This and much more of like effect I told her out of my well-learnt lesson. She struggled ever more faintly against me, but I was strongly armed against all she could say. I told her of predestination, and what she should think of works done in the days of her unbelief. All the things she loved so well—ceremonies, vestments, and every relic of the ancient mass to which she clung—I condemned mercilessly with practised argument. I showed how Rome had abused the Christian faith, and how it could not be purified till every meretricious adornment by which worship had been turned to idolatry was cleansed away.
She fell at last to imploring me to leave her something, but I told her, without pity, that no good could come of any unholy union of the gospel and papacy, such alluring schemes being only thought on by their inventors as an unstable place whence it was hard not to slip back to Antichrist.
It was an easy task I had. In the wilderness of doctrine, where she suddenly found herself, she seemed but to want a guide who would take her by the hand and lead her to rest. So it was but a short work to set her again on the path she once had trodden under the good Earl of Bedford's lead, and which she had deserted for the flowery mazes of the Court.
It were tedious to tell step by step how we trode the sweet and dangerous way together. All will understand if they remember what we two were. I, from long sojourn at Cambridge, a monk, for with all its faults my university was then a most well-ordered monastery,—a monk who, as it were, was on a sudden released from his vows; she, a woman who, after a strictly ordered childhood, was set loose in a pleasure-loving Court, where her life was an ever-changing scene of exciting pleasure and gallantry.
The change was too great for both of us. For myself I find no excuse, but for her much. Ere the first fires of her youth had burnt out she was overcome by the passionate love-making of the handsome soldier, who came covered with glory from the wars abroad to lay siege to her heart at home. What wonder if she loved before all that pattern of manhood and gentleness who so loved her, and thought she could feed on his love alone! What wonder that, when passion grew dull and she found how full of many things besides love a man's life is, and how full of things which, in spite of all her trying, proved but dull to what her life had been at Court, insensibly she was ready to open her heart to any excitement, even to me and my teaching!
If I had not been blinded by my own accursed pride and self-righteousness, I should have known by many marks which we passed whither our road led. I should have known when, after that first talk, we began to be silent in Harry's presence, though we could chatter well enough when he was not by. I should have known when we ceased to speak, and moved farther from each other whenever he came where we talked. I should have known when she spoke to me of her misery in being wed to so ungodly a husband, and begged me to speak earnestly to him that he might amend his ways.
It is my one comfort of all that time that I still had manliness left to defend him with all my heart to her, and that I was spared that last depth of knavery, much used by craven gallants, who, that they may win a cheap and easy favour with a woman, will make her believe with a score of cunning lies that her husband is unworthy of her.
Though out of the deeps of my love for him I found a hundred excuses to offer her, yet I laboured when alone with him to turn his light heart to weightier things, well knowing it was useless, or who can tell whether I should have tried?
It was as we rode home over the downs from hawking wild-fowl on the marsh-lands in the valley of the Medway that I first attacked him, and I well remember that my surprise was rather at how much he had thought than at what his thought was.
It was such a glorious afternoon as now, since I have known Signor Bruno, lifts my heart to God more truly than ever did psalms and prayers, much as I loved them and do still. The wide and marshy river stretched out below us far away to the low haze-clad lands of Hoo and the misty Thames. Water and woodland and field were bathed in sunshine which seemed, as it were, to melt all Nature into such full and tender harmony with its Creator, as I think, after all my many wanderings, can nowhere be seen in truer perfection than in our own dear England. Moved by the beauty which wrapped the land, Harry fell to praising it with a score of rich conceits, and I seized the occasion to broach the cask of divinity which I had brewed for him.