I read no diurnals or pamphlets of news and paid little heed to the talk about me, so that what might be happening in Ireland to Sir Mun, whom I supposed to be serving still with the Marquis of Ormonde, I could not venture to guess. It had happened to me that, from the night when I first lay with my husband, I found the bond of sympathy between myself and Sir Mun slackened or cut through; I no longer either dreamed of him or was aware of the accidents of his life, and if ever any unaccountable pain or sorrow or happiness stole upon me I could no longer confidently say as before: “This happens also to my Mun.”
I was become a City wife, a mere droiling drudge, accustomed at last to the noise and stench and smoke of London, sometimes gossiping idly with neighbours, never riding out or taking other exercise, my body growing fat, my cheeks yellowish, my eyes dull. As for my hair, I confined it under a hat or cap, as did the other City wives, because thick hair worn loose in London grows very foul, especially in the time of choking fogs. Gaudy apparel I no longer wore, at my husband’s desire, but gowns of plain cut and sombre colour: for he told me that it was against nature for the female to go more bravely clad than the male. “Witness,” said he, “the peacock’s tail, the lion’s mane, the robin’s breast—”
“Ay, husband,” said I, for I had learned the art of indecently racquetting back his words, “and the stag’s antlers!”
In the City in those days it was generally accounted a sign of reprobation, either in man or woman, to be seen with bright eyes and rosy cheeks, and a heinous fault in a minister or a matron—damnable in a widow. The proof of grace and respectable godliness lay in a haggard countenance and pallid lips. Many a man of a naturally sanguine complexion has been clapped in the stocks only for looking fresh on a frosty morning. Well, I was in the fashion now. Says I to myself: “Marie”—for I was still Marie to myself—“you are come half-way already to the dark grave. It is time you turned devout and interlarded all your speech with ‘if God will’ and ‘the Lord be thanked’ and ‘if the Lamb show me mercy.’” Yet I seldom went to Church, the services being so strange and my husband neither commanding me to attend, nor himself hardly ever attending. The only words he spoke to me on the matter were to forbid me to receive the Sacrament of our Lord’s Body at the hand of a Presbyterial minister: for the Triers, those grave elders appointed to examine persons for their fitness to receive, asked questions that were immodest and impertinent enough to make any honest woman blush. He doubted not but they would seek occasion against him, by pumping me for what I knew of his habits and opinions.
My little Nan was a dull child, and though I desired to love her, I could not, which made me wonder; for Nature, I had heard, teaches every mother to love her child. I was patient with her, but she was long learning to walk because of the deformity of her left leg. My husband was very surly with the child, because she often cried in the night, my milk not agreeing with her; and when she learned to prattle, she stammered. What was worse, though Trunco would have fitted her with a clog to raise her lame foot from the ground equally with the other, my husband forbade it, prophesying that Nature would in the lapse of years compensate for her error by stretching out the short leg. However, in this he was mistaken, for when Nan learned to hobble her body grew more and more awry, and one shoulder was driven up higher than the other.
My husband was never wanton with me either in word or act, nor ever lay with me but with the express intention of procreation, and that very seldom. I thought it a mighty silly distinction that he made between lawful procreation and natural concupiscence; which in effect axe as alike as one caraway-cake is to another. Always a few days beforehand he cast an astrological figure to assure a fortunate result, and then solicitously prepared my mind with music and poetry. He prided himself upon the exactness of these figures, the art whereof he had learned from Mr. Joseph Meade (author of Clavis Apocalyptica), a senior tutor of his College at Cambridge, and he laughed at such dabblers in astrology as William Lilly, William Hodges or John Booker. Yet he acknowledged Hodges to be good at crystal-gazing and Booker at curing sicknesses by constellated rings and amulets. Lilly he praised because, though a man of mean education, he had written Christian Astrology, a book confounding the Presbyterians who held astrology to be of the Devil and no true science; and because he was a useful instrument to General Fairfax, who employed him to keep up the spirits of the soldiers by seasonable prophecies.
For myself, I never had any patience with the stars, which evidently are sly, cozening creatures, saying one thing when they mean another. When I spoke my mind upon them to my husband, he was exceeding angry with me; he thrust my Bible into my hand and commanded me to read out aloud the scripture about the star that guided the wise men to Bethlehem. And he said: “O woman of intemperate and unbridled tongue, do you not see now that a loose word spoken against the holy study of Astrology is as a stone contumaciously flung in the face of God Himself, that will rebound back into the caster’s face?”
I answered: “I am truly sorry, Husband, if I have spoken amiss; but I cannot find in this scripture that the Wise Men cast any astrological figures. For they seem merely to have followed their hooked noses, and a moving star; as any unlettered person might have done.”
That my husband companied with me seldom, not above twice or thrice a year, I held no hardship, for I was not of a hot and passionate nature; I wanted no more children of him, who had made my former pregnancy so needlessly hard for me. I suckled my child so long as ever I could, for this is held good against conception; and also medicined myself on occasion with the smut of rye, which is used by the women of the Town.
