The Ashland union. [volume] (Ashland, Ashland County, Ohio) 1854-1868, 1859-03-09

oIo AoN oOES VIZ As (oS ~ Noo - tOASS
speaking within him that had never made
itself heard before; a voice with a persistent
warning in it, that said-Wait; and look at
your letters first!
He spread them out on the table with hands
that trembled he knew not why. Among
them was the back number of the Times, for
which he had written to London, with a letter
from the publisher, explaining the means by
which the copy had been procured.
He opened the newspaper, with a vague feel
ing of alarm, at finding that those letters to the
Editor, which he had been so eager to read, and
that perfecting of the multilated volume which
he had been so anxious to accomplish, had be-
come objects of secondary importance in his
mind. An inexplicable curiosity about the
general contents of the paper was now the one
moving influence which asserted itself within
him. He spread open the broad sheet on the
table.
The first page on which his eye fell, was the
page on the right-hand side. 1t contained
those very letters-three in number-which
he had once been so anxious to see. He tried
to read them; but no effort could fix his wander
ing attention. He looked aside to the opposite
page, on the left hand. 1t was the page that
contained the leading-articles.
They were three in number. The first was
on foreign politics; the second was a sarcastic
commentary on a recent division in the House
of Lords; the third was one of those articles
on social SUBJECTS WHICH nave greatly anu Hull
orably helped to raise the reputation OF the
Times above all contest and all rivalry.
The lines in this third article which first
caught his eye comprised the opening sentence
of the second paragraph, and contained these
words
at appears from the narrative, which will
be found in another part of our columns, that
this unfortunate woman married, in the spring
of this year, IS, one Mr.. Fergus Duncan, of
| Hla.lo, -, +Ia Hioh1ap5c of Scotland -
The letters swan and mingled together un-
der his eyes, before he could go on to the next
sentence. His wife exhibited as an object for
public compassion in the Times newspaper!
On the brink of the dreadful discovery that
was advancing on him, his mind reeled back;
and a dreadful ~faintness came over him. There
was water on a side-table-he drank a deep
draught of it-roused himself-seized on the
newspaper with both hands, as if it had beena
living thing that could feel the desperate reso-
luton of his grasp-and read the article
through, sentence by sentence, word by word.
The subject was the Law of Divorce; and
the example quoted was the example of his
wife.
AT that time, England stood disgracefully
alone as the one civilized country in the world
having a divorcelaw for the husband, which
was not also a divorcelaw for the wife. The
writer in the Times boldly and eloquently ex-
posed this discreditable anomaly in the admin
~istration of Justice limited delicately at the
unutterable wrongs suffered by Mrs Duncan,
and plainly showed that.she was indebted to the
accident of having been married in Scotland,
and to her consequent right of appeal to the
Scotch Tribunals, for a full and final release
from the tie that bound her to the vilest hus-
bands which the English law of that day would
have mercilessly refused.
He read that. Other men might have gone
on to the narrative extracted from the Scotch
newspaper. But at the last word of the article
HE stopped. The newspaper and the unread
details which it contained, all lost their hold on
his attention in an instant, and IN their stead,
living and burning on his mind, like the Let
tiers of Doom on the wall of Belshazzar, there
rose up in judgment against him the last
words of a verse in the Gospel of st. Luke,
"Whosoever marrieth her that is put away from
her husband committeth adultery" He had
preached from these words. He had warned
his hearers, with the whole strength of the ia
NAUTICAL sincerity that was in him, to beware of
prevaricating with the prohibition which that
verse contained, and to accept it as literally,
unreservedly, finally forbidding the marriage
of a divorced woman. He had insisted on that
plain Interpretation Of plain words in terms which
had made his congregation remble. And now
he stood alone in the secrecy of his chamber,
self-convicted of the deadly sin that he had de-
nounced-he stood, as he had told the wicked
| among MS hearers tQdU lHey WOuiu SUduU dG liz
Last Day, before the Judgment Seat.
He was unconscious of the lapse of time; he
never knew whether.it was many minutes or
few, before the door of his room was suddenly
and softly opened. 1t did open-and his wife
came in.
In her white dress, with awhile shawl thrown
over her shoulders, her dark hair, so neat and
glossy at other times, hanging tangled about
her colorless cheeks, andheightening the CLASSY
hrinbtnacc of terror in har avpS-SO ba NV
her, the woman put away from her husband,
the woman whose love had made him happy
and had stained his soul with a deadly sin.
She came on to within a few PAGES of him,
without a word, or a tear, or shadow of change
passing over the dreadful rigidity of her face.
She looked at him with a strange look she
pointed to the newspaper crumpled in his hand
with a strange gesture; she spoke to him in a
strange voice.
"You know it," she said.
His eyes met hers ; che shrank from them
turned, and laid her arms and her head heavily
against the wall.
80, Alfredo she said, ri was so lonely in
the world, and 1 was SO fond of you"
The woman's delicacy, the woman's tremb-
ling tenderness swelled up from her heart, and
touched her voice with a tone of its old sweet
ness, as she murmured these simple words
She said no more. Her confession of her fault,
her appeal to their past love for pardon, were
both poured forth in that one sentence. She
left it to his own heart to tell him the rest
How anxiously her vigilant love had followed
his every word, and treasured up his every
opinion, in the days when they first met. How
weakly and falsely, and yet with how true an
affection for him, she had shrank from the dis
closure whichs he knew but too weilwould have
separated them even at the church door; how
desperately she had fought against the coming
discovery which threatened to tear her from
the bosom she chung to, and to cast her out into
the world with the shadow of her own shame
to darken her lonely life to the end-all this
she left him to feel, for the moment which
might part them forever, was the moment when
she knew best how truly, how passionately he
had loved her.