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!