“Most solemnly do I assure you, Arthur,” exclaimed Mr. Hatfield, “that, as an impartial person, and supposing I were disinterested in the matter, I should view it precisely in the same light: but I should not have dared to express those sentiments before you, had you not been the first to give utterance to them.”
“It is, after all, the mere common-sense aspect of the question,” said the earl. “A young man is inveigled into a marriage with a woman whom he looks upon as an angel of purity; and in a few hours he discovers her to be a demon of pollution. They separate upon positive and written conditions. The tribunals would take cognizance of the affair, and grant a legal divorce were they appealed to: but a private arrangement is deemed preferable to a public scandal. Well, the woman marries again—and every remaining shadow of claim which she might still have had upon the individual whom she had entrapped and deluded, ceases at once. The complete snapping of the bond—the total severance of the tie, is her own doing. It is true that the law may proclaim the first marriage to be the only legal one: but morality revolts against such an unnatural averment. These are my solemn convictions;—and, were I to ponder upon them for a hundred years, I should not waver one tittle in my belief.”
“There is more injustice committed by a false morality—more unhappiness inflicted by a ridiculous fastidiousness, than the world generally would believe,” observed Mr. Hatfield.
“Yes—and there is another consideration which weighs with me, Thomas!” exclaimed the earl, turning once more, and now with a smiling countenance, towards his half-brother. “You have shewn so much generosity towards me—you have annihilated documents which ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have prized and availed themselves of—and you have exhibited so much noble feeling in all your actions respecting myself and our family honour, that I consider myself bound to effect the union of my daughter and your son, if it be practicable. This, then, I propose—that the unfortunate marriage of Charles shall be kept a profound secret, and that he shall leave England for a short time, so that active employment may completely and radically wean his mind from any lingering attachment that he may entertain for the polluted Perdita. With regard to this latter suggestion I have a project which I will presently explain to you. Respecting the maintenance of the secret of his unhappy marriage, I should recommend its propriety even were there no ulterior considerations of the nature already stated. For of what avail can it be to distress my wife or yours—much less my daughter—by a revelation of the sad circumstance? In any case, Frances would not be permitted to learn that secret; and I should be loth indeed to afflict Lady Ellingham by the narration of such a history.”
“And you may be wall assured, Arthur,” observed Mr. Hatfield, “that it would prove no pleasant task for me to inform Lady Georgiana that her son, by his mad ambition and his fatal misconceptions, had compelled me to make known to him the fact of his illegitimacy. Neither should I wish to distress her by unfolding to her the secret of this most miserable marriage.”
“It is fortunate that we were so guarded with our wives on that morning when we made such alarming discoveries in the library,” observed Lord Ellingham: “it is a subject for self-congratulation that we merely intimated the fact of Charles’s departure that day with an abandoned woman——”
“Yes—and it was to your prudent representations that I yielded, when I was about to commit the folly of imparting every thing to my wife,—the loss of the papers—the certainty that Charles had not only taken them, but had likewise discovered every thing relating to my own past life——”
“It was scarcely my advice, Thomas, which prevented you from making all those revelations to Georgiana,” said the earl: “but it was when——”
“Yes—I remember: it was when we resolved to depart in search of the fugitive, that I found my wife was so overcome by the first word I uttered—the word which told her he was gone—that I could not feel it in my heart to afflict her by farther revelations.”
“You scarcely require to be informed that Villiers and myself each pursued the road that we respectively took, until we acquired the certainty that no travellers of the description given had passed that way; but it was late at night when I returned to London, and Villiers was an hour or two later still. While we are, however, conversing in this desultory manner,” said the earl, “we forget that Charles is waiting for us in another room.”