They watched her go away with her step still stately. Her faithful maid, whom Mrs. John had found so kind, but who had not always been kind, was waiting for her. The two young people stood and looked after her with eyes of tender respect and awe.
“I thought once,” said Hester, in a hush of subdued feeling, “that she might have died sitting in her chair.”
“Ah,” said Harry, who had a little more experience, “it is seldom that people get out of it so easily as that. I want to tell you something more if it will not—upset you more.”
Hester smiled.
“Is there anything that can upset me more?” she said.
He looked at her wistfully. He did not know what her individual part in this trouble had been; whether Edward was more to her than another, or what the position was in which they stood to each other.
“I don’t know how to take it,” he said, “or how to understand it. There are news of—Edward.”
The last gleam of hope shot across Hester’s mind.
“He is coming back?” she said, clasping her hands.
Harry shook his head.
“Will you come with me to the door? It is such a lovely night.”
She had not the courage or the presence of mind to say no. She went downstairs with him, where the lamps were lighted again, and out to the gate—the same hour, the same atmosphere as last night. Was it only last night that all had happened? She could have turned and fled in the tremor, the horror of the recollection. Just there she lay at Catherine’s feet. Just there Catherine had stood and listened.
Hester stood her ground like a martyr. She knew she must learn to do so, and that it would not be possible to avoid the place made so bitter by recollection. Harry did not know how to speak. He shifted uneasily from one foot to another. “He has been traced to town; he got in at the junction, not here. He reached London this morning, very early—with a lady.”
“With a lady!”
Hester had expected a great shock, but the astonishment of this took its sting away.
“They left this afternoon, it is supposed to go abroad,” Harry said.
“Still with the lady? That is very strange,” said Hester, with a little quiver in her lips.
“There is reason now to suppose that he—married her in the meantime.”
Hester had grasped by accident the post of the gate. She was glad she had done so. It was a support to her, at least. Married her! It gave her no immediate pain in her astonishment, which was unspeakable. In the dusk Harry did not see her face. He had no conception of the real state of the case. The fact that Edward had been discovered with another woman had confused Harry and diverted the natural suspicions which had risen in his mind when he had found Hester so linked with Catherine after the discovery of Edward’s flight. He watched her with a little alarm, wondering and anxious. But the only sign of any emotion was the tightening of her hand upon the iron gate.
“You will know,” he said, “whether it will be best to say anything of this. If it will hurt her more, let it alone till the crisis is past.”
“If it will hurt her—more? I do not think anything—can hurt her more.”
“And you are nearly over-worn,” he said, with a tender and pitying cadence in his voice. “I can’t say spare yourself, Hester. You are the only one she deserves nothing from. She ought to feel that: if he is gone who owes her everything, yet you are standing by her, who never owed her anything.”
Hester could not bear it any longer. She waved her hand to him and went in—into the house that was not hers, where there was no one who had a thought to bestow upon her. Where was there anyone? Her mother loved her with all her heart, but had nothing to say to her in this rending asunder of her being. She thought she was glad that it was all happening in a house which was not her home, which after, as Harry said, the crisis was past, she might never need to enter again. She went upstairs, to the unfamiliar room in which she had spent the previous night. There she sat down in the dark on the bed, and looked at it all, passing before her eyes, like a panorama. For this was the only description that could be given. The conversation just recorded occurred over again, as if it had been in a book. “With a lady!” “They left this afternoon.” “Reason to suppose that in the meantime—” And then this talk, suspended in the air as it seemed, came to a pause. And Hester, through the interval, saw all her own long stormy wooing, its sudden climax with so much that was taken for granted—“My only love!—and I am your only love.” That was all true. Those agitated scenes, the dances that were nothing but a love duel from beginning to end, the snatches of talk in the midst of the music and tumult, the one strange blessed moment in the verandah at home, the meeting so tragical and terrible of last night. That was a sort of interlude that faded again, giving place to Harry’s steady subdued voice—
“Married her in the meantime! Married her!”
Hester said these words aloud, with a laugh of incredulous dismay and mockery. The sound terrified herself when she heard it. It was Catherine’s laugh made terrible with a sort of tragic wonder. Married her! Had there been no place for Hester at all, nothing but delusion from beginning to end?
XLIV
The Settlement
The records of the next few days were agitated and full of excitement. Day after day Catherine spent at the
