FALLOW FIELDS.
The spring was bursting in bud and leaf before the workmen were out of
the Old House. The very next day, Dorothy commenced her removal. Every
stick of the old furniture she carried with her; every book of her
father's she placed on the shelves of the library he had designed. But
she took care not to seem neglectful of Juliet, never failing to carry
her the report of her husband as often as she saw him. It was to Juliet
like an odor from Paradise making her weep, when Dorothy said that he
looked sad--"so different from his old self!"
One day Dorothy ventured, hardly to hint, but to approach a hint of
mediation. Juliet rose indignant: no one, were he an angel from Heaven,
should interfere between her husband and her! If they could not come
together without that, there should be a mediator, but not such as
Dorothy meant!
"No, Dorothy!" she resumed, after a rather prolonged silence; "the very
word _mediation_ would imply a gulf between us that could not be passed.
But I have one petition to make to you, Dorothy. You _will_ be with me
in my trouble--won't you?"
"Certainly, Juliet--please God, I will."
"Then promise me, if I can't get through--if I am going to die, that you
will bring him to me. I _must_ see my Paul once again before the
darkness."
"Wouldn't that be rather unkind--rather selfish?" returned Dorothy.
She had been growing more and more pitiful of Paul.
Juliet burst into tears, called Dorothy cruel, said she meant to kill
her. How was she to face it but in the hope of death? and how was she to
face death but in the hope of seeing Paul once again for the last time?
She was certain she was going to die; she knew it! and if Dorothy would
not promise, she was not going to wait for such a death!
"But there will be a doctor," said Dorothy, "and how am I----"
Juliet interrupted her--not with tears but words of indignation: Did
Dorothy dare imagine she would allow any man but her Paul to come near
her? Did she? Could she? What did she think of her? But of course she
was prejudiced against her! It was too cruel!
The moment she could get in a word, Dorothy begged her to say what she
wished.
"You do not imagine, Juliet," she said, "that I could take such a
responsibility on myself!"
"I have thought it all over," answered Juliet. "There are women properly
qualified, and you must find one. When she says I am dying,--when she
gets frightened, you will send for my husband? Promise me."
"Juliet, I will," answered Dorothy, and Juliet was satisfied.
But notwithstanding her behavior's continuing so much the same, a
change, undivined by herself as well as unsuspected by her friend, had
begun to pass upon Juliet. Every change must begin further back than the
observation of man can reach--in regions, probably, of which we have no
knowledge. To the eyes of his own wife, a man may seem in the gall of
bitterness and the bond of iniquity, when "larger, other eyes than ours"
may be watching with delight the germ of righteousness swell within the
inclosing husk of evil. Sooner might the man of science detect the first
moment of actinic impact, and the simultaneously following change in the
hitherto slumbering acorn, than the watcher of humanity make himself
aware of the first movement of repentance. The influences now for some
time operative upon her, were the more powerful that she neither
suspected nor could avoid them. She had a vague notion that she was kind
to her host and hostess; that she was patronizing them; that her friend
Dorothy, with whom she would afterwards arrange the matter, filled their
hands for her use; that, in fact, they derived benefit from her
presence;--and surely they did, although not as she supposed. The only
benefits they reaped were invaluable ones--such as spring from love and
righteousness and neighborhood. She little thought how she interfered
with the simple pleasures and comforts of the two; how many a visit of
friends, whose talk was a holy revelry of thought and utterance,
Polwarth warded, to avoid the least danger of her discovery; how often
fear for her shook the delicate frame of Ruth; how often her host left
some book unbought, that he might procure instead some thing to tempt
her to eat; how often her hostess turned faint in cooking for her. The
crooked creatures pitied, as well they might, the lovely lady; they
believed that Christ was in her; that the deepest in her was the nature
He had made--His own, and not that which she had gathered to
herself--and thought her own. For the sake of the Christ hidden in her,
her own deepest, best, purest self; that she might be lifted from the
dust-heap of the life she had for herself ruined, into the clear air of
a pure will and the Divine Presence, they counted their best labor most
fitly spent. It is the human we love in each other--and the human is the
Christ. What we do not love is the devilish--no more the human than the
morrow's wormy mass was the manna of God. To be for the Christ in a man,
is the highest love you can give him; for in the unfolding alone of that
Christ can the individuality, the genuine peculiarity of the man, the
man himself, be perfected--the flower of his nature be developed, in its
own distinct loveliness, beauty, splendor, and brought to its idea.
