ent darkness"? Few men would consent to be
comforted in accordance with their professed theories of life; and more
than most would Faber, at this period of his suffering, have scorned
such truth for comfort. As it was, men gave him a squeeze of the hand,
and women a tearful look; but from their sympathy he derived no
faintest pleasure, for he knew he deserved nothing that came from heart
of tenderness. Not that he had begun to condemn himself for his hardness
to the woman who, whatever her fault, yet honored him by confessing it,
or to bemoan her hard fate to whom a man had not been a hiding-place
from the wind, a covert from the tempest of life, a shadow-shelter from
the scorching of her own sin. As he recovered from the double shock,
and, his strength slowly returning, his work increased, bringing him
again into the run of common life, his sense of desolation increased. As
his head ached less, his heart ached the more, nor did the help he
ministered to his fellows any longer return in comfort to himself.
Hitherto his regard of annihilation had been as of something so distant,
that its approach was relatively by degrees infinitesimal, but as the
days went on, he began to derive a gray consolation from the thought
that he must at length cease to exist. He would not hasten the end; he
would be brave, and see the play out. Only it was all so dull! If a
woman looked kindly at him, if for a moment it gave him pleasure, the
next it was as an arrow in his heart. What a white splendor was vanished
from his life! Where were those great liquid orbs of radiating
darkness?--where was that smile with its flash of whiteness?--that form
so lithe, yet so stately, so perfect in modulation?--where were those
hands and feet that spoke without words, and took their own way with his
heart?--those arms--? His being shook to its center. One word of
tenderness and forgiveness, and all would have been his own still!--But
on what terms?--Of dishonor and falsehood, he said, and grew hard again.
He was sorry for Juliet, but she and not he was to blame. She had ruined
his life, as well as lost her own, and his was the harder case, for he
had to live on, and she had taken with her all the good the earth had
for him. She had been the sole object of his worship; he had
acknowledged no other divinity; she was the loveliness of all things;
but she had dropped from her pedestal, and gone down in the sea that
flows waveless and windless and silent around t