London Pride, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [book recommendations website txt] 📗

in our resumed bondage. Figure to yourself a thoroughbred horse that had kicked off the traces, and stood free upon the open plain with arched neck and lifted nostrils, sniffing the morning air! and behold he creeps back to his harness, and makes himself again a slave! We had done with the Stuarts, at the cost of a tragedy, and in ten years we call them back again, and put on the old shackles; and for common sense, religion, and freedom, we have the orgies of Whitehall, and the extravagance of Lady Castlemaine. It will not last, Angela; it cannot last. I was with his lordship in Artillery Row last night, and we talked with the blind sage who would sacrifice the remnant of his darkened days in the cause of liberty."

"Sir Denzil, I hope you are not plotting mischief--you and my brother," Angela said anxiously. "You are so often together; and his lordship has such a preoccupied air."

"No, no, there is no conspiring; but there is plenty of discontent. It would need but little to fire the train. Can any man in his senses be happy when he sees his country, which ten years ago was at the pinnacle of power and renown, sinking to the appanage of a foreign sovereign; England threatened with a return to Rome; honest men forbidden to preach the gospel; and innocent seekers after truth hounded off to gaol, to rot among malefactors, because they have dared to worship God after their own fashion?"

"Where was your liberty of conscience under the Protectorate, when the Liturgy was forbidden as if it were an unholy thing, when the Anglican priests were turned out of their pulpits, and the Anglican service tolerated in only one church in all this vast London?" Angela asked indignantly.

"That was a revolt of deep thinkers against a service which has all the mechanical artifice of Romanism without its strong appeal to the heart and the senses--dry, empty, rigid--a repetition of vain phrases. If I am ever to bow my neck beneath the Church's yoke, let me swallow the warm-blooded errors of Papacy rather than the heartless formalism of English Episcopacy."

"But what can you or Fareham--or a few good men like you--do to change established things? Remember Venner's plot, and how many lives were wasted on that foolish, futile attempt. You can only hazard your lives, die on the scaffold. Or would you like to see civil war again; the nation divided into opposite camps; Englishmen fighting with Englishmen? Can you forget that dreadful last year of the Rebellion? I was only a little child; but it is branded deep on my memory. Can you forget the murder of the King? He was murdered; let Mr. Milton defend the deed as he can with his riches of big words. I have wept over the royal martyr's own account of his sufferings."

"Over Dr. Gauden's account, that is to say. 'Eikon Basilike' was no more written by Charles than by Cromwell. It was a doctored composition--a churchman's spurious history, trumped up by Charles's friends and partisans, possibly with the approval of the King himself. It is a fine piece of special pleading in a bad cause."

"You make me hate you when you talk so slightingly of that so ill-used King. You will make me hate you more if you lead Fareham into danger by underhand work against the present King."

"Lies Fareham's safety so very near your heart?"

"It lies in my heart," she answered, looking at him, and defying him with straight, clear gaze. "Is he not my sister's husband, and to me as a brother? Do you expect me to be careless about his fate? I know you are leading him into danger. Some mischief must come of these visits to Mr. Milton, a Republican outlaw, who has escaped the penalty of his treasonous pamphlets only because he is blind and old and poor. I doubt there is danger in all such conferences. Fareham is at heart a Republican. It would need little persuasion to make him a traitor to the King."

"You have it in your power to make me so much your slave, that I would sacrifice every patriotic aspiration at your bidding, Angela," Denzil answered gravely.

"I know not if this be the time to speak, or if, after waiting more than a year, I may not even now be premature. Dearest girl, you know that I love you--that I haunt this house only because you live here; that I am in London only because my star shines there; that above all public interests you rule my life. I have exercised a prodigious patience, only because I have a prodigious resolution. Is it not time for me to reap my reward?"

"Oh, Denzil, you fill me with sorrow! Have I not said everything to discourage you?"

"And have I not refused to be discouraged? Angela, I am resolved to discover the reason of your coldness. Was there ever a young and lovely woman who shut love out of her heart? History has no record of such an one. I am of an appropriate age, of good birth and good means, not under-educated, not brutish, or of repulsive face and figure. If your heart is free I ought to be able to win it. If you will not favour my suit, it must be because there is some one else, some one who came before me, or who has crossed my path, and to whom your heart has been secretly given."

She had turned from red to pale as he spoke. She stood before him in the winter light, with her colour changing, her hands tightly clasped, her eyes cast down, and tears trembling on the long dark lashes.

