“Something is wrong,” said the old lady, “and you have come to tell me. Are you going to marry Harry Vernon, Hester?”
“Would that be something wrong?” cried the girl, looking up quickly, with a certain irritation. She did not mean to have so important a question fore-judged in this easy way.
“That is according as you feel, my dear; but I fear he is not good enough for you. Catherine says—”
Now the Morgans were altogether of Catherine’s faction, being her relations, and not—as the other members of the community remembered with much resentment—Vernons at all. It was a sinful use of the family property as concentrated in Catherine’s hand, to support these old people who had no right to it. More or less this was the sentiment of the community generally, even, it is to be feared, of Mrs. John herself; and consequently, as an almost infallible result, they were on Catherine’s side, and took her opinions. Hester stopped the mouth of the old lady, so to speak, hastily holding up her hand.
“That is a mistake,” she cried; “Catherine is quite wrong! She does not like him; but he is honest as the skies—he is good. You must not think badly of him because Catherine has a prejudice against him.”
“That is a rash thing for you to say. Catherine is a great deal older, and a great deal wiser than you.”
“She may be older, and she may be wiser; but she does not know everything,” said Hester. “There is one prejudice of hers you don’t share—she thinks the same of me.”
This staggered the old lady.
“It is true—she does not understand you somehow; things seem to go the wrong way between times.”
“Am I difficult to understand?” cried Hester. “I am only nineteen, and Catherine is sixty—”
“You are not quite so easy as A.B.C.,” said Mrs. Morgan, with a smile; “still I acknowledge that is one thing against her judgment. But you do not answer my question. Are you going to marry Harry Vernon?”
Hester, seated in the shelter of the curtain, invisible from outside, hardly visible within, looked out across the Common to the place where she had sat and pondered, and breathed a half-articulate “No.”
“Then, Hester, you should tell him so,” said the old lady. “You should not keep him hanging on. Show a little respect, my dear, to the man who has shown so much respect to you.”
“Do you call that respect?” said Hester, and then she added, lowering her voice, “My mother wishes it. She thinks it would make her quite happy. She says that she would want nothing more.”
“Ah!” said the old lady, “that means—” It is to be feared that she was going to say something not very respectful to Hester’s mother, about whom, also, Catherine’s prejudice told: but she checked herself in time. “That gives it another aspect,” she said.
“Do you think it would be right to marry a man only because your mother wished it?” asked Hester, fixing her eyes on Mrs. Morgan’s face.
“Sometimes,” said the old lady, with a smile.
“Sometimes! I thought you were like the captain, and believed in love.”
“Sometimes,” she said again. “It does not do in every case: that is what I object to the captain and you for. You are always so absolute. Love rejects suitableness; and if Catherine is not quite wrong—”
“She is quite wrong!” cried Hester again, vehemently. “She does not know Harry any more than she knows me. He is not clever, but he is true.”
“Then marry him, my dear.”
“Why should I marry him?—one does not marry everyone whom Catherine misjudges—oh, there would be too many!—nor even to please mother.”
“I am perhaps as poor a judge as Catherine, Hester.”
“Now you are unjust—now you are unkind!” cried the girl, with anger in her eyes.
“Come,” said Mrs. Morgan, “you must not assault me. You are so young and so fierce: and my old man is not here to take my part.”
“I cannot ask him, because he is a man,” said Hester; “but I know what he would say. He would not say ‘Sometimes’ like you; he would say ‘Never!’ And that is what I think too.”
“Because you are so young, my dear; and my old man, bless him, he is very young. But this world is a very strange place. Right and wrong, are like black and white; they are distinct and easy. The things that baffle us are those that perhaps are not quite right, but certainly are not wrong.”
“Do you call it not wrong—to do what your heart revolts at to please your mother?”
“I call that right in one sense; but I would not use such strong language, Hester,” the old lady said.
“This must be metaphysics,” said the girl. “Sophistry, isn’t it? casuistry, I don’t know what to call it; but I see through you. It would be right to do a great many things to please her, to make my dress her way instead of mine, to stop at home when she wanted me though I should like to go out; but not—surely not, Mrs. Morgan—”
“To marry the man of her choice, though he is not your own?”
Hester nodded her head, her face glowing with the sudden blush that went and came in a moment. She was agitated though she did not wish to show it. The impulse to do it became suffocating, the shiver of repugnance stronger as she felt that the danger was coming near.
“I am not so sure,” said the old lady in her passionless calm. “Sometimes such a venture turns out very well; to please your mother is a very good thing in itself, and if you are right about his character, and care for no one else, and can do it—for after all that is the great thing, my dear—if you can do it—it might turn out very well, better than if you took your own way.”
“Is that all that is to be thought of, whether it will turn out well?” cried Hester, indignantly. “You mean if it is successful; but the
