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 God’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 God’s intention a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage…. Again, where the mind is unsatisfied, the solitariness of man, which God had namely and principally 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. God, 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 passion. 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 friendship—the difference in our religious education and observance. Oh, my beloved, let not difference in particulars divide two hearts that worship the same God, 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 Godhead and my prayers. In the regeneration of baptism, in the sanctity 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 worship God 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 shield 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. God 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 lust, 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.