“And do you really call this the end?” asked Margaret. “Do you consider our destiny fixed for evermore?”
“As far as you and I are concerned, love,” said Hester to him, “I could almost wish that this were the end. I feel as if almost any change would be for the worse; I mean supposing you not to look as you do now, but as you have always been till now. Oh, Edward, I am so happy!”
Her husband could not speak for astonishment and delight. “You remember that evening in Verdon woods, Edward—the evening before we were married?”
“Remember it!”
“Well. How infinitely happier are we now than then! Oh! that fear—that mistrust of myself! You reproved me for my fear and mistrust then; and I must beg leave to remind you of what you then said. It is not often that I can have the honour of preaching to you, my dear husband, as it is rather difficult to find an occasion; but now I have caught you tripping. What is there for you to be uneasy about now, that can at all be compared with what I troubled myself about then?—Since that time I have caused you much misery, I know—misery which I partly foresaw I should cause you: but that is over, I trust. It is over at least for the time that we are poor and persecuted. I dare not and do not wish for anything otherwise than as we have it flow. Persecution seems to have made us wiser, and poverty happier; and how, if only Margaret were altogether as we would see her, how could we be better than we are?”
“You are right, my dear wife.” These few tender words, and her husband’s brightened looks, sufficed—Hester had no cares. She forgot even the fever, in seeing Edward look as gay as usual again, and in feeling that she was everything to that feeling, that conviction, for which she had sighed in vain, for long after her marriage. She had then fancied that his profession, his family, his own thoughts, were as important to him as herself. She now knew that she was supreme; and this was supreme satisfaction.
When Margaret sprang up to her new labours in the chill dusk of the next morning, she flattered herself that she was the first awake; but it was not so. When she went down, she found her brother busy shovelling the snow away, and making a clear path from the kitchen door to the coal-house. He declared it delightfully warm work, by the time he had brought in coals enough for the day, and wanted more employment of the same sort. He went round to the front of the house, and cleared the steps and pavement there; caring nothing for the fact, that two or three neighbours gazed from their doors, and that some children stood blowing upon their fingers, and stamping with their feet, enduring the cold, for the sake of seeing the gentleman clearing his own steps.
“What would the Greys say?” asked Margaret, laughing; as, duster in hand, she looked from the open window, and spoke to her brother outside.
“I am sure they ought to say I have done my work well.”
“That is just what Hester is observing within here. You are almost ready for breakfast, are you not? She is setting the table.”