“Her ladyship will stay here to-night, Cooper,” he said. “And you will take her to the station to-morrow morning and bring her down to Stanier.”
He did not so much as glance at Hester, and next moment the front door had closed behind him.
Hester arrived back at Stanier next day after this abortive expedition, and it was clear at once that orders had been issued that no word was to be said to her on the subject of what she had done. She had mid-day dinner with her governess, rode afterwards with her brothers, and as usual stood up when her father entered the drawing-room in the evening. The awful life had closed like a trap upon her again, rather more tightly than before, for she was subject to a closer supervision.
But though the apparent victory was with her father, she knew (and was somehow aware that he knew it, too) that her spirit had not yielded one inch to him, and that he, for all his grim autocracy, was conscious, as regards her, of imperfect mastery. If he had broken her will, so she acutely argued, she would not now have been watched; her doings would not, as they certainly were, have been reported to him by the governess. That was meat and drink to her. But from being a mere grim presence in the background he had leaped into reality, and with the whole force of her nature, she hated him.
The substance of the Stanier legend, faint though the faith in it had become, was, of course, well known to her, and every morning, looking like some young sexless angel newly come to earth, she added to her very tepid prayers the fervent and heartfelt petition that the devil would not long delay in exacting his part of the bargain.
Two years passed, and Hester became aware that there were schemes on foot for marrying her off with the utmost possible speed. The idea of marriage in the abstract was wholly to her mind, since then she would be quit of the terrible life at Stanier, but in the concrete she was not so content with her selected deliverer. This was the mild and highborn Marquis of Blakeney, a man precisely twice her age, of plain, serious mind and irreproachable morals. He adored her in a rapt and tongue-tied manner, and no doubt Hester had encouraged him with those little smiles and glances which she found it impossible not to bestow on any male denizen of this earth, without any distinct ulterior views. But when it became evident, by his own express declaration made with the permission of her father, that he entertained such views, Hester wondered whether it would be really possible to kiss that seal-like whiskered face with any semblance of wifely enthusiasm.
Had there been any indication that her pious petition with regard to the speedy ratification of the Stanier legend as regards her father would be granted, she would probably have recommended the mild Marquis to take his vows to other shrines, but her father seemed to be suffering no inconvenience from her prayers, and she accepted the rapt and tongue-tied devotion. Instantly all the bonds of discipline and suppression were relaxed; even in her father’s eyes her engagement made her something of a personage, and Hester hated him more than ever.
And then the vengeance of winged, vindictive love, more imperious than her father, overtook and punished her, breaking her spirit, which he had never done. At a dance given at Blakeney Castle to celebrate the engagement, she saw young Ralph Brayton, penniless and debonair, with no seal-face and no marquisate, and the glance of each pierced through the heart of the other. He was the son of the family solicitor of Lord Blakeney, and even while his father was drawing out the schedule of munificent settlements for the bride-to-be, the bride gave him something more munificent yet, and settled it, her heart, upon him for all perpetuity.
She did her best to disown, if not to stifle, what had come upon her, and had her marriage but been fixed for a month earlier than the day appointed, she would probably have married her affianced bridegroom, and let love hang itself in its own silken noose and chance its being quite strangled. As it was, even while her room at Stanier was silky and shimmering with the appurtenances of a bride, she slipped out one night as the moon set, and joined her lover at the park gates. By dawn they had come to London, and before evening she was safe in the holding of her husband’s arms.
On the news reaching Lord Yardley he had a stroke from which he did not recover for many years, though he soon regained sufficient power of babbling speech to make it abundantly clear that he would never see Hester again. As she was equally determined never to see him, their wills were in complete harmony. That brutal punishment she had received from those thin white hands two years before, followed by the bondage of her life at home, had rendered her perfectly callous as regards him. Had he been sorry for it, she might have shrugged her pretty shoulders and forgotten it; for that cold pale slab of womanhood, her mother, she felt nothing whatever.