Read Online These Three Remain by Pamela Aidan - Free Book Online Page B

family of his patroness and, to Darcy’s consternation, bowed to them yet again, whereupon Lady Catherine nodded her permission to proceed. With growing apprehension, Darcy watched the rector arrange his face into the most solemn of lines and turn it upon his congregation. “My text this morning comes from the Epistle to the Colossians, chapter three: ‘Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.’ My subject for this Easter morn, my faithful congregation, is affection — or, more properly, what has been called Religious Affection. That is to say, I speak to you today in stern warning against the vulgar excesses of ‘Enthusiasm!’ ”
    “Oh no!” Fitzwilliam groaned as he shrank down in the pew, but Darcy came to a tense attention. This was his aunt’s doing, he was sure of it.
    “The text,” continued Her Ladyship’s mouthpiece, “directs us to set our affection on things above. This may not be construed as leave to indulge in flights of emotion. Heaven forbid! Religion is of a more steady nature; of a more sober, manly quality. She scornfully rejects the support of something so volatile, so trivial and useless as a lively imagination and the uncontrolled flow of, you will pardon the expression, ‘animal spirits.’ Such things find their home in the heated, disordered brain of the Enthusiast rather than in the dispassionate, rational understanding which the Supreme Being requires of the true man of religion.”
    Heated, disordered brain? Darcy crossed his arms over his chest and leveled a piercing stare at his aunt’s minion.
    “No, dear listeners.” Collins brought his palm down upon the pulpit with a theatrical thwack. “True wisdom, true religion directs us to the reining in of passion and its disorders for the calm cultivation of moral virtues. Only fulfill the conditions on your part of duty and honor, become proficient in this lesson of the Gospel, and all will be well.
Self-reformation
is affection set on things above, not this vain, self-aggrandizing fervor.”
    Self-reformation! Darcy shifted, the pew having grown unrelenting in its discouragement of the slightest bodily comfort. Honor and duty were the air he’d breathed all his life, yet had he not been lately tempted to abandon them? How close had he trod to succumbing to the wiles of Lady Sylvanie, whose tragic madness had, nonetheless, shown him the shocking depths of hatred he harbored in his own heart? And what success had he found over these intervening months in rooting it out?
    “I tell you, it is no more than the low canting of wild fanatics like that infamous Newton or Whitefield of the last century or Bunyan and Donne before them.” Mr. Collins swept men his theological and literary superiors aside with a wave of his hand. “And I need not remind you where that led!” He paused dramatically, then spat out, “Regicide!”
    Another groan arose from Fitzwilliam. “Dear God, now she’ll write His Lordship that I’m planning to kill old George!”
    Darcy’s brows slanted dangerously, and his eyes narrowed into mere slits. If this reflected Lady Catherine’s view, and he had little doubt that Collins’s sermon had been written under her direction, she must never be permitted to stay two minutes alone with Georgiana!
    “Trust, rather, in Reason, the Divine’s handmaiden, and in your spiritual fathers — I am honored to be so appointed and advised by Her Ladyship, Lady Catherine de Bourgh — to prescribe to you what is proper affection, acceptable in the sight of Heaven. Thus endeth the lesson. Amen and amen.”
    After the benediction, the choirboys struck once more an attempt at their proper notes and began the recessional down the aisle, Mr. Collins in their wake. A small sigh near his shoulder recalled Darcy to the service of his cousin. Putting his displeasure aside, he quickly gathered up his hat and walking stick and reached for her prayer book, then glanced over at Elizabeth as he stepped out of the