Part 14 (1/2)

'You are cold, Miss Lavington?'

'Oh, not in the least.' Cold! when every vein was boiling so strangely! A soft luscious melancholy crept over her. She had always had a terror of darkness; but now she felt quite safe in his strength. The thought of her own unprotected girlhood drew her heart closer to him. She remembered with pleasure the stories of his personal prowess, which had once made her think him coa.r.s.e and brutal. For the first time in her life she knew the delight of dependence--the holy charm of weakness. And as they paced on silently together, through the black awful night, while the servants lingered, far out of sight, about the horses, she found out how utterly she trusted to him.

'Listen!' she said. A nightingale was close to them, pouring out his whole soul in song.

'Is it not very late in the year for a nightingale?'

'He is waiting for his mate. She is rearing a late brood, I suppose.'

'What do you think it is which can stir him up to such an ecstasy of joy, and transfigure his whole heart into melody?'

'What but love, the fulness of all joy, the evoker of all song?'

'All song?--The angels sing in heaven.'

'So they say: but the angels must love if they sing.'

'They love G.o.d!'

'And no one else?'

'Oh yes: but that is universal, spiritual love; not earthly love--a narrow pa.s.sion for an individual.'

'How do we know that they do not learn to love all by first loving one?'

'Oh, the angelic life is single!'

'Who told you so, Miss Lavington?'

She quoted the stock text, of course:--'”In heaven they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels.”'

'”As the tree falls, so it lies.” And G.o.d forbid that those who have been true lovers on earth should contract new marriages in the next world. Love is eternal. Death may part lovers, but not love.

And how do we know that these angels, as they call them, if they be really persons, may not be united in pairs by some marriage bond, infinitely more perfect than any we can dream of on earth?'

'That is a very wild view, Mr. Smith, and not sanctioned by the Church,' said Argemone, severely. (Curious and significant it is, how severe ladies are apt to be whenever they talk of the Church.)

'In plain historic fact, the early fathers and the middle-age monks did not sanction it: and are not they the very last persons to whom one would go to be taught about marriage? Strange! that people should take their notions of love from the very men who prided themselves on being bound, by their own vows, to know nothing about it!'

'They were very holy men.'

'But still men, as I take it. And do you not see that Love is, like all spiritual things, only to be understood by experience--by loving?'

'But is love spiritual?'

'Pardon me, but what a question for one who believes that ”G.o.d is love!”'

'But the divines tell us that the love of human beings is earthly.'

'How did they know? They had never tried. Oh, Miss Lavington!

cannot you see that in those barbarous and profligate ages of the later empire, it was impossible for men to discern the spiritual beauty of marriage, degraded as it had been by heathen brutality?