My neighbours, I could see, pitied me, yet some avoided my company because I was never seen in Church, and because it was known that Nan had not been baptised, nor I churched. And often I would overhear how they spoke behind my back, to such as knew me not, with words like these: “Hist, Gossip, see, see! Mark you that little mincing gentlewoman with the proud head who carries the crooked child—that is Mrs. Milton!” Or: “That is John Milton’s Manacle—have you not heard of Mr. Milton the Divorcer? For all she looks so sickly I dare say that she has not the physiognomy of Grace. She will burn, Goodwife, doubtless she will burn. Yea, it is lamentable sure she will burn.”
My husband seldom took any physic, but like all scholars and schoolmasters and clerks, who from long sitting are customarily bound in the bowels, he used Calabrian manna, which is good for purgations. He suffered also from flatulency, because he was always in haste. He himself confessed that such was the impetuousity of his temper that no delay, nor quiet, nor care, nor thought of almost any thing else, could stop him till he came to his journey’s end in any undertaking or study. Thus, though he was in general punctual to the table, he oftentimes came to it like one in a trance, especially if he were engaged in some sharp polemical writing, visibly raging in his mind and jotting down notes in a little book pulled from his pocket. At such times he ate abstractedly and violently; yet every fool knows that a meal that is not eaten graciously and at leisure will always breed wind. He drank little beer or mead or wine, for he said liquor made him drowsy. Yet neither did he drink water, considering that it hurt the digestion to wash down victuals with water, yet neglecting to drink any between-whiles.
I warned him once that, if he did not swill out his guts more generously, they would grow foul, and breed the gout. He laughed at me and asked, for what did I take him? Was it for a cheese-vat or a cider-cask?
“No,” said I, “and I will not be so saucy as to amend the proverb, which says that ‘one may lead a horse to water but cannot make him drink.’” And I asked him: “How is it that you complain of the headache, yet crouch all day in your library with the windows fast shut and so foul an inspissation of the air, from the fumes of your pipe, that I cannot see across from wall to wall?”
He answered: “The windows are shut against the noise of children playing in the fields, and I drink tobacco to fortify me against domestic misery.”
“Oh, that I
were wife to King Nebuchadnezzar!” cried I.
“Why so, Addlepate?” he asked.
“Because,” said I, “Nebuchadnezzar was no more mad a croucher than you, yet by his eating of grass, like an ox, he had a sweet breath at least.”
“Bless me!” he cried. “Will you never leave your vitilitigation—your perverse termagant humour of wrangling and reparteeing?”
One afternoon, early in February, 1648, which was a resplendent day, as warm as May, I felt that suffocation of my spirits, I could scarce breathe. I must go out of the house, come what might, for a breathing-space; though my husband, who had taken his two nephews riding into the country, had commanded me to stay close within doors lest there should come a message for him. I went out, with Nan in my arms, into Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where because of the fineness of the weather there was a concourse of lawyers and other citizens at the bowling green. So soon as ever I went out, my heart began to lighten and the dismal vapours to disperse. Then looking shrewdly about me I soon distinguished the cause: for before me, about a quoit’s cast away, stood Sir Mun, leaning against a tree, with meagre cheeks and a deep sword-scar upon his brow. He was not watching the play, but gazed fixedly at me.
As I came towards him, he swept off his hat and, said he: “Mistress Milton, your humble servant.”
“Be covered, Servant,” I answered. “You look not so well conditioned as when last I saw you.” For the rich clothes that he wore were old and stained and patched.
He was silent for a while and then he said: “By God, I wish with all my heart that we were both in happier plight.”
I began to weep a little, looking down at my worn house-gown and the little dirty brat in my arms.
Then he broke out passionately: “Oh, Marie, Marie, how is it that neither of us is yet dead? What excuse have we for life? That you truly love neither your husband, nor yet your child, is plain and evident; yet doubtless you are a good wife, for the honour of matrimony, and pass as a kind mother. As for myself, I no longer truly love either the King whom I serve nor the cruel profession of arms to which I am committed; yet am a most loyal subject, for the honour of kingship, and pass as a valiant commander.”
“It is not so easy to die, dear heart,” I answered, “without sufficient cause. My time is not yet, nor is yours, and who can say certainly whether that Metempsychosis, in which you once instructed me, be fantasy or truth? While we both yet live, it is something to know ourselves bound together in the same faggot of Time, though lying wide apart. When the bundle is broke and we burn severally, then perhaps we are lost to each other for ever more.”
“That can never be,” said he hastily. “Mun shall never lose his Marie, nor Marie her Mun. Yet the dark shadow of your husband falls between us; who is a devil, else he had never intruded upon our company; and who from ambitious greed has laid hands on what is not his, except by legality.”
“This Devil has scorched his fingers,” said I. “He is not happy in his plunder.”
“That I doubt not,” said he, “and therefore I would carry you with me into France to-morrow—when I sail from Tilbury with the morning tide—but that legality, like chastity, is unassailable. John Milton loves you not, you love him not in return, yet he possesses you by a claim that no honest man would dispute, and will never yield you up, merely from scrivener-bred stubbornness. To be sure, at the Court in France, I could readily procure you a divorce from him, pleading on your behalf a difference of faith; for you married him according to the old Liturgy and he is now, as I hear, turned Levitical Jew. Yet then myself to marry you would go point-blank against my conscience—and against yours.”
