Part 34 (1/2)
Papillon sprang off the coach step into her father's arms.
”Sweetheart, why are you so sad?” she asked. ”You look more unhappy than Philaster when he thought his lady loved him not.”
She would not be put off, but hung about him all the length of the corridor, to the door of his room, where he parted from her with a kiss on her forehead.
”How your lips burn!” she cried. ”I hope you are not sickening for the plague. I dreamt last night that the contagion had come back; and that our new gla.s.s coach was going about with a bell collecting the dead.”
”Thou hadst eaten too much supper, sweet. Such dreams are warnings against excess of pies and jellies. Go, love; I have business.”
”You have always business now. You used to let me stay with you-even when you was busy,” Henriette remonstrated, dejectedly, as the sonorous oak door closed against her.
Fareham flung himself into his chair in front of the large table, with its heaped-up books and litter of papers. Straight before him there lay Milton's pamphlet-a publication of ten years ago; but he had been reading it only that morning-”The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.”
There were sentences which seemed to him to stand out upon the page, almost as if written in fire; and to these he recurred again and again, brooding over and weighing every word. ”....Neither can this law be of force to engage a blameless creature to his own perpetual sorrow, mistaken for his expected solace, without suffering charity to step in and do a confessed good work of parting those whom nothing holds together but this of G.o.d's joining, falsely supposed against the express end of his own ordinance.... 'It is not good,' said He, 'that man should be alone; I will make him a helpmeet for him.' From which words, so plain, less cannot be concluded, nor is by any learned interpreter, than that in G.o.d's intention a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and n.o.blest end of marriage.... Again, where the mind is unsatisfied, the solitariness of man, which G.o.d had namely and princ.i.p.ally ordered to prevent by marriage, hath no remedy, but lies in a worse condition than the loneliest single life; for in single life the absence and remoteness of a helper might inure him to expect his own comforts out of himself, or to seek with hope; but here the continual sight of his deluded thoughts, without cure, must needs be to him, if especially his complexion incline him to melancholy, a daily trouble and pain of loss, in some degree like that which reprobates feel.”
He closed the book, and started up to pace the long, lofty room, full of shadow, betwixt the light of the fire and that one pair of candles on his reading desk.
”Reprobate! Yes. Am not I a reprobate, and the worst, plotting against innocence? New England,” he repeated to himself. ”How much the name promises. A new world, a new life, and old fetters struck off. G.o.d, if it could be done! It would hurt no one-no one-except perhaps those children, who might suffer a brief sorrow-and it would make two lives happy that must be blighted else. Two lives! Am I so sure of her? Yes, if eyes speak true. Sure as of my own fond pa.s.sion. The contagion, quotha! I have suffered that, sweet, and know its icy sweats and parching heats; but 'tis not so fierce a fever as that devilish disease, the longing for your company.”
CHAPTER XXI.
GOOD-BYE, LONDON.
Sitting in her own room before supper, a letter was brought to Angela-a long letter, closely written, in a neat, firm hand she knew very well.
It was from Denzil Warner; a letter full of earnest thought and warm feeling, in which he pursued the subject of their morning's discourse.
”We were interrupted before I had time to open my heart to you, dearest,” he wrote; ”and at a moment when we had touched on the most delicate point in our friends.h.i.+p-the difference in our religious education and observance. Oh, my beloved, let not difference in particulars divide two hearts that wors.h.i.+p the same G.o.d, or make a barrier between two minds that think alike upon essentials. The Christ who died for you is not less my Saviour because I love not to obtrude the dressed-up image of His earthly mother between His G.o.dhead and my prayers. In the regeneration of baptism, in the sanct.i.ty of marriage, in the resurrection of the body, and the life of the world to come, in the reality of sin and the necessity for repentance, I believe as truly as any Papist living. Let our lives be but once united, who knows how the future may shape and modify our minds and our faith? I may be brought to your way of thinking, or you to mine. I will pledge myself never to be guilty of disrespect to your religion, or to unkindly urge you to any change in your observances. I am not one of those who have exchanged one tyranny for another, and who, released from the dominion of Rome, have become the slave of the Covenant. I have been taught by one who, himself deeply religious, would have all men free to wors.h.i.+p G.o.d by the light of their own conscience; and to my wife, that dearer half of my soul, I would allow perfect freedom. I suffer from the lack of poetic phrases with which to embellish the plain reality of my love; but be sure, Angela, that you may travel far through the world, and receive many a flowery compliment to your beauty, yet meet none who will love you as faithfully as I have loved you for this year last past, and as I doubt I shall love you-happy or unfortunate in my wooing-for all the rest of my life. Think, dearest, whether it were not wise on your part to accept the chaste and respectful homage of a suitor who is free to love and cherish you, and thus to s.h.i.+eld yourself from the sinful pursuit of one who offends Heaven and dishonours you whenever he looks at you with the eyes of a lover. I would not write harshly of a man whose very sin I pity, and whom I believe not wholly vile; but for him, as for me, that were a happy day which should make you my wife, and thus end the madness of unholy hopes. I would again urge that Lady Fareham desires our union with all a sister's concern for you, and more than a friend's tenderness to me.
