'Well, as you will,' said Drake, very disappointed. 'But you miss a glorious venture; and you will not go either, Jasper?'
'Gladly I would,' said I, 'but each must to the work his hand finds to do, and mine, as you know, is here. My money, as far as my capacity goes, shall be with you, though for profit I would rather have seen it risked in a plain voyage to Guinea after negroes. Yet, since this is the Lord's work which you are on, you shall have what help my purse can yield. But for my body, the Lord has need of that here.'
This was indeed so, as I thought, though had it been otherwise I doubt if then I should have had stomach for Frank's wild enterprise. Mr. Cartwright had already sounded his note against prelatical Church government and all its brood of evils, and had been deprived both of his professorship and his fellowship. Since that time he had been busy with his Admonition to Parliament. That clarion-blast, which was to wake a war in England which seems each day to grow in fierceness, was about to be blown, and seeing how much he looked to me to help him in his great work, and how stormy a controversy he foresaw it would raise, I felt I should not leave his side.
Such was the reason I gave to myself, yet I think my resolve was dictated rather by distaste for the danger of so rash an expedition, and by the closer ties which bound me to England.
Would God I had had strength to give Frank another answer! What sin and misery I might then have been spared, and of how much sorrow brought on those I loved best should I have been guiltless! Yet it was fated that I should have another tale to tell, so let me hasten in shame to the end, which now came quickly.
When Frank left us our lives rolled on in the old ruts again, but deeper than before. Out of his great love for his wife, and his knightly devotion to her, Harry had made a sacrifice greater than we and he guessed in refusing Drake's offer; and seeking to forget it in an unceasing round of work and pleasure, he devoted his time more and more to his sheep and tenants and estate, and sought more, eagerly the assemblies of gentlemen where sport was to be had.
As for his wife, she seemed to think now of nothing but good works amongst the poor and reading theology with me. Hour after hour she would pore over Genevan Latin, still her Puritanism grew sterner and sterner. Harry's hunting and bull-baiting and card-playing became more and more distasteful in her eyes, till at last I think it was all they could see of him; so that when he came home at nights it was little return he got for the love he was ready to lavish upon her.
Perhaps he was to blame, though I can never see in his most noble life anything that is not praiseworthy. Perhaps if he could have given her a little more and his work a little less, she would have been readier to forgive the manly pleasures he loved in common with every other gentleman of spirit. Yet I think not. I doubt the poison which I, in my self-willed ignorance, administered for a wholesome physic was too strong and deadly for her high-wrought nature.
Soon she would bid none but the poor and preachers to Ashtead, where once she had loved so well to entertain very gallant parties of gentry from the country round, ay, and from London too. Nor would she go abroad to other houses, as she used, with Harry, since she had grown to hate the sports and ungodly conversation and gallantry that went forward at such times.
Above all, there was one house which she hated. It belonged to a Popish gentleman, and was well known to me as a place where there was a great coming and going of strangers, who rode on North Country cobbles, and often spoke with a strong North Country burr. We had not yet forgotten the Catholic risings in the North. The Duke of Norfolk's treasonable practices with Rome for her Majesty's destruction had been but recently brought to light, and he was yet lying a convicted traitor in the Tower, but still unexecuted. Rumours were leaking out or being invented of other great Popish plots for the subversion of the realm and the making away with the Queen and her ministers. It was no wonder, then, that Harry's constant visits to the house of which I speak caused us no little anxiety, although now I know he went there bent only on pleasure.