The man went by, still whistling cheerfully. She peered around the tree and watched him as he retreated—a broad-shouldered man, swinging a cudgel. A hundred yards or less beyond her tree he halted, with his back to her, in the middle of the road, and stayed his whistling while he made two or three ludicrous cuts with his cudgel at the empty air. This pantomime over, he resumed his way.
She recognised him by so much of his back as showed over the dwarf hedge. It was William Wright.
Was it he, then, who had come with John Lambert? Hetty sat down by the tree, and, with her eyes on the slow water in the dyke, began to think.
To be sure, this man might have come to Wroote merely for his money. Yet (as she firmly believed) it was he who had written the letter which in effect had led to her running away. He might have used the debt to-day as a pretext. His motive, she felt certain, was curiosity to learn what his letter had brought about.
She bore him no grudge. He had fired the train—oh, no doubt! But she was clear-sighted now, saw that the true fault after all was hers, and would waste no time in accusing others. Very soon she dismissed him from her mind. In all the blank hopelessness of her fall from hope she put aside self-pity, and tasked herself to face the worst. To Emilia and Nancy she had spoken lightly, as if scarcely alive to her dreadful position, still less alive to her sin. They had misunderstood her: but in truth she had spoken so on the instinct of self-defence. Real defence she had none.
She knew she had none. And let it be said here that she saw no comfortable hope in religion. She had listened to a plenty of doctrine from her early childhood: but somehow the mysteries of God had seldom occupied her thoughts, never as bearing directly on the questions of daily life. If asked, for example, "did she believe in the Trinity?" or "did she believe in justification by faith?" she would have answered "yes," without hesitating for a moment. But in fact these high teachings lay outside her private religion, which amounted to this—"God is all-seeing and omnipotent. To please Him I must be good; and being good gives me pleasure in turn, for I feel that His eye is upon me and He approves. He is terribly stern: but all-merciful too. If, having done wrong, I go to Him contritely, and repent, He will give me a chance to amend my ways, and if I honestly strive to amend them, He will forgive." In short—and perhaps because the word "Father" helped to mislead—she had made for herself an image of God by exalting and magnifying all that she saw best in her parents. And this view of Him her parents had confirmed insensibly, in a thousand trifles, by laying constant daily stress upon good conduct, and by dictating it and judging her lapses with an air of calm authority, which took for granted that what pleased them was exactly what would please God.
So now, having done that which her mother and father could not forgive, at first she hardly dared to hope that God could by any means forgive it. In the warm sunlight of loving she had seen for a while that her father and mother were not always wise; nay, long beforehand in her discontent she had been groping towards this discovery. But now that the sunshine had proved a cruel cheat, she ran back in dismay upon the old guide-posts, and they pointed to a hell indeed.
She had been wicked. She craved to be good. She remembered Mary Magdalene, whom Christ had forgiven, and caught at a hope for herself. But why had Christ forgiven Mary? Because she had been sorry, and turned and walked the rest of her life in goodness? Because He had foreseen her long atonement? So Hetty believed. For her, too, then the way back to forgiveness lay through conduct— always through conduct; and for her the road stretched long, for not until death could she reach assurance. Of a way to forgiveness through faith (though she must have heard of it a hundred times) she scarcely thought; still less of a way through faith to instant assurance. To those who have not travelled by that road its end— though promised on the honour of God and proclaimed incessantly by those who have travelled and found it—seems merely incredible. Hardly can man or woman, taught from infancy to suspect false guides, trust these reports of a country where to believe and to have are one.
Hetty sat by the tree and saw the road beyond her, that it was steep and full of suffering. But for this she did not refuse it: she desired it rather. She saw also, that along it was no well of forgiveness to refresh her; the thirst must endure till she reached the end and went down in darkness to the river. This, too, she must endure, God in mercy helping her. What daunted her was conscience whispering that she had as yet no right to that mercy, no right even to tread the road. For though her sin was abhorrent, in her heart she loved her fellow-sinner yet. A sound of hoofs aroused her. Still screened by her tree, she saw her father trot by on the filly. In spite of the warm settled weather he carried his cloak before him strapped across the holsters. His ride, therefore, would be a long one; to Gainsborough at least—or to Lincoln?
She lifted her head and sat erect in a sharp terror. Was her father going to seek him? She had not thought of this as possible. And if so—