BENJAMIN HARRIS AND HIS WIFE PATIENCE. By H. K.
CHAPTER II. CHEPE.
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To have experience in human nature, it will not be a marvel to learn that within a twelve-month from the evening recorded in the last chapter, Benjamin Harris, the young protesting printer, wedded the spinster.
Patience Chiswell, and that, notwithstanding she had no present portion beyond her wedding-clothes, one of Master Guy’s bibles, a copy of pious songs from Mistress Lucy, a caudle-cup from her godmother, and a fine cornice of oak-leaves, grapes, fauns, and satyrs from Master Chiswell’s own skilled, painstaking hand, “almost too fine a piece of furniture for this wilderness world,” Harris declared; but he smiled, and was ready to admire also when he saw his Patience’s young matron face lookiug up with wonder and delight at the luscious clusters and the goat-eared heads.
To those who have been happy in reading the pages of pure and high hearts, neither will it seem strange to be told that, as Harris expressed it, Patience having been accommodating enough to take a lively fancy and a trustful liking to his grim visage, this Patience, woman-like, rapidly imbibed the young printer’s lofty sentiments, became the most devoted of his disciples, and echoed his psalm of life, only diversified by her delicate womanly chords and subtle variations. Patience’s candid affectionate heart, unsophisticated in its errors and vanities, was the good ground, and in it, as privileged to represent his master, Benjamin Harris dropped the good seed which was to bring forth an hundredfold. Master Chiswell took no part with the aggrieved Non-conformists, he was a Court servant, and a State and Church man, employed under noble patronage along with Stone, and Le Soeur, and Fenellia, and was so just, so timid and time-serving, as to be delivered up against his better nature to any of Sir Roger’s bluster. But Master Chiswell “was not to say rich,” and he had many daughters at his elbow, and really the national councils were still so precarious as to render a stout, faithful husband of any colour which might turn up not a castaway.
Nor was it a contradiction in this case that Harris, rigid in duty, stern towards himself, proved notably indulgent to Patience, to the verge of uxoriousness, even perversely protecting and petting her, almost vexing her by obstinately refusing to allow her to share his troubles, and insisting upon taking upon himself all the toil, all the risk, all the weariness. You see Harris was deeply conscious that his lot was likely to be clouded; he was aware, to a certain extent, of the tinge of gloom in his own temper, and the harshness which injuries had sealed, and double sealed, on his sect. He did not try to check these tendencies as far as he himself was concerned, but he was, with some excuse, perhaps, morbidly anxious to spare Patience — once he understood and valued her, and could not resist making her his own. The young, healthy, spirited, genial tempered, unbroken wife, was a bright being indeed to the struggling, saddened husband—the new sunshine of his existence, whose warmth, radiance, and gladness should be preserved at all hazards, except that of sin. There was cowardice bound up with Harris’s love and temporising with his proselytism.
So Harris fell into an error; was nervously, sedulously attentive to his wife’s comfort and pleasure, treated her to no “wholesome neglect,”