Again that deprecating look, as if battling with her conscience, which whispers to her that the cause of her trouble should not be avowed or even tacitly admitted. Complaint against her husband should not be made to Martin Vanderlyn, above all. There is already too dangerous a sympathy between them. A subtle intuition tells her that she is being led into temptation, and that she ought to end this now and for ever. Yet she does not do so. The serpent in the shadow has even now warmed and stirred. Curiosity, also, concerning Mr. Vanderlyn’s former history leads her to encourage him to proceed; so she says, “I am sorry to hear that your life has not been, a happy one. I had thought of your leaving us to go to brighter scenes and kinder friends.”
She has pondered over the absence of any communication with friends or relatives during his illness, and so this last remark is not quite truthful. She has often wondered if he has ever had wife or lady-love. He answers all this by his reply to her last words:
“I am glad that I cannot return to the unhappy time I speak of. That is closed for ever. It was when I had a wife, Mrs. Thorndyke; I have none now.”
“She is dead, then,” says Agnes, looking up, and speaking in a low voice which she instinctively feels should not seem sympathetic with a grief he evidently disavows, for it is rather a relief which he confesses.
“I know not,” he says, with a careless tone; “she may be, for aught I know or care. She is dead to me, and I know I feel quite dead to her. We are divorced, and I am a free man again. To that unhappy time of my life I cannot return. The chains are broken. It was a woeful time. I can imagine no surer blight on a human being’s happiness than an unsuitable marriage. I know how it poisons a life, because mine, for a time, was so poisoned. I think if there is any hell, my marriage was arranged there by the prince himself, who is particularly interested in the marriage question. I think divorces are made in heaven, not matches, for my relief on getting my divorce was heavenly. The sacrament of divorce for me! The feeling it gave me was that which old John Bunyan ascribes to Christian when the pack of sins fell off his back.”
He speaks with an audacity which frightens her Puritan prejudices, while it lures her feminine admiration for his courage in daring to speak out and assert himself. There is some romance here also, and a subtle flattery in being made his confidante. For to her more delicate sense, this, which he would brazenly declare to any one who might listen, seems a sacred confidence. Her face looks her sympathy. The answering chord is struck, and he sees it. The serpent has stirred to the evil breath.
“Do you not think, Mrs. Thorndyke, that we have the inborn right to seek our own happiness? Has not nature implanted that feeling within us? Are not our lives a continual protest against being made miserable or uncomfortable for the sake of sustaining a law of church or state? The law of love is above these, and it can glorify a life, or the absence of it can debase one.”
“And joy was duty, and love was law,” echoes in Mrs. Thorndyke’s memory; and here is the “manly form by her side.”
He continues without pause: “If it is our right to pursue happiness, it is equally our right to seek our love freely, casting off fetters which love disdains; they chafe his delicate wings—love cannot live bound.”
“But he must be, to some extent,” she almost gasps, frightened at this new and dangerous doctrine. “Society, respectability, require that there should be a marriage bond by which the law can hold either party to the contract. Else what would become of us? So many would escape who have no right to do so.”