“Yes, indeed; for very sufficient cause. It must be a painful thing to you to find my neighbours beginning to dislike me; to have the tradespeople impertinent to you on my account; to see my patients leave me, and call in somebody from a distance, in the face of all Deerbrook. It must make you anxious to think what is to become of us, if the discontent continues and spreads: and it must be a bitter disappointment to you to find that to be my wife is not to be so happy as we expected. Here is cause enough for tears.”
In the midst of her grief, Hester looked up at her husband with an expression of gratitude and tenderness which consoled him for her.
“I will not answer for it,” he continued, “but that we may all three sit down to weep together, one of these days.”
“And then,” said Margaret, “Hester will be the first to cheer up and comfort us.”
“I have no doubt of it,” replied Hope. “Meantime, is there anything that you would have had done otherwise by me? Was I right or not to vote? and was there anything wrong in my manner of doing it? Is there any cause whatever for repentance?”
“None, none,” cried Hester. “You have been right throughout. I glory in all you do.”
“To me it seems that you could not have done otherwise,” observed Margaret. “It was a simple, unavoidable act, done with the simplicity of affairs which happen in natural course. I neither repent it for you, nor glory in it.”
“That is just my view of it, Margaret. And it follows that the consequences are to be taken as coming in natural course too. Does not this again simplify the affair, Hester?”
“It lights it up,” replied Hester. “It reminds me how all would have been if you had acted otherwise than as you did. It is, to be sure, scarcely possible to conceive of such a thing,—but if you had not voted, I should have—not despised you in any degree,—but lost confidence in you a little.”
“That is a very mild way of putting it,” said Hope, laughing.