necessary indeed to the fact that a child _could_ be born of them,
namely, that they two had issued from the one perfect Heart of love. And
every heart of perplexed man, although, too much for itself, it can not
conceive how the thing should be, has to learn that there, in that heart
whence it came, lies for it restoration, consolation, content. Herein, O
God, lies a task for Thy perfection, for the might of Thy
imagination--which needs but Thy will (and Thy suffering?) to be
creation!
One evening when he paid her a visit after the absence of a week, he
found her charmingly dressed, and merry, but in a strange fashion which
he could not understand. The baby, she said, was down stairs with the
landlady, and she free for her Paul. She read to him, she sang to him,
she bewitched him afresh with the graces he had helped to develop in
her. He said to himself when he left her that surely never was there a
more gracious creature--and she was utterly his own! It was the last
flicker of the dying light--the gorgeous sunset she had resolved to
carry with her in her memory forever. When he sought her again the next
evening, he found her landlady in tears. She had vanished, taking with
her nothing but her child, and her child's garments. The gown she had
worn the night before hung in her bedroom--every thing but what she must
then be wearing was left behind. The woman wept, spoke of her with
genuine affection, and said she had paid every thing. To his questioning
she answered that they had gone away in a cab: she had called it, but
knew neither the man nor his number. Persuading himself she had but gone
to see some friend, he settled himself in her rooms to await her return,
but a week rightly served to consume his hope. The iron entered into his
soul, and for a time tortured him. He wept--but consoled himself that he
wept, for it proved to himself that he was not heartless. He comforted
himself further in the thought that she knew where to find him and that
when trouble came upon her, she would remember how good he had been to
her, and what a return she had made for it. Because he would not give up
every thing to her, liberty and all, she had left him! And in revenge,
having so long neglected him for the child, she had for the last once
roused in her every power of enchantment, had brought her every charm
into play, that she might lastingly bewitch him with the old spell, and
the undying memory of their first bliss--then left him to his lonely
misery! She had done what she could for the ruin of a man of education,
a man of family, a man on the way to distinction!--a man of genius, he
said even, but he was such only as every man is: he was a man of latent
genius.
But verily, though our sympathy goes all with a woman like her, such a
man, however little he deserves, and however much he would scorn it, is
far more an object of pity. She has her love, has not been false
thereto, and one day will through suffering find the path to the door of
rest. When she left him, her soul was endlessly richer than his. The
music, of which he said she knew nothing, in her soul moved a deep wave,
while it blew but a sparkling ripple on his; the poetry they read
together echoed in a far profounder depth of her being, and I do not
believe she came to loathe it as he did; and when she read of Him who
reasoned that the sins of a certain woman must have been forgiven her,
else how could she love so much, she may well have been able, from the
depth of such another loving heart, to believe utterly in Him--while we
know that her poor, shrunken lover came to think it manly, honest,
reasonable, meritorious to deny Him.
Weeks, months, years passed, but she never sought him; and he so far
forgot her by ceasing to think of her, that at length, when a chance
bubble did rise from the drowned memory, it broke instantly and
vanished. As to the child, he had almost forgotten whether _it_ was a
boy or a girl.
But since, in his new desolation, he discovered her, beyond a doubt, in
the little Amanda, old memories had been crowding back upon his heart,
and he had begun to perceive how Amanda's mother must have felt when she
saw his love decaying visibly before her, and to suspect that it was in
the self-immolation of love that she had left him. His own character had
been hitherto so uniformly pervaded with a refined selfishness as to
afford no standpoint of a different soil, whence by contrast to
recognize the true nature of the rest; but now it began to reveal itself
to his conscious judgment. And at last it struck him that twice he had
been left--by women whom he loved--at least by women who loved him. Two
women had trusted him utterly, and he had failed them both! Next
followed the thought stinging him to the heart, that the former was the
purer of the two; that the one on whom he had looked down because of her
lack of education, and her familiarity with humble things and simple
forms of life, knew nothing of what men count evil, while she in whom he
had worshiped refinement, intellect, culture, beauty, song--she who, in
love-teachableness had received his doctrine against all the prejudices
of her education, was--what she had confessed herself!
But, against all reason and logic, the result of this comparison was,
that Juliet returned fresh to his imagination in all the first witchery
of her loveliness; and presently he found himself for the first time
making excuses for her; if she had deceived him she had deceived him
from love; whatever her past, she had been true to him, and was, from
the moment she loved him, incapable of wrong.--He had cast her from him,
and she had sought refuge in the arms of the only rival he ever would
have had to fear--the bare-ribbed Death!
Naturally followed the reflection--what was he to demand purity of any
woman?--Had he not accepted--yes, tempted, enticed from the woman who
preceded her, the sacrifice of one of the wings of her soul on the altar
of his selfishness! then driven her from him, thus maimed and helpless,
to the mercy of the rude blasts of the world! She, not he ever, had been
the noble one, the bountiful giver, the victim of shameless ingratitude.
Flattering himself that misery would drive her back to him, he had not
made a single effort to find her, or mourned that he could never make up
to her for the wrongs he had done her. He had not even hoped for a
future in which he might humble himself before her! What room was there
here to talk of honor! If she had not sunk to the streets it was through
her own virtue, and none of his care! And now she was dead! and his
child, but for the charity of a despised superstition, would have been
left an outcast in the London streets, to wither into the old-faced
weakling of a London workhouse!