“No doubt,” she said, “no doubt! he was to carry you away, a fine lady like you, with posthorses in a romantic way—not by the vulgar method of a train; and you have deceived me, and lost me my last chance. Edward! Edward! Oh where are you, my boy, my boy?”
Here, had she but known it, poor Catherine’s comedy of human nature was complete. Edward, upon whom she called with tragic passion as great as that of a Constance, was just then approaching Emma, in a fierce farce of self-compensation, determined to make the adventure complete, to cut every tie and tear every remnant of the past to pieces. Her laugh of contempt at the poor farce-tragedy would have been supreme had it been any case but her own.
XLI
A Night’s Vigil
They had been sitting through all the night, examining everything. Catherine was not a woman to be the slave of passion, even when that was the one delusion of her life. She got over it with a stern and fierce struggle before they reached the gate of the Grange, whither Hester followed her, trembling and half stupefied, unable either to resist or to think of any course of action for herself. Catherine paused at the gate, and looked round her with a curious quivering smile. “Here is where I saw him going away,” she said; “here is where I heard the last words from him.” She laughed; her heart was throbbing with the wildest suffering. She dashed her hands together with a violence of which she was unaware. “Such words!” she cried. It was scarcely one o’clock, but in summer there is little night, and already the air had begun to whiten with some premonition of day. She held up her face to the sky—an old face, with so many lines in it, suddenly smitten as with a deathblow. Her eyes, under the curve of pain, which makes the eyelids quiver, looked up to the pale skies with what is the last appeal of humanity. For why?—for why?—an honest life, an honourable career, a soul that had shrunk from no labour or pain, a hand that never had been closed to human distress—and repaid with misery at the end! Is there no reason in it when God’s creature lifts a face of anguish to His throne, and asks why? She paused on the threshold of her house, which was desolate, and made that mute appeal. It was beyond all words or crying, as it was beyond all reply. The other, who was the companion of her misfortune, stood beside her, looking, not at heaven, but at her. Hester had got far beyond thinking of her own share in it. Fatigue and excitement had brought sensation almost to an end. She was not angry with Catherine, who had thrown her off. Everything was blurred to her in a sense of calamity common and universal, of which Catherine seemed the sign and emblem. She made no interruption in the silence. And it was only when Catherine turned to go in that she was recalled to a recollection of Hester by her side.
“I think—I had better go home—to my mother,” the girl said, looking along the road with a dreamy terror. She was afraid of the dark, the solitude, the distance—and yet what was there left to her but to go home, which she seemed to have quitted, to have fled from, with the idea of never returning, years ago. Catherine put out her hand and grasped her. She was far the more vigorous of the two. She could have carried the girl into the house, where she now half led, half dragged her. They found Harry already waiting for them in great bewilderment and distress. He could not account for the entrance of these two together, or for their apparent union—but Catherine gave him no explanation. She made him sit down and tell her at once everything he knew of the state of affairs: and when this was made plain to her, she flew out upon him with a wrath that made Harry shrink.
“Why did you leave everything in one person’s hands? Is it not a
