He was in all things the opposite of the Vicar of St. Elizabeth’s. He wrote poetry, made puns, played billiards, dined out at all the houses in the neighbourhood that were worth dining at, and was only waiting to marry until Tom Hillersdon should be able to give him a living.
Mr. Cancellor reproved the ribald jester with a scathing look before he took up the argument against his host.
“If this Bill were to pass, no virtuous woman could live in the house of a married sister,” he said.
“That is as much as to say that no honest woman can live in the house of any married man,” retorted Greswold hotly. “Do you think if a man is weak enough to fall in love with another woman under his wife’s roof he is less likely to sin because your canonical law stares him in the face, telling him, ‘Thou canst never wed her’? The married man who is inconstant to his wife is not influenced by the chances of the future. He is either a bold, bad man, whose only thought is to win the woman whom he loves at any cost of honour or conscience; or he is a weak fool, who drifts hopelessly to destruction, and in whom the resolution of to-day yields to the temptation of to-morrow. Neither the bold sinner nor the weak one is influenced by the consideration whether he can or cannot marry the woman he loves under the unlikely circumstance of his wife’s untimely death. The man who does so calculate is the one man in so many thousands of men who will poison his wife to clear the way for his new fancy. I don’t think we ought to legislate for poisoners. In plain words, if a married man is weak enough or wicked enough to be seduced by the charms of any woman who dwells beneath his roof, he will not be the less likely to fall because the law of the land has made that woman anathema maranatha, or because he has been warned from the pulpit that she is to be to him as his own flesh and blood, no dearer and no less dear than the sister beside whom he grew from infancy to manhood, and whom he has loved all his life, hardly knowing whether she is as beautiful as Hebe or as hideous as Tisyphone.”
“You are a disciple of the New Learning, Mr. Greswold,” Cancellor said bitterly; “the learning which breaks down all barriers and annihilates the Creator of all things—the learning which has degraded God from infinite power to infinitesimal insignificance, and which explains the genius of Plato and Shakespeare, Luther and Newton, as the ultimate outcome of an unconscious primeval mist.”
“I am no Darwinian,” replied Greswold coldly, “but I would rather belong to his school of speculative inquiry than to the Calvinism which slew Servetus, or the Romanism which lit the death-pile of the Oxford martyrs.”
Mildred was not more anxious than Mrs. Hillersdon to end a discussion which threatened angry feeling. They looked at each other in an agony, and then with a sudden inspiration Mildred exclaimed,
“If we could only persuade Mr. Castellani to play to us! We are growing so terribly serious;” and then she went to Clement Cancellor, who was standing by the open window, and took her place beside him, while Mrs. Hillersdon talked with Pamela and Castellani at the piano. “You know what a privilege it is to me always to hear you talk,” she murmured in her sweet, subdued voice. “You know how I have followed your teaching in all things. And be assured my husband is no materialist. We both cling to the old faith, the old hopes, the old promises. You must not misjudge him because of a single difference of opinion.”
“Forgive me, my dear Mildred,” replied Cancellor, touched by her submission. “I did wrong to be angry. I know that to many good Christians this question of marriage with a sister-in-law is a stumbling-block. I have taken the subject too deeply to heart perhaps—I, to whom marriage altogether seems outside the Christian priest’s horizon. Perhaps I may exaggerate the peril of a wider liberty; but I, who look upon Henry VIII. as the arch-enemy of the one vital Church—of which he might have been the wise and enlightened reformer—I, who trace to his unhallowed union with his brother’s widow all the after evils of his career—must needs lift up my voice against a threatened danger.”
Castellani began Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” with a triumphant burst that sounded like mockery. Do what the preacher might to assimilate earth to heaven, here there would still be marrying and giving in marriage.