”I beseech your pardon and indulgence for my rough words of this morning. G.o.d forbid that I should impute one unworthy thought to her whose virtues I honour above all earthly merit. If your heart inclines towards one whom it were misery for you to love, I know that it must be with an affection pure and ethereal as the love of the disguised girl in Fletcher's play. But, ah, dearest angel, you know not the peril in which you walk. Your innocent mind cannot conceive the audacious height to which unholy love may climb in a man's fiery nature. You cannot fathom the black depths of such a character as Fareham-a man as capable of greatness in evil as of distinction in good. Forget not whose fierce blood runs in those veins. Can you doubt his audacity in wrong-doing, when you remember that he comes of the same stock which produced that renegade and tyrant, Thomas Wentworth-a man who would have waded deep in the blood of a nation to reach his desired goal, all the history of whose life was expressed by him in one word-'thorough'?
”Do you consider what that word means to a man over whose heart sin has taken the upper hand? Thorough! How resolute in evil, how undaunted and without limit in baseness, is he who takes that word for his motto! Oh, my love, there are dragons and lions about thy innocent footsteps-the dragons of l.u.s.t, the lions of presumptuous love. Flee from thy worst enemy, dearest, to the shelter of a heart which adores thee; lean upon a breast whose pulses beat for thee with a truth that time cannot change.
”Thine till death,
”WARNER.”
Angela tore up the letter in anger. How dared he write thus of Lord Fareham? To impute sinful pa.s.sions, guilty desires-to enter into another man's mind, and read the secret cipher of his thoughts and wishes with an a.s.sumed key, which might be false? His letter was a bundle of false a.s.sumptions. What right had he to insist that her brother-in-law cared for her with more than the affection authorised by affinity? He had no right. She hated him for his insolent letter. She scorned the protection of his love. She had her refuge and her shelter in a holier love than his. The doors of the old home would open to her at a word.
She sat on a low stool in front of the hearth, while the pile of s.h.i.+p timber on the andirons burnt itself out and turned from red to grey. She sat looking into the dying fire and recalling the pictures of the past; the dull grey convent rooms and formal convent garden; the petty rules and restrictions; the so-frequent functions-low ma.s.s and high, benedictions, vespers-the recurrent sound of the chapel bell. The few dull books, permitted in the hour of so-called recreation; the sombre grey gown, which was the only relief from perpetual black; the limitations of that colourless life. She had been happy with the Ursulines under her kinswoman's gentle sway. But could she be happy with the present Superior, whose domineering temper she knew? She had been happy in her ignorance of the outer world; but could she be happy again in that grey seclusion-she who had sat at the banquet of life, who had seen the beauty and the variety of her native land? To be an exile for the rest of her days, in the hopeless gloom of a Flemish convent, among the heavy faces of Flemish nuns!
In the intensity of introspective thought she had forgotten one who had forbidden that gloomy seclusion, and to whom it would be as natural for her to look for protection and refuge as to convent or husband. From her thoughts to-night the image of her wandering father had been absent. His appearances in her life had been so rare and so brief, his influence on her destiny so slight, that she was forgetful of him now in this crisis of her fate.
It was within a week of that evening that the sisters were startled by the arrival of their father, unannounced, in the dusk of the winter afternoon. He had come by slow stages from Spain, riding the greater part of the journey-like Howell, fifty years earlier-attended only by one faithful soldier-servant, and enduring no small suffering, and running no slight risk, upon the road.
”The wolves had our provender on more than one occasion,” he told them. ”The wonder is they never had us or our hackneys. I left Madrid in July, not long after the death of my poor friend Fanshawe. Indeed, it was his friends.h.i.+p and his good lady's unvarying courtesy that took me to the capital. We had last met at Hampton Court, with the King, shortly before his Majesty's so ill-advised flight; and we were bosom-friends then. And so, he being dead of a fever early in the summer, I had no more to do but to travel slowly homeward, to end my days in my own chimney-corner, and to claim thy promise, Angela, that thou wouldst keep my house, and comfort my declining years.”
”Dear father!” Angela murmured, hanging over him as he sat in the high-backed velvet chair by the fire, while her ladys.h.i.+p's footmen set a table near him, with wine and provisions for an impromptu meal, Lady Fareham directing them, and coming between-whiles to embrace her father in a flutter of spirits, the firelight s.h.i.+ning on her flame-coloured velvet gown and primrose taffety petticoat, her pretty golden curls and sparkling Sevigne, her ruby necklace and earrings, and her bright restless eyes.