“Would’st have a friend, would’st know what friend is best?
Have God thy friend, who passeth all the rest.”
CHAP. VII.
Love is a kind of superstition,
Which fears the idol which itself hath framed.
Sir Thomas Overbury.
Cuthbert was awakened at midnight by pain:—the glimmer of the night lamp in the little room adjoining cast a dim light into the chamber where he lay; and the breathing of the aged female servant, who sat there in watch, told him that she had been overcome by sleep. He cared not to disturb her, and made an effort to reach the cup of water on the little table by his side, but he found that he was no longer equal to the slightest exertion—he could not even change his posture. He endured his thirst, and tried to collect his thoughts, and gather up all that had passed in the hall, but he could not: he was dizzy with the sense of having been pushed to the very brink of eternity, and snatched back again. A gleam shone upon the portrait of Luther which hung opposite. “Though he slay me yet will I trust him,” was now his own whispered act of confidence in God, and he lay passive, silent, and hopeful. Not only was he heavily oppressed with bodily anguish, but his mind, after undue excitement, and proportionate depression and exhaustion, had sunk into a state of torpor. At the moment when Sir Charles Lambert made the insidious speech to Sir Oliver, which Cuthbert truly discerned to be aimed at his suspected principles, and still more basely at a supposed line of conduct which he had far too high a sense of integrity to pursue.
At that moment it seemed to him as if it was but fair and honourable to make open avowal of his true sentiments; but in the same quick glance of the mind he saw the first bitter and inevitable consequence. He must quit Milverton immediately, and for ever. Sir Oliver could no longer have retained in his family a man openly admiring the cause and the course of that party in the kingdom which opposed the crown.
The collision in his mind of this fear of separation from so much that he loved, and of the honest impulse to do what was right, begat a momentary desperation; and thus it was, that he rose upon that occasion with so unbecoming a want of calmness, and that he was about to preface his statement by exhibiting his unmeasured scorn for the base assailant of his character, but the too sure destroyer of his present happiness.