Thaddeus of Warsaw

by Jane Porter

Lady Sara, who had been standing silently at the window, rather proudly answered—

"Yes, madam, if you will honor me with your protection."

Lady Tinemouth was the only one present who understood the resentment which these words conveyed; and, almost believing that she had gone too far, by implying suspicion, she approached her with a pleading anxiety of countenance. "Then, Lady Sara, perhaps you will dine with me? I mean to call on Miss Dorothy Somerset, and would invite her to be of the party."

Lady Sara curtseyed her acceptance of the invitation, and, smiling, appeared to think no more of the matter. But she neither forgot it nor found herself able to forgive Lady Tinemouth for having betrayed her into a confidence which her own turbulent passions had made but too easy. She had listened unwillingly to the reasonable declaration of the countess, that her only way to retreat from an error which threatened criminality was to avoid the object.

"When a married woman," observed her ladyship, in that confidential conference, "is so unhappy as to love any man besides her husband, her only safety rests in the resolution to quit his society, and to banish his image whenever it obtrudes."

Lady Sara believed herself incapable of this exertion, and hated the woman who thought it necessary. By letter and conversation Lady Tinemouth tried to display in every possible light the enormity of giving encouragement to such an attachment, and ended with the unanswerable climax—the consideration of her duty to Heaven.

Of this argument Lady Sara knew little. She never reflected on the true nature of religion, though she sometimes went to church, repeated the prayers, without being conscious of their spirit; and when the coughing, sneezing, and blowing of noses which commonly accompany the text subsided, she generally called up the remembrance of the last ball, or an anticipation of the next assembly, to amuse herself until the prosing business was over. From church she drove to the Park, where, bowling round the ring, or sauntering in the gardens, she soon forgot that there existed in the universe a Power of higher consequence to please than her own vanity—and the admiration of the spectators.

Lady Sara would have shuddered at hearing any one declare himself a deist, much more an atheist; but for any influence which her nominal belief held over her desires, she might as well have been either. She never committed an action deserving the name of premeditated injury, nor went far out of her way to do her best friend a service,—not because she wanted inclination, but she ceased to remember both the petitioner and his petition before he had been five minutes from her sight. She had read as much as most fine ladies have read: a few histories, a few volumes of essays, a few novels, and now and then a little poetry comprised the whole range of her studies; these, with morning calls and evening assemblies, occupied her whole day. Such had been the routine of her life until she met the once "young star" of Poland, Thaddeus Sobieski, in an unknown exile, an almost nameless guest, at Lady Tinemouth's, which event caused a total revolution in her mind and conduct.

The strength of Lady Sara's understanding might have credited a better education; but her passions bearing an equal power with this mental vigor, and having taken a wrong direction, she neither acknowledged the will nor the capability to give the empire to her reason. When love really entered her heart, its first conquest was over her universal vanity; she surrendered all her admirers, in the hope of securing the admiration of Thaddeus; its second victory mastered her discretion; she revealed her unhappy affection to Lady Tinemouth, and more than hinted it to himself. What had she else to lose? She believed her honor to be safer than her life. Her honor was the term. She had no conception, or, at best, a faint one, that a breach of the marriage vow could be an outrage on the laws of Heaven. The word sin had been gradually ignored by the oligarchy of fashion, from the hour in which Charles the Second and his profligate court trod down piety with hypocrisy; and in this day the new philosophy has accomplished its total outlawry, denouncing it as a rebel to decency and the freedom of man.

Thus, the Christian religion being driven from the haunts of the great, pagan morality is raised from that prostration where, Dagon- like, it fell at the feet of the Scriptures, and is again erected as the idol of adoration. Guilt against Heaven fades before the decrees of man; his law of ethics reprobates crime. But crime is only a temporal transgression, in opposition to the general good; it draws no consequent punishment heavier than the judgment of a broken human law, or the resentment of the offended private parties. Morality neither promises rewards after death nor denounces future chastisement for error. The disciples of this independent doctrine hold forth instances of the perfectibility of human actions, produced by the unassisted decisions of human intellect on the limits of right and wrong. They admire virtue, because it is beautiful. They practice it, because it is heroic. They do not abstain from the gratification of an intemperate wish under the belief that it is sinful, but in obedience to their reason, which rejects the commission of a vicious act because it is uncomely. In the first case, God is their judge; in the latter, themselves. The comparison need only be proposed, to humble the pride that made it necessary. How do these systematizers refine and subtilize? How do they dwell on the principle of virtue, and turn it in every metaphysical light, until their philosophy rarifies it to nothing! Some degrade, and others abandon, the only basis on which an upright character can stand with firmness. The bulwark which Revelation erected between the passions and the soul is levelled first; and then that instinctive rule of right which the modern casuist denominates the citadel of virtue falls of course.