“No good news will ever come to me again,” sighed Hester. “No, no; I do not quite mean that. You need not look at me so. It is ungrateful to say such a thing at this moment. Come: I am ready to go down to tea. It is really getting dark. I thought this day never would come to an end.”
The evening was wearisome enough. Mrs Grey asked how Mrs Rowland had behaved, and Sophia was beginning to tell, when her father checked her, reminding her that she had been enjoying Mrs Rowland’s hospitality. This was all he said, but it was enough to bring on one of Sophia’s interminable fits of crying. The children were cross with fatigue: Mrs Grey thought her husband hard upon Sophia; and, to complete the absurdity of the scene, Hester’s and Margaret’s tears proved uncontrollable. The sight of Sophia’s set them flowing; and though they laughed at themselves for the folly of weeping from mere sympathy, this did not mend the matter. Mrs Grey seemed on the verge of tears herself, when she observed that she had expected a cheerful evening after a lonely and anxious day. A deep sob from the three answered to this observation, and they all rose to go to their apartments. Hester was struck by the peculiar tender pressure of the hand given her by Mr Grey, as she offered him her mute good-night. It caused her a fresh burst of grief when she reached her own room.
Margaret was determined not to go to rest without knowing what it was that Mrs Rowland had said to her sister. She pressed for it now, hoping that it would rouse Hester from more painful thoughts.
“Though I have been enjoying that woman’s hospitality, as Mr Grey says,” declared Hester, “I must speak of her as I think, to you. Oh, she has been so insolent!”
“Insolent to you! How? Why?”
“Nay: you had better ask her why. Her confidence was all about her brother. She seems to think,—she did not say so, or I should have known better how to answer her, but she seems to think that her brother is—(I can hardly speak it even to you, Margaret!)—is in some way in danger from me. Now, you and I know that he cares no more for me than for any one of the people who were there to-day; and yet she went on telling me, and I could not stop her, about the views of his family for him!”
“What views?”
“Views which, I imagine, it by no means follows that he has for himself. If she has been impertinent to me, she has been even more so to him. I wonder how she dares meddle in his concerns as she does.”
“Well, but what views?” persisted Margaret.
“Oh, about his marrying:— that he is the darling of his family,—that large family interests hang upon his marrying,—that all his relations think it is time he was settling, and that he told her last week that he was of that opinion himself:— and then she went on to say that there was the most delightful accordance in their views for him;—that they did not much value beauty,—that they should require for him something of a far higher order than beauty, and which indeed was seldom found with it—”