The main channel through which the influences of the gnomes reached the
princess, was their absolute simplicity. They spoke and acted what was
in them. Through this open utterance, their daily, common righteousness
revealed itself--their gentleness, their love of all things living,
their care of each other, their acceptance as the will of God concerning
them of whatever came, their general satisfaction with things as they
were--though it must in regard to some of them have been in the hope
that they would soon pass away, for one of the things Juliet least could
fail to observe was their suffering patience. They always spoke as if
they felt where their words were going--as if they were hearing them
arrive--as if the mind they addressed were a bright silver table on
which they must not set down even the cup of the water of life roughly:
it must make no scratch, no jar, no sound beyond a faint sweet
salutation. Pain had taught them not sensitiveness but delicacy. A
hundred are sensitive for one that is delicate. Sensitiveness is a
miserable, a cheap thing in itself, but invaluable if it be used for the
nurture of delicacy. They refused to receive offense, their care was to
give none. The burning spot in the center of that distorted spine, which
ought to have lifted Ruth up to a lovely woman, but had failed and sunk,
and ever after ached bitterly as if with defeat, had made her pitiful
over the pains of humanity: she could bear it, for there was something
in her deeper than pain; but alas for those who were not thus upheld!
Her agony drove her to pray for the whole human race, exposed to like
passion with her. The asthmatic choking which so often made Polwarth's
nights a long misery, taught him sympathy with all prisoners and
captives, chiefly with those bound in the bonds of an evil conscience:
to such he held himself specially devoted. They thought little of
bearing pain: to know they had caused it would have been torture. Each,
graciously uncomplaining, was tender over the ailing of the other.
Juliet had not been long with them before she found the garments she had
in her fancy made for them, did not fit them, and she had to devise,
afresh. They were not gnomes, kobolds, goblins, or dwarfs, but a prince
and princess of sweet nobility, who had loved each other in beauty and
strength, and knew that they were each crushed in the shell of a cruel
and mendacious enchantment. How they served each other! The uncle would
just as readily help the niece with her saucepans, as the niece would
help the uncle to find a passage in Shakespeare or a stanza in George
Herbert. And to hear them talk!
For some time Juliet did not understand them, and did not try. She had
not an idea what they were talking about. Then she began to imagine they
must be weak in the brain--a thing not unlikely with such spines as
theirs--and had silly secrets with each other, like children, which they
enjoyed talking about chiefly because none could understand but
themselves. Then she came to fancy it was herself and her affairs they
were talking about, deliberating upon--in some mental if not lingual
gibberish of their own. By and by it began to disclose itself to her,
that the wretched creatures, to mask their misery from themselves, were
actually playing at the kingdom of Heaven, speaking and judging and
concluding of things of this world by quite other laws, other scales,
other weights and measures than those in use in it. Every thing was
turned topsy-turvy in this their game of make-believe. Their religion
was their chief end and interest, and their work their play, as lightly
followed as diligently. What she counted their fancies, they seemed to
count their business; their fancies ran over upon their labor, and made
every day look and feel like a harvest-home, or the eve of a
long-desired journey, for which every preparation but the last and
lightest was over. Things in which she saw no significance made them
look very grave, and what she would have counted of some importance to
such as they, drew a mere smile from them. She saw all with bewildered
eyes, much as his neighbors looked upon the strange carriage of Lazarus,
as represented by Robert Browning in the wonderful letter of the Arab
physician. But after she had begun to take note of their sufferings, and
come to mark their calm, their peace, their lighted eyes, their ready
smiles, the patience of their very moans, she began to doubt whether
somehow they might not be touched to finer issues than she. It was not,
however, until after having, with no little reluctance and recoil,
ministered to them upon an occasion in which both were disabled for some
hours, that she began to _feel_ they had a hold upon something unseen,
the firmness of which hold made it hard to believe it closed upon an
unreality. If there was nothing there, then these dwarfs, in the
exercise of their foolish, diseased, distorted fancies, came nearer to
the act of creation than any grandest of poets; for these their
inventions did more than rectify for them the wrongs of their existence,
not only making of their chaos a habitable cosmos, but of themselves
heroic dwellers in the same. Within the charmed circle of this their
well-being, their unceasing ministrations to her wants, their
thoughtfulness about her likings and dislikings, their sweetness of
address, and wistful watching to discover the desire they might satisfy
or the solace they could bring, seemed every moment enticing her. They
soothed the aching of her wounds, mollified with ointment the stinging
rents in her wronged humanity.
