Paul Faber, Surgeon | Page 3

blood," said the rector.
"I've got no little belongings of wife or child to make a prudent man of me, you see," returned the surgeon. "At worst it's but a knock on the head and a longish snooze."
The rector fancied he felt his wife's shudder shake the carriage, but the sensation was of his own producing. The careless defiant words wrought in him an unaccountable kind of terror: it seemed almost as if they had rushed of themselves from his own lips.
"Take care, my dear sir," he said solemnly. "There may be something to believe, though you don't believe it."
"I must take the chance," replied Faber. "I will do my best to make calamity of long life, by keeping the rheumatic and epileptic and phthisical alive, while I know how. Where nothing can be known, I prefer not to intrude."
A pause followed. At length said the rector,
"You are so good a fellow, Faber, I wish you were better. When will you come and dine with me?"
"Soon, I hope," answered the surgeon, "but I am too busy at present. For all her sweet ways and looks, the spring is not friendly to man, and my work is to wage war with nature."
A second pause followed. The rector would gladly have said something, but nothing would come.
"By the by," he said at length, "I thought I saw you pass the gate--let me see--on Monday: why did you not look in?"
"I hadn't a moment's time. I was sent for to a patient in the village."
"Yes, I know; I heard of that. I wish you would give me your impression of the lady. She is a stranger here.--John, that gate is swinging across the road. Get down and shut it.--Who and what is she?"
"That I should be glad to learn from you. All I know is that she is a lady. There can not be two opinions as to that."
"They tell me she is a beauty," said the parson.
The doctor nodded his head emphatically.
"Haven't you seen her?" he said.
"Scarcely--only her back. She walks well. Do you know nothing about her? Who has she with her?"
"Nobody."
"Then Mrs. Bevis shall call upon her."
"I think at present she had better not. Mrs. Puckridge is a good old soul, and pays her every attention."
"What is the matter with her? Nothing infectious?"
"Oh, no! She has caught a chill. I was afraid of pneumonia yesterday."
"Then she is better?"
"I confess I am a little anxious about her. But I ought not to be dawdling like this, with half my patients to see. I must bid you good morning.--Good morning, Mrs. Bevis."
As he spoke, Faber drew rein, and let the carriage pass; then turned his horse's head to the other side of the way, scrambled up the steep bank to the field above, and galloped toward Glaston, whose great church rose high in sight. Over hedge and ditch he rode straight for its tower.
"The young fool!" said the rector, looking after him admiringly, and pulling up his horses that he might more conveniently see him ride.
"Jolly old fellow!" said the surgeon at his second jump. "I wonder how much he believes now of all the rot! Enough to humbug himself with--not a hair more. He has no passion for humbugging other people. There's that curate of his now believes every thing, and would humbug the whole world if he could! How any man can come to fool himself so thoroughly as that man does, is a mystery to me!--I wonder what the rector's driving into Glaston for on a Saturday."
Paul Faber was a man who had espoused the cause of science with all the energy of a suppressed poetic nature. He had such a horror of all kinds of intellectual deception or mistake, that he would rather run the risk of rejecting any number of truths than of accepting one error. In this spirit he had concluded that, as no immediate communication had ever reached his eye, or ear, or hand from any creator of men, he had no ground for believing in the existence of such a creator; while a thousand unfitnesses evident in the world, rendered the existence of one perfectly wise and good and powerful, absolutely impossible. If one said to him that he believed thousands of things he had never himself known, he answered he did so upon testimony. If one rejoined that here too we have testimony, he replied it was not credible testimony, but founded on such experiences as he was justified in considering imaginary, seeing they were like none he had ever had himself. When he was asked whether, while he yet believed there was such a being as his mother told him of, he had ever set himself to act upon that belief, he asserted himself fortunate in the omission of what might have riveted