How quickly the days passed in that gay household at Chilton! and yet every day of Angela’s life held so much of action and emotion that, looking back at Christmas time to the three months that had slipped by since she had brought Fareham from his sick bed to his country home, she could but experience that common feeling of youth in such circumstances. Surely it was half a lifetime that had lapsed; or else she, by some subtle and supernatural change, had become a new creature.
She thought of her life in the Convent, thought of it much and deeply on those Sunday mornings when she and her sister and De Malfort and a score or so of servants crept quietly to a room in the heart of the house where a Priest, who had been fetched from Oxford in, Lady Fareham’s coach, said Mass within locked doors. The familiar words of the service, the odour of the incense, brought back the old time—the unforgotten atmosphere, the dull tranquillity of ten years, which had been as one year by reason of their level monotony.
Could she go back to such a life as that? Go back! Leave all she loved? At the mere suggestion her trembling hand was stretched out involuntarily to clasp her niece Henriette, kneeling beside her. Leave them—leave those with whom and for whom she lived? Leave this loving child—her sister—her brother? Fareham had told her to call him “Brother.” He had been to her as a brother, with all a brother’s kindness, counselling her, confiding in her.
Only with one person at Chilton Abbey had she ever conversed as seriously as with Fareham, and that person was Sir Denzil Warner, who at five and twenty was more serious in his way of looking at serious things than most men of fifty.
“I cannot make a jest of life,” he said once, in reply to some flippant speech of De Malfort’s; “it is too painful a business for the majority.”
“What has that to do with us—the minority? Can we smooth a sick man’s pillow by pulling a long face? We shall do him more good by tossing him a crown, if he be poor; or helping to build him a hospital by the sacrifice of a night’s winnings at ombre. Long faces help nobody; that is what you Puritans will never consider.”
“No; but if the long faces are the faces of men who think, something may come of their thoughts for the good of humanity.”
Denzil Warner was the only person who ever spoke to Angela of her religion. With extreme courtesy, and with gentle excuses for his temerity in touching on so delicate a theme, he ventured to express his abhorrence of the superstitions interwoven with the Romanist’s creed. He talked as one who had sat at the feet of the blind poet—talked sometimes in the very words of John Milton.
There was much in what he said that appealed to her reason; but there was no charm in that severer form of worship which he offered in exchange for her own. He was frank and generous; he had a fine nature, but was too much given to judging his fellow-men. He had all the arrogance of Puritanism superadded to the natural arrogance of youth that has never known humiliating reverses, that has never been the servant of circumstance. He was Angela’s senior by something less than four years; yet it seemed to her that he was in every attribute infinitely her superior. In education, in depth of thought, in resolution for good, and scorn of evil. If he loved her—as Hyacinth insisted upon declaring—there was nothing of youthful impetuosity in his passion. He had, indeed, betrayed his sentiments by no direct speech. He had told her gravely that he was interested in her, and deeply concerned that one so worthy and so amiable should have been brought up in the house of idolaters, should have been taught falsehood instead of truth.
She stood up boldly for the faith of her maternal ancestors.