At first, when she found they had no set prayers in the house, she
concluded that, for all the talk of the old gnome in the garden, they
were not very religious. But by and by she began to discover that no one
could tell when they might not be praying. At the most unexpected times
she would hear her host's voice somewhere uttering tones of glad
beseeching, of out-poured adoration. One day, when she had a bad
headache, the little man came into her room, and, without a word to her,
kneeled by her bedside, and said, "Father, who through Thy Son knowest
pain, and Who dost even now in Thyself feel the pain of this Thy child,
help her to endure until Thou shall say it is enough, and send it from
her. Let it not overmaster her patience; let it not be too much for her.
What good it shall work in her, Thou, Lord, needest not that we should
instruct Thee." Therewith he rose, and left the room.
For some weeks after, she was jealous of latent design to bring their
religion to bear upon her; but perceiving not a single direct approach,
not the most covert hint of attack, she became gradually convinced that
they had no such intent. Polwarth was an absolute serpent of holy
wisdom, and knew that upon certain conditions of the human being the
only powerful influences of religion are the all but insensible ones. A
man's religion, he said, ought never to be held too near his neighbor.
It was like violets: hidden in the banks, they fill the air with their
scent; but if a bunch of them is held to the nose, they stop away their
own sweetness.
Not unfrequently she heard one of them reading to the other, and by and
by, came to join them occasionally. Sometimes it would be a passage of
the New Testament, sometimes of Shakespeare, or of this or that old
English book, of which, in her so-called education, Juliet had never
even heard, but of which the gatekeeper knew every landmark. He would
often stop the reading to talk, explaining and illustrating what the
writer meant, in a way that filled Juliet with wonder. "Strange!" she
would say to herself; "I never thought of that!" She did not suspect
that it would have been strange indeed if she had thought of it.
In her soul began to spring a respect for her host and hostess, such as
she had never felt toward God or man. When, despite of many revulsions
it was a little established, it naturally went beyond them in the
direction of that which they revered. The momentary hush that preceded
the name of our Lord, and the smile that so often came with it; the
halo, as it were, which in their feeling surrounded Him; the confidence
of closest understanding, the radiant humility with which they
approached His idea; the way in which they brought the commonest
question side by side with the ideal of Him in their minds, considering
the one in the light of the other, and answering it thereby; the way in
which they took all He said and did on the fundamental understanding
that His relation to God was perfect, but His relation to men as yet an
imperfect, endeavoring relation, because of their distance from His
Father; these, with many another outcome of their genuine belief, began
at length to make her feel, not merely as if there had been, but as if
there really were such a person as Jesus Christ. The idea of Him ruled
potent in the lives of the two, filling heart and brain and hands and
feet: how could she help a certain awe before it, such as she had never
felt!
Suddenly one day the suspicion awoke in her mind, that the reason why
they asked her no questions, put out no feelers after discovery
concerning her, must be that Dorothy had told them every thing: if it
was, never again would she utter word good or bad to one whose very
kindness, she said to herself, was betrayal! The first moment therefore
she saw Polwarth alone, unable to be still an instant with her doubt
unsolved, she asked him, "with sick assay," but point-blank, whether he
knew why she was in hiding from her husband.
"I do not know, ma'am," he answered.
"Miss Drake told you nothing?" pursued Juliet.
"Nothing more than I knew already: that she could not deny when I put it
to her."
"But how did you know any thing?" she almost cried out, in a sudden rush
of terror as to what the public knowledge of her might after all be.
"If you will remember, ma'am," Polwarth replied, "I told you, the first
time I had the pleasure of speaking to you, that it was by observing and
reasoning upon what I observed, that I knew you were alive and at the
Old House. But it may be some satisfaction to you to see how the thing
took shape in my mind."
Thereupon he set the whole process plainly before her.
Fresh wonder, mingled with no little fear, laid hold upon Juliet. She
felt not merely as if he could look into her, but as if he had only to
look into himself to discover all her secrets.
"I should not have imagined you a person to trouble himself to that
extent with other people's affairs," she said, turning away.
"So far as my service can reach, the things of others are also mine,"
replied Polwarth, very gently.
