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THE SMOKE.
Lord, I have laid my heart upon Thy altar,
But can not get the wood to burn;
It hardly flares ere it begins to falter,
And to the dark return.
Old sap, or night-fallen dew, has damped the fuel;
In vain my breath would flame provoke;
Yet see--at every poor attempt's renewal
To Thee ascends the smoke.
'Tis all I have--smoke, failure, foiled endeavor,
Coldness, and doubt, and palsied lack;
Such as I have I send Thee;--perfect Giver,
Send Thou Thy lightning back.
In the morning, as soon as breakfast was over, Helen's ponies were
brought to the door, she and Juliet got into the carriage, Wingfold
jumped up behind, and they returned to Glaston. Little was said on the
way, and Juliet seemed strangely depressed. They left her at her own
door.
"What did that look mean?" said Wingfold to his wife, the moment they
were round the corner of Mr. Drew's shop.
"You saw it then?" returned Helen. "I did not think you had been so
quick."
"I saw what I could not help taking for relief," said the curate, "when
the maid told her that her husband was not at home."
They said no more till they reached the rectory, where Helen followed
her husband to his study.
"He can't have turned tyrant already!" she said, resuming the subject of
Juliet's look. "But she's afraid of him."
"It did look like it," rejoined her husband. "Oh, Helen, what a hideous
thing fear of her husband must be for a woman, who has to spend not her
days only in his presence, but her nights by his side! I do wonder so
many women dare to be married. They would need all to have clean
consciences."
"Or no end of faith in their husbands," said Helen. "If ever I come to
be afraid of you, it will be because I have done something very wrong
indeed."
"Don't be too sure of that, Helen," returned Wingfold. "There are very
decent husbands as husbands go, who are yet unjust, exacting, selfish.
The most devoted of wives are sometimes afraid of the men they yet
consider the very models of husbands. It is a brutal shame that a woman
should feel afraid, or even uneasy, instead of safe, beside her
husband."
"You are always on the side of the women, Thomas," said his wife; "and I
love you for it somehow--I can't tell why."
"You make a mistake to begin with, my dear: you don't love me because I
am on the side of the women, but because I am on the side of the
wronged. If the man happened to be the injured party, and I took the
side of the woman, you would be down on me like an avalanche."
"I dare say. But there is something more in it. I don't think I am
altogether mistaken. You don't talk like most men. They have such an
ugly way of asserting superiority, and sneering at women! That you never
do, and as a woman I am grateful for it."
The same afternoon Dorothy Drake paid a visit to Mrs. Faber, and was
hardly seated before the feeling that something was wrong arose in her.
Plainly Juliet was suffering--from some cause she wished to conceal.
Several times she seemed to turn faint, hurriedly fanned herself, and
drew a deep breath. Once she rose hastily and went to the window, as if
struggling with some oppression, and returned looking very pale.
Dorothy was frightened.
"What is the matter, dear?" she said.
"Nothing," answered Juliet, trying to smile. "Perhaps I took a little
cold last night," she added with a shiver.
"Have you told your husband?" asked Dorothy.
"I haven't seen him since Saturday," she answered quietly, but a pallor
almost deathly overspread her face.
"I hope he will soon be home," said Dorothy. "Mind you tell him how you
feel the instant he comes in."
Juliet answered with a smile, but that smile Dorothy never forgot. It
haunted her all the way home. When she entered her chamber, her eyes
fell upon the petal of a monthly rose, which had dropped from the little
tree in her window, and lay streaked and crumpled on the black earth of
the flower-pot: by one of those queer mental vagaries in which the
imagination and the logical faculty seem to combine to make sport of the
reason--"How is it that smile has got here before me?" she said to
herself.
She sat down and thought. Could it be that Juliet had, like herself,
begun to find there could be no peace without the knowledge of an
absolute peace? If it were so, and she would but let her know it, then,
sisters at least in sorrow and search, they would together seek the
Father of their spirits, if haply they might find Him; together they
would cry to Him--and often: it might be He would hear them, and reveal
Himself. Her heart was sore all day, thinking of that sad face. Juliet,
whether she knew it or not, was, like herself, in trouble because she
had no God.
The conclusion shows that Dorothy was far from hopeless. That she could
believe the lack of a God was the cause unknown to herself of her
friend's depression, implies an assurance of the human need of a God,
and a hope there might be One to be found. For herself, if she could but
find Him, she felt there would be nothing but bliss evermore. Dorothy
then was more hopeful than she herself knew. I doubt if absolute
hopelessness is ever born save at the word, Depart from me. Hope
springs with us from God Himself, and, however down-beaten, however sick
and nigh unto death, will evermore lift its head and rise again.
She could say nothing to her father. She loved him--oh, how dearly! and
trusted him; where she could trust him at all!--oh, how perfectly! but
she had no confidence in his understanding of herself. The main cause
whence arose his insufficiency and her lack of trust was, that all his
faith in God was as yet scarcely more independent of thought-forms,
word-shapes, dogma and creed, than that of the Catholic or Calvinist.
How few are there whose faith is simple and mighty in the Father of
Jesus Christ, waiting to believe all that He will reveal to them! How
many of those who talk of faith as the one needful thing, will accept as
sufficient to the razing of the walls of partition between you and them,
your heartiest declaration that you believe in Him with the whole
might of your nature, lay your soul bare to the revelation of His
spirit, and stir up your will to obey Him?--And then comes your
temptation--to exclude, namely, from your love and sympathy the weak and
boisterous brethren who, after the fashion possible to them, believe in
your Lord, because they exclude you, and put as little confidence in
your truth as in your insight. If you do know more of Christ than they,
upon you lies the heavier obligation to be true to them, as was St. Paul
to the Judaizing Christians, whom these so much resemble, who were his
chief hindrance in the work his Master had given him to do. In Christ we
must forget Paul and Apollos and Cephas, pope and bishop and pastor and
presbyter, creed and interpretation and theory. Care-less of their
opinions, we must be careful of themselves--careful that we have salt in
ourselves, and that the salt lose not its savor, that the old man, dead
through Christ, shall not, vampire-like, creep from his grave and suck
the blood of the saints, by whatever name they be called, or however
little they may yet have entered into the freedom of the gospel that God
is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.
How was Dorothy to get nearer to Juliet, find out her trouble, and
comfort her?
"Alas!" she said to herself, "what a thing is marriage in separating
friends!"
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