“Aye,” said I, “for I would be a plain whore if I lay in one bed with you to-night, when last night, upon a lucky conjunction of planets, my husband had his marital will of me. And what of Doll Leke, who is reported to be your wife?”
“I have no wife,” he answered. “Yet my case matches yours, for I have lain with many women in these last two years, since I heard of your return to your husband; and I could not use you in the same manner as I have used them, even were you to command it. If you ran to France with me, it would not be for carnal acquaintance.”
“Could it be otherwise?” I asked. “I am no deaconess of the primitive Church, neither are you a deacon to lie chastely a-bed with me in Satan’s despite. Yet I would not wrong a husband who once, against his own inclinations, was persuaded to receive me kindly back into his house after long absence. Nor have I any just complaint against him, for he never raised a violent hand against me, nor abused me in any other way by which he could be held accountable to God. He also fed and comforted my father and mother and my whole family when they were distressed: nor did he defraud my mother of her thirds, when she was widowed. He acts righteously, though without love as you and I know love to be. He has a devil, just as you say, the devil of legality, the same which plagued the Jews to tithe mint and rue, with other follies: but this devil must have his due, or he will howl and run stark mad and hurt both himself and us. True, he has once or twice reproached me without a cause; but then so have I disobeyed him, more than once or twice, and pretended to be the fool that I am not. The truth is that, setting the hare’s head against the goose’s giblets, neither of us has dealt more than commonly ill with the other. I could not leave him now and come with you: he would ululate like an Irish wolf with the hurt to his esteem, how little soever he may love or value me.”
“Yet his kindred and friends would earnestly press him to sue for a divorce from you,” said Mun. “And your desertion of him would be a cause to satisfy any one of the new presbyterial Courts that are set up. I verily believe that it would be a kindness to him were you to cut the knot after this fashion.”
“Sweet Mun,” said I, “you understand me perfectly, but you are mistaken in John Milton. Were I to desert him and company with you, he might indeed win the Presbyters’ permission to divorce me for adultery; yet that he should be forbidden to divorce me at his own pleasure on account of the defects of my mind and spirit, but earnestly pressed to divorce me because of a vulgar adultery, this would indeed drive him frantic. Oh, but why do we beat upon the bush? There is nothing good harboured in it for us. Our happiness lies not at the end of the divorcer’s road. It is now too late for me to come to you, as both of us know and acknowledge.”
He nodded his head and said slowly: “You are right, it is too late. Yet I have thus reasoned with you because of the pain of seeing and speaking with you as through the bars of a prison window when to-morrow I must die. Marie, you and I are married in the spirit, and we passed our bridal night under the bells, which is a bond insoluble; yet what have we to show? Almost I could envy your husband that poor dull infant in your arms, whom you carry not as a treasure, but as a nasty burden.”
I began to weep again, and when Nan laughed in my face I grew angry with her and slapped her so that her laugh changed to a screech; then I was sorry and kissed her, but that made her screech the more, until I pacified her with a comfit.
Suddenly it was again with Mun and me as it had been under the bells: we spoke together in a curious riddling language of our own, in which we disclosed to each other deep concepts which were never before so clear to either mind, and imaginings of such rare subtlety that we seemed as ghosts communing together upon the nature of the wind or of the lightning. Presently the grass of Lincoln’s Inn Fields vanished away, and all the houses and players at bowls with it, and he and I stood alone, as it seemed to us, on a sedgy bank by a cold river where waterfowl swam and herons waded.
I know not how long we conversed there; but at last the spell waned, the river receded, the several houses shuddered back into their places, the clack of bowls sounded again, and from beyond the houses came the hoarse noise of the parish bellman crying his proclamation against the casting of garbage into the streets.
We parted after a few words more, but without any kiss or other salutation: I placidly taking my child back to the house and Mun sauntering
off towards the bowl-game. His last words to me were: “And that I shall never see you again in this life, it is but a way of speaking—as upon New Year’s Eve, in my childhood, I would stand at the open door (when the clock wanted but one minute for midnight), and cry to my tall brother Ralph: ‘Good-bye, sweet Brother, for I am off on a journey and shall not be back with you again until next year!’”
My husband returned wearied by his unaccustomed jaunt. He asked: “Has anyone called at the house? Is there any message or letter come for me?”
“No,” said I, “I have no news for you, except that we are short of coals, and the merchant again has delivered none to us, though three days ago he made you a faithful promise of three or four chaldrons at least. The child is asleep. Are you ready to eat your supper?”
“Supper?” said he. “Nay, not for another half hour at the least. We must not be unthrifty of daylight: I yet have time for a chapter or two of a dangerous book that the Council requires me to examine. Yet will I eat an apple. Come, wife, make haste: first draw off my muddied boots for me, and then bring me my worsted slippers and a rough-tasted apple. Why do you stand and gape?”
Wife to Mr. Milton Page 37