"But you could not have had the smallest idea of serving me when you
made all those observations concerning me."
"I had long desired to serve your husband, ma'am. Never from curiosity
would I have asked a single question about you or your affairs. But what
came to me I was at liberty to understand if I could, and use for lawful
ends if I might."
Juliet was silent. She dared hardly think, lest the gnome should see her
very thoughts in their own darkness. Yet she yielded to one more urgent
question that kept pushing to get out. She tried to say the words
without thinking of the thing, lest he should thereby learn it.
"I suppose then you have your own theory as to my reasons for seeking
shelter with Miss Drake for a while?" she said--and the moment she said
it, felt as if some demon had betrayed her, and used her organs to utter
the words.
"If I have, ma'am," answered Polwarth, "it is for myself alone. I know
the sacredness of married life too well to speculate irreverently on its
affairs. I believe that many an awful crisis of human history is there
passed--such, I presume, as God only sees and understands. The more
carefully such are kept from the common eye and the common judgment, the
better, I think."
If Juliet left him with yet a little added fear, it was also with
growing confidence, and some comfort, which the feeble presence of an
infant humility served to enlarge.
Polwarth had not given much thought to the question of the cause of
their separation. That was not of his business. What he could not well
avoid seeing was, that it could hardly have taken place since their
marriage. He had at once, as a matter of course, concluded that it lay
with the husband, but from what he had since learned of Juliet's
character, he knew she had not the strength either of moral opinion or
of will to separate, for any reason past and gone, from the husband she
loved so passionately; and there he stopped, refusing to think further.
For he found himself on the verge of thinking what, in his boundless
respect for women, he shrank with deepest repugnance from entertaining
even as a transient flash of conjecture.
One trifle I will here mention, as admitting laterally a single ray of
light upon Polwarth's character. Juliet had come to feel some desire to
be useful in the house beyond her own room, and descrying not only dust,
but what she judged disorder in her _landlord's_ little library--for
such she chose to consider him--which, to her astonishment in such a
mere cottage, consisted of many more books than her husband's, and ten
times as many readable ones, she offered to dust and rearrange them
properly: Polwarth instantly accepted her offer, with thanks--which were
solely for the kindness of the intent, he could not possibly be grateful
for the intended result--and left his books at her mercy. I do not know
another man who, loving his books like Polwarth, would have done so.
Every book had its own place. He could--I speak advisedly--have laid his
hand on any book of at least three hundred of them, in the dark. While
he used them with perfect freedom, and cared comparatively little about
their covers, he handled them with a delicacy that looked almost like
respect. He had seen ladies handle books, he said, laughing, to
Wingfold, in a fashion that would have made him afraid to trust them
with a child. It was a year after Juliet left the house before he got
them by degrees muddled into order again; for it was only as he used
them that he would alter their places, putting each, when he had done
with it for the moment, as near where it had been before as he could;
thus, in time, out of a neat chaos, restoring a useful work-a-day world.
Dorothy's thoughts were in the meantime much occupied for Juliet. Now
that she was so sadly free, she could do more for her. She must occupy
her old quarters as soon as possible after the workmen had finished. She
thought at first of giving out that a friend in poor health was coming
to visit her, but she soon saw that would either involve lying or lead
to suspicion, and perhaps discovery, and resolved to keep her presence
in the house concealed from the outer world as before. But what was she
to do with respect to Lisbeth? Could she trust her with the secret? She
certainly could not trust Amanda. She would ask Helen to take the latter
for a while, and do her best to secure the silence of the former.
She so represented the matter to Lisbeth as to rouse her heart in regard
to it even more than her wonder. But her injunctions to secrecy were so
earnest, that the old woman was offended. She was no slip of a girl, she
said, who did not know how to hold her tongue. She had had secrets to
keep before now, she said; and in proof of her perfect trustworthiness,
was proceeding to tell some of them, when she read her folly in
Dorothy's fixed regard, and ceased.
"Lisbeth," said her mistress, "you have been a friend for sixteen years,
and I love you; but if I find that you have given the smallest hint even
that there is a secret in the house, I solemnly vow you shall not be
another night in it yourself, and I shall ever after think of you as a
wretched creature who periled the life of a poor, unhappy lady rather
than take the trouble to rule her own tongue."
Lisbeth trembled, and did hold her tongue, in spite of the temptation to
feel herself for just one instant the most important person in Glaston.
