He learned of it, however, before he left his home. Finding that neither persuasions, threats, nor prayers could move him,--that he would be true to honor and love,--they told him of what they had done; laid bare the whole intensity of their feeling; and putting her on the one side, placing themselves on the other, said, "Choose,--this wife, or those who have loved you for a lifetime. Cleave to her, and your father disowns you, your mother renounces, your home shuts its doors upon you, never to open. With the world and its judgment we have nothing to do; that is between it and you; but no judgment of indifferent strangers shall be more severe than ours."
A painful position; a cruel alternative; but not for an instant did he hesitate. Taking the two hands of father and mother into his solitary one, he said,--"Father, I have always found you a gentleman; mother, you have shown all the graces of the Christian character which you profess; yet in this you are supporting the most dishonorable sentiment, the most infidel unbelief, with which the age is shamed. You are defying the dictates of justice and the teachings of God. When you ask me to rank myself on your side, I cannot do it. Were my heart less wholly enlisted in this matter, my reason and sense of right would rebel. Here, then, for the present at least, we must say farewell." And so, with many a heart-ache and many a pang, he went away.
As true love always grows with passing time, so his increased with the days, and intensified by the cruel heat which was poured upon it. He realized the torture to which, in a thousand ways, this darling of his heart had for a lifetime been subjected; and his tenderness and love--in which was an element of indignation and pathos--deepened with every fresh revelation of the passing hours. When he came back to her he had few words to speak, and no airy grace of sentence or caress to bestow; he followed her about in a curious, shadow-like way, with such a strain on his heart as made him many a time lift his hand to it, as if to check physical pain. For her, she was as one who had found a beloved master, able and willing to lighten all her burdens; a physician, whose slightest touch brought balm and healing to every aching wound. And so these two when the time came, spite of the absence of friends who should have been there, spite of warnings and denunciations and evil prophecies, stood up and said to those who listened what their hearts had long before confessed, that they were one for time and eternity; then, hand in hand, went out into the world.