Hester’s eyes were shining with eloquence and ardour; the little movement of her head so proud, so animated, so full of visionary passion, threw back and gave a certain freedom to the hair which her mother called auburn. Her whole figure was full of that force and meaning which is above beauty. Edward looked at her with smiling admiration. If his conscience was touched, or his temper at least, he did not show it.
“Do you call me a cat?” he said.
“Oh, I am not in fun. I am as earnest as ever I can be. It is wicked, it is miserable, and I cannot understand you. All the others are as nothing in comparison with you.”
He grew a little pale under this accusation; he would not meet it directly. “But you know,” he said, “why she hates you. It is for your mother’s sake.”
“My mother!” cried Hester astonished. “But no one could hate my mother.” The suggestion took away her breath.
“It is true, all the same. I thought you did not know. She was to have married John Vernon, your father, and he preferred—that is the whole account of it; then he got into trouble, and she had her revenge.”
“Did she ruin my father?” said Hester in a low whisper of horror.
“I—don’t know if it went so far as that,” Edward said.
A hesitation was in his speech. It was scarcely compunction, but doubt, lest a statement of this kind, so easily to be contradicted, might be injudicious on his part—but then, who would speak to Hester on such a subject? And her mother was a little fool, and, most likely, did not know, or would be sure to mistake, the circumstances.
“Don’t let us talk of that: it is so long past,” he said; “and here is a wretch, a scoundrel, coming up with his eye fixed upon you as if he was a partner. How I loathe all your partners, Hester! Mind, the rest of the dances are for me. I shall watch for you as soon as you have shaken that fellow off.”
But Hester did not care for the dances that followed. She went through them indifferently, faithful to the partners who had presented themselves before he came on the scene; and, indeed, the conversation in the conservatory had not drawn her nearer to Edward. It had given her a great deal to think of. She had not time in the whirl and fluster of this gaiety to think it all out.
XXIV
A New Competitor
Emma Ashton had brought Hester’s flowers, and though she was tired with her journey, had taken a great deal of interest in Hester’s dress. When she came in to show herself to the old people in her white robes before her ball, the stranger had surveyed her with much attention. She had kissed her slowly and deliberately when introduced to her.
“Roland told me a great deal about you,” she said. “I suppose we are cousins too. You look very nice. I hope you will enjoy yourself.” She was a very deliberate, measured talker, doing everything steadily. When Hester was gone, she resumed her seat beside her grandmother.
“Roland admires her very much. She is pretty, but I should think she had a great deal of temper,” Emma said.
“Temper is scarcely the word. She is a great favourite with your grandfather—and with me too—with me too.”
“Roland told me,” said Emma. “When I say temper I don’t mean any harm. She would do much better for Roland if she had a good deal of temper. That is what he wants to keep him straight; for a man ought not to flirt after he is married, and he will, unless she keeps him in order.”
“Married! but is he likely to marry? I did not hear anything of it.”
“When a man can keep a sister he can keep a wife,” said Emma, announcing this fact as if it were an oracle. “He has a house, and everything that is necessary. And of course I shall not stand in his way. I can go back to Elinor, where I am a sort of head nurse, and cheap enough at the money; or I can be a governess. That touches his pride—he does not like that.”
Here the old captain came back, who had been putting his favourite carefully into the fly.
“Why has she not her mother with her?” he said. “I like a girl to have her mother with her. It is pretty, it is natural. I do not like those new-fashioned, independent ways.”
“But they are much more convenient, grandpapa,” said Emma. “Think how I should have been situated had a girl always wanted her mother with her. Elinor, with her family, cannot always be going out; and when she goes she likes to amuse herself, she does not go for me. A girl going out with her mother means a devoted sort of old lady like the mothers in books. Such nonsense, you know—for a girl’s mother, when she is eighteen or so, is rarely more than forty, and people of forty like amusement just as much as we do. It is better, on the whole, I think, when everyone is for herself.”
“Well, that is not my opinion,” said the old captain, shortly.
He was accustomed to do most of the talking himself,