"You have no right to question me. It is enough for you to have my honest answer. I esteem you, but I do not love you; and it distresses me when you talk of love."

"There is some one else, then! I knew it. There is some one else. For me you are marble. You are fire for him. He is in your heart. You have said it"

"How dare you----" she began.

"Why should I shrink from warning you of your danger? It is Fareham you love. I have seen you tremble at his touch--start at the sound of his footstep--that step you know so well. His footstep? Why, the very air he breathes carries to you the consciousness of his approach. Oh, I have watched you both, Angela; and I know, I know. Jealous pangs have racked me, day after day; yet I have hung on. I have been very patient. 'She knows not the sinful impulses of her own heart,' I said, 'knows not in her purity how near she goes to a fall. Here, in her sister's house, passionately loved by her sister's husband! She calls him 'brother,' whose eyes cannot look at her without telling their story of wicked love. She walks on the edge of a precipice--self-deceived. Were I to abandon her she might fall. My affection is her only safeguard; and by winning her to myself I shall snatch her from the pit of hell.'"

It was the truth he was telling her. Yes; even when Fareham was harshest, she had been dimly conscious that love was at the root of his unkindness. The coldness that had held them apart since that midnight meeting had been ice over fire. It was jealousy that had made him so angry. No word of love, directly spoken, had ever offended her ear; but there had been many a speech of double meaning that had set her wondering and thinking.

And, oh! the guilt of it, when an honourable man like Denzil set her sin before her, in plain language. She stood aghast at her own wickedness. That which had been a sin of thought only, a secret sorrow, wrestled with in many an hour of heartfelt prayer, with all the labour of a soul that sought heavenly aid against earthly temptation, was conjured into hideous reality by Denzil's plain speech. To love her sister's husband, to suffer his guilty love, to know gladness only in his company, to be exquisitely happy were he but in the same room with her--to sink to profoundest melancholy when he was absent. Oh, the sin of it! In what degree did her guilt differ from that of the women of the Court, who had each her open secret in some base intrigue that all the world knew and laughed at? She had been kept aloof from that libertine crew; but was she any better than they? Was Fareham, who openly scorned the royal debauchee, was he any better than the King?

She remembered how he had talked of Lord Sandwich, making excuses for a perverted love. She had heard him speak of other offenders in the same strain. He had been ever ready to recognise fatality where a good Catholic would have perceived only sin.

"Angela, believe me, you are drifting helmless in perilous waters," Denzil urged, while she stood beside him in mute distress. "Let me be your strong rock. Only give me the promise of your hand. I can be patient still. I will give time for love to grow. Grant me but the right to guard you from the danger of an unholy passion that is always near you in this house."

"You pretend to be his lordship's friend, and you speak slander of him."

"I am his friend. I could find it in my heart to pity him for loving you. Indeed, it has been in friendship that I have tried to interest him in a great national question--to wean him from his darling sin. But were you my wife he should never cross our threshold. The day that made us one should make you and Fareham strangers. It is for you to choose, Angela, between two men who love you--one near your own age, free, God-fearing; the other nearly old enough to be your father, bound by the tie which your Church deems indissoluble, whose love is insult and pollution, and can but end in shame and despair. It is for you to choose between honest and dishonest love."

"There is a nobler choice open to me," she said, more calmly than she had yet spoken, and with a pale dignity in her countenance that awed him. A thrill of admiration and fear ran along his nerves as he looked at her. She seemed transfigured. "There is a higher and better love," she said. "This is not the first time that I have considered a sure way out of all my difficulties. I can go back to the convent where, in my dear Aunt Anastasia, I saw so splendid an example of a holy life hidden from the world."

"Life buried in a living grave!" cried Denzil, horror-stricken at the idea of such a sacrifice. "Free-will and reason obscured in a cloud of incense! All the great uses of a noble life brought down to petty observances and childish mummeries, prayers and genuflections before waxen relics and dressed-up madonnas. Oh, my dearest girl, next worst only to the dominion of sin is the slavery of a false religion. I would have thee free as air--free and enlightened--released from the trammels of Rome, happy in thyself and useful to thy fellow-creatures."

"You see, Sir Denzil, even if we loved each other, we could never think alike," Angela said, with a gentle sadness. "Our minds would always dwell far apart. Things that are dear and sacred to me are hateful to you."

"If you love me I could win you to my way of thinking," he said.

"You mean that if I loved