Chapter II: ‘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!’