guarded her from all rough but invigorating shocks, denied her reasonable work, fatigue, and disappointment; put very considerable force upon his natural disposition and education to procure for her flowers, cates, and even a subdued kind of finery, and to bear her company in entertainments at Master Chiswell’s, Mrs. Lucy’s, and other relatives and friends and neighbours, most of them totally distasteful to him, and all more or less burdensome, taken as a task, and fulfilled without a chance of exemption.
In all this Harris showed himself what he was, a noble and self-denying heart with a remarkable aptitude for getting rid of narrow prejudices and acerbities, when they came in collision with the charities and tendernesses of his daily life; but he did not display much worldly wisdom, or a Petruchio’s bold, shrewd blitheness in compassing and confounding female weaknesses.
Patience, like every child of Adam similarly situated, was ungrateful for his folly, refused to be governed by this half and half system, could not be gay, because Harris ordained it, secretly resisted the artificial atmosphere provided for her, and hankered in her inmost soul after that of which he had first given her a taste, self-abnegation, endurance, effort; she grew pensive, formal, restless, without being permitted to betray her state of mind; took refuge in the solemn mysteries which float about all recently awakened souls, and can be grasped at any moment; and, oh! grievous mystery in itself, loving her husband and loved by him, was breaking from all near communion or true partnership with him.
Now, this would not have happened had Patience been older, wiser, and more apparently on her husband’s level; but while there was substantial equality between them, it was far down below the husband’s studious thoughtfulness, and the wife’s book ignorance and girlish buoyance; and once she was seized with an admiration of his excellence, she conceived an awe of him w hich his elaborate forbearance and somewhat painful fondness was building up, mountains high, to a degree that would crush him one day with its unfamiliarity and its slavishness. There can be no perfection of regard, or liberty of affection without mutual sincerity and confidence, and mutual blame as well as mutual praise, and mutual vexation as well as triumph — no, not while we are here below.
Thus the first year of the Harrises’ married life was not the blended jubilee and fast which it might have been. It was at first monotonous sunshine, and then, inconsistent as it sounds, a tinge of frost crept into that persistent tranquillity, and Benjamin Harris had occasional cruel visions that for all his efforts and all his pains, he was not enough for his chief earthly treasure; and she was no longer the same unquestioning, unexacting, sympathetic mistress he had courted and wedded. Foolish man! that could not be. Why not have the substitute? But he would not, not he! permit her to help him in the business, in the catalogues, the manuscripts, the ledger, like John Dunton’s useful, estimable Elizabeth, notwithstanding Patience was as neat-handed, as intelligent, as industrious, and quite as solicitous for her husband’s interest, and she, too, would have been a priceless assistant. Patience’s eyes filled with tears of envy — poor, energetic, earnest woman — when she saw what others were permitted to accomplish, what she might never attempt, where she would never signalise herself, so as to be more worthy of him. She would have so liked to help him in the duties he had taught her, to go halves in the dangers, for it was no trifle to propagate their faith under these tines and imprisonments, Rumsey and West witnesses, and Jeffrey judgments. But he would not even tell her when he was implicated with the commissioners, and forbade her to read the scurrilous personal abuse of the “Observator,” which sometimes fired even him, though he had jestingly dubbed his ordinary indifference the true Patience in contradistinction to her im- Patience of slander and wrong to the cause. Why, he -would not even venture her with household work, and cramped himself, poor as he was, and always poorer, that he might not stint her in domestic service, or deny her any former custom.
First drawn out, and then set aside, Patience in despair, took to reading rabidly violent reformers, latter-day prophets, and high-flown Mrs. Rowes (there were extraordinary mental appetites and diseases developed by these occasions), hurried on to become wilful, opinionative and hovering on dangerous delusions; and, from long absence of opposition, resented doggedly when Benjamin Harris would have at last firmly, with alarm and reprehension, forced her back from these dark, rugged paths. This dreaming woman commencing to frown in bitterness, was scarcely the little lass, humble in her flippancy, of the Mercers’ Gardens, Benjamin Harris’s old delight.
The summer sun was again shining on this heady, fermenting, unstable London, where men had once protested against a Star Chamber, and were now submitting to be ruled without the shadow of a parliament by a feather-headed, not brainless, but heartless king. Russell and Sydney had not yet died for love of the law and league with traitors; it was still many months before that fit which glazed the merry, roving eye for ever, ere James’s sullen stupidity and conscientious -wrong-doing could effect the vital change which only dire obstinacy and strong belief in a delusion can perfect and perpetrate. But hardship to spare was riding rough -handed in the kingdom; wild, old soldiers of Cromwell’s, weary of inactivity, weak, failing tradesmen, basest rogues, had but to swear roundly to convict honest men of licence and libel, if not of treason. Sentences quoted by hearsay from a sermon, were enough to condemn a preacher. A simple report that a Scottish gentleman had stirred on the wrong side in the affair of Bothwell Brig, was an apology for the Boot; and truly the Duke of York in the Edinburgh Parliament House “was born under no pardoning planet,” and Judge Jeffreys on a London bench did not fail him. Good reason that Essex, once "cast” and laid in the Tower, gave way to one of his deep fits of the spleen; that good Leighton died mourning the depravity alike of his king, his country, and his church; that a plantation in Carolina was eagerly talked of by both English and Scottish
Nonconformists.