“Damme!” cries out my lord; “would you have had me wait and catch the small-pox?  Where the deuce had been the good of that?  I’ll bear danger with any man—­but not useless danger—­no, no.  Thank you for nothing.  And—­you nod your head, and I know very well, Parson Harry, what you mean.  There was the—­the other affair to make her angry.  But is a woman never to forgive a husband who goes a-tripping?  Do you take me for a saint?”

“Indeed, sir, I do not,” says Harry, with a smile.

“Since that time my wife’s as cold as the statue at Charing Cross.  I tell thee she has no forgiveness in her, Henry.  Her coldness blights my whole life, and sends me to the punch-bowl, or driving about the country.  My children are not mine, but hers, when we are together.  ’Tis only when she is out of sight with her abominable cold glances, that run through me, that they’ll come to me, and that I dare to give them so much as a kiss; and that’s why I take ’em and love ’em in other people’s houses, Harry.  I’m killed by the very virtue of that proud woman.  Virtue! give me the virtue that can forgive; give me the virtue that thinks not of preserving itself, but of making other folks happy.  Damme, what matters a scar or two if ’tis got in helping a friend in ill fortune?”

And my lord again slapped the table, and took a great draught from the tankard.  Harry Esmond admired as he listened to him, and thought how the poor preacher of this self-sacrifice had fled from the small-pox, which the lady had borne so cheerfully, and which had been the cause of so much disunion in the lives of all in this house.  “How well men preach,” thought the young man, “and each is the example in his own sermon.  How each has a story in a dispute, and a true one, too, and both are right or wrong as you will!” Harry’s heart was pained within him, to watch the struggles and pangs that tore the breast of this kind, manly friend and protector.

“Indeed, sir,” said he, “I wish to God that my mistress could hear you speak as I have heard you; she would know much that would make her life the happier, could she hear it.”  But my lord flung away with one of his oaths, and a jeer; he said that Parson Harry was a good fellow; but that as for women, all women were alike—­all jades and heartless.  So a man dashes a fine vase down, and despises it for being broken.  It may be worthless—­true:  but who had the keeping of it, and who shattered it?

Harry, who would have given his life to make his benefactress and her husband happy, bethought him, now that he saw what my lord’s state of mind was, and that he really had a great deal of that love left in his heart, and ready for his wife’s acceptance if she would take it, whether he could not be a means of reconciliation between these two persons, whom he revered the most in the world.  And he cast about how he should break a part of his mind to his mistress, and warn her that in his, Harry’s opinion, at least, her husband was still her admirer, and even her lover.