As the time went on, Juliet became more fretful, and more confiding.
She was never cross with Ruth--why, she could not have told; and when
she had been cross to Dorothy, she was sorry for it. She never said she
was sorry, but she tried to make up for it. Her husband had not taught
her the virtue, both for relief and purification, that lies in the
_acknowledgment_ of wrong. To take up blame that is our own, is to
wither the very root of it.
Juliet was pleased at the near prospect of the change, for she had
naturally dreaded being ill in the limited accommodation of the lodge.
She formally thanked the two crushed and rumpled little angels, begged
them to visit her often, and proceeded to make her very small
preparations with a fitful cheerfulness. Something might come of the
change, she flattered herself. She had always indulged a vague fancy
that Dorothy was devising help for her; and it was in part the
disappointment of nothing having yet justified the expectation, that had
spoiled her behavior to her. But for a long time Dorothy had been
talking of Paul in a different tone, and that very morning had spoken of
him even with some admiration: it might be a prelude to something! Most
likely Dorothy knew more than she chose to say! She dared ask no
question for the dread of finding herself mistaken. She preferred the
ignorance that left room for hope. But she did not like all Dorothy said
in his praise; for her tone, if not her words, seemed to imply some kind
of change in him. He might have his faults, she said to herself, like
other men, but she had not yet discovered them; and any change would, in
her eyes, be for the worse. Would she ever see her own old Paul again?
One day as Faber was riding at a good round trot along one of the back
streets of Glaston, approaching his own house, he saw Amanda, who still
took every opportunity of darting out at an open door, running to him
with outstretched arms, right in the face of Niger, just as if she
expected the horse to stop and take her up. Unable to trust him so well
as his dear old Ruber, he dismounted, and taking her in his arms, led
Niger to his stable. He learned from her that she was staying with the
Wingfolds, and took her home, after which his visits to the rectory were
frequent.
The Wingfolds could not fail to remark the tenderness with which he
regarded the child. Indeed it soon became clear that it was for her sake
he came to them. The change that had begun in him, the loss of his
self-regard following on the loss of Juliet, had left a great gap in his
conscious being: into that gap had instantly begun to shoot the
all-clothing greenery of natural affection. His devotion to her did not
at first cause them any wonderment. Every body loved the little Amanda,
they saw in him only another of the child's conquests, and rejoiced in
the good the love might do him. Even when they saw him looking fixedly
at her with eyes over clear, they set it down to the frustrated
affection of the lonely, wifeless, childless man. But by degrees they
did come to wonder a little: his love seemed to grow almost a passion.
Strange thoughts began to move in their minds, looking from the one to
the other of this love and the late tragedy.
"I wish," said the curate one morning, as they sat at breakfast, "if
only for Faber's sake, that something definite was known about poor
Juliet. There are rumors in the town, roving like poisonous fogs. Some
profess to believe he has murdered her, getting rid of her body utterly,
then spreading the report that she had run away. Others say she is mad,
and he has her in the house, but stupefied with drugs to keep her quiet.
Drew told me he had even heard it darkly hinted that he was making
experiments upon her, to discover the nature of life. It is dreadful to
think what a man is exposed to from evil imaginations groping after
theory. I dare hardly think what might happen should these fancies get
rooted among the people. Many of them are capable of brutality. For my
part, I don't believe the poor woman is dead yet."
Helen replied she did not believe that, in her sound mind, Juliet would
have had the resolution to kill herself; but who could tell what state
of mind she was in at the time? There was always something mysterious
about her--something that seemed to want explanation.
Between them it was concluded that, the next time Faber came, Wingfold
should be plain with him. He therefore told him that if he could cast
any light on his wife's disappearance, it was most desirable he should
do so; for reports were abroad greatly to his disadvantage. Faber
answered, with a sickly smile of something like contempt, that they had
had a quarrel the night before, for which he was to blame; that he had
left her, and the next morning she was gone, leaving every thing, even
to her wedding-ring, behind her, except the clothes she wore; that he
had done all he could to find her, but had been utterly foiled. More he
could not say.
The next afternoon, he sought an interview with the curate in his
study, and told him every thing he had told Mr. Drake. The story seemed
to explain a good deal more than it did, leaving the curate with the
conviction that the disclosure of this former relation had caused the
quarrel between him and his wife, and more doubtful than ever as to
Juliet's having committed suicide.