‘FAREWELL, CONTENT.’
Joshua read the letter slowly, every word going to his heart like
the thrust of a knife. He had been told that a man had addressed
a confession of guilty love to his wife, and the knowledge that
this thing had been had preyed upon him like a corroding poison.
But even in all he had suffered since Judith’s revelation he had
never realised the greatness of the wrong as he did now, with the
betrayer’s letter in his hand, the audacious confession deliberately
set down in black and white.
‘He dared to write this!’ he muttered. ‘He dared--to my wife! O God!
how low she must have fallen in his esteem before he wrote this
letter!’
Here was the cruellest sting. Could Oswald have penned this
passionate appeal had he not been sure of a hearing? Did not this
letter imply that he knew himself beloved? Ay, there were the
abhorrent words burning the paper: ‘That mutual love, which is our
mutual sorrow!’ This villain made very sure that he was loved. Must
he not have been so assured before he dared to ask an honest woman to
grant him a secret meeting?
Joshua Haggard sat with the letter in his hand, and a look in those
dark eyes of his--a lurid fire under black lowering brows--which
would have struck terror to the hearts of his admiring flock could
they have seen their shepherd in his lonely agony. What was he to
do--how find revenge great enough for this gigantic wrong? Revenge
was not the thought in his mind; retribution, justice rather, was
what he demanded. He felt himself like Orestes, privileged, nay
appointed, to slay. The furies might come afterwards, but in this
present hour it seemed to him that he might claim this man’s blood.
That gentlemanlike institution, the duel, was in full force in
Joshua’s day. It was but a year or so since a couple of English dukes
had tried to murder each other in a pit in Hyde Park. Had he been a
man of the world, nothing would have been clearer or more easy than
his course. But for the shepherd of souls, the preacher of peace,
to take up the sword! Would it not be the renunciation of those
principles for which he had lived? How often from his pulpit had he
anathematised the slayer of his brother, hurled his thunders against
that corrupt society in which murder could be deemed honourable!
He sat with the letter in his hand, and all was dark before him.
Could he ever trust his wife again?--believe in her purity, cherish
with a fond and almost fatherly pride that sweet and girlish
innocence, that utter ignorance of evil, the freshness and beauty of
life’s morning, which had first won his love? Never more--never more!
His Eve had gathered the fatal fruit; the serpent had lifted his
venomous crest from among the flowers; the glory of life’s paradise
had faded. Never more could he love, or worship, or trust. Henceforth
he must hold her loathly. If this letter had reached her, how would
she have received it? Would she have listened to the tempter’s
pleading? Would she have stolen in secret to meet him, to hear his
poisonous vows, to pity his weak unmanly lamentings?
‘I should like to know that,’ he said to himself; ‘I should like to
know how she would have answered this letter.’
And then it occurred to him that he might easily put her to the test.
The seal had been broken, but the paper round it was untorn. It would
be easy to reseal the letter, making the second seal just a little
larger than the first; and Cynthia would not examine the outside of
the letter too closely.
He lighted a candle and resealed the violated letter; then paused
for a moment or so, wondering how he should get it conveyed to
his wife. ‘She shall find it somewhere,’ he thought. ‘Her guilty
conscience will tell her it is from her lover. He may have written
to her before, perhaps. God only knows the greatness of her sin--God
who made us, and knows the blackness of our unregenerate hearts. And
I thought that there could be one exempt--one free from humanity’s
universal taint. Fool, fool, fool!’
He went slowly up-stairs to the bedchamber, the airy orderly room,
with its substantial old-fashioned furniture and look of homely
comfort--the room that had once been his father’s. There hung the
old grocer’s turnip-shaped silver watch on the mahogany stand upon
the mantelpiece, ticking with as lusty a beat as when its sturdy
proprietor carried it in his ample drab-cloth fob. There were the
samplers which testified to the industry and skill of Joshua’s mother
and Joshua’s wife--the pyramidal apple-trees innocent of leaves, the
angular figures of Adam and Eve in the garden, with a curly serpent
standing on tip-tail between them. The evening sun shone into the
room, and glorified the gaudy sunflowers on the chintz bed-furniture,
and glittered on the brazen handles of Joshua’s escritoire. A bowl of
freshly-gathered roses and carnations on the table perfumed all the
room. Joshua knew whose busy hand had plucked the flowers, and the
sight of them smote him with an aching pain. O, wounded heart, for
which every new thought was a new torture!
The escritoire stood open, and there was the _Sorrows of Werther_,
lying where he had placed it after his long night of waking. There
had been no need for Cynthia to hide the book any more. It had told
its story.
Joshua’s sombre glance lighted on the volume. ‘Accursed book that
taught them to sin!’ he exclaimed; ‘they might never have fathomed
the wickedness of their own hearts but for thee.’
This was hard upon the innocent and noble Charlotte, the misguided
but generous Werther.
A thought full of bitterness and anger came into Joshua’s mind as he
looked at _Werther_. He would put Oswald’s letter between the leaves
of that detested book. She would find it there, he felt assured; the
book was her own love-story, it talked to her of her lover. He could
fancy her hanging over the pages, sucking poisonous sweetness from
every line. Werther and Oswald were, in Joshua’s mind, one.
He put the letter in the book, and was going slowly down-stairs, when
he stopped, with his hand upon the banisters, and pondered for a
minute or so.
The thought came over him that he could not pray with his household,
or teach or exhort them to-night. It was as if an evil spirit were at
his shoulder forbidding him that holy and familiar exercise. He felt
that it would have been a kind of profanation to lay his hand upon
the Bible, that anchor of his life, which had never before seemed
insufficient mooring for his wind-driven bark.
‘Not to-night,’ he muttered to himself--‘not to-night.’
He called over the stairs to his daughter, who had just come in from
the garden.
‘Tell your aunt to read a chapter and a psalm, Naomi,’ he said; ‘I am
too ill to come down-stairs again to-night.’
Naomi hurried to him, full of apprehension.
‘Dearest father, what is the matter? Can I do anything? can I get you
anything?’
Conscience smote her. Why had she afflicted him by the sight of that
wicked letter? It would have been better to have taken it to Cynthia,
and spoken words of Christian reproof and warning. Why had she made
him, her dearest upon earth, to suffer?
‘No, my dear, you can do nothing. It is the mind that is ill at ease,
not the body. My soul is too dark to hold communion with her God. The
blow has been heavy.’
‘Dear father, it was so wicked of me to show you the letter--an evil
revengeful act. And, after all, the sin may not be so deep as it
seems to us. They are but children--weak, foolish, easily led astray.
Let us pity and forgive them.’
‘I may come--some day, when I am old and doting--to pity her. I can
never forgive him.’
He put his daughter aside, went into his bedroom, and shut the door.
Naomi dared not follow him. She went slowly down-stairs, greatly
troubled.
It is one thing to launch the thunderbolt, and another to survey the
ruin the bolt has made.
* * * * *
Joshua Haggard turned his face to the wall, and gave himself up to
darkest thoughts. He rose soon after daybreak, and his first look was
directed to _Werther_. The letter was gone. Yes; there was nothing
now between the pages but a few faded rose-leaves and withered fern
tendrils, which marked a favourite passage here and there.
He looked from the book to his wife, lying with her face turned from
the light, and one round white arm, dimpled like a young child’s,
thrown above her head. Was she sleeping placidly with that guilty
secret in her breast, or only pretending to sleep? He could not tell.
‘She is all dissimulation,’ he thought, ‘fairest seeming, sweetest
show--bitter as ashes within!’