"When he is with you on the sea, I shall go on my voyage too. I cannot stay in this house longer—or anywhere else in this place."
"Nor need you. All can be arranged. Can you be ready to start in a couple of days?"
"Easily. Everything here must be left to pay the debts we owe—that money he took too. I can only give up everything I have. It's not much, I fear, but it's all I can do just now. When I get home, my father——"
"Not a word about that matter," interrupted Mr. Morpeth, rising. "These burdens are all my right now. I must go, but I shall look in again this evening, since you prefer to be alone to-day. Go and lie down, my child, you are overwrought," he added, glancing at Hester's worn face.
Beckoning to the butler, he briefly told him of his master's death, and charged him to see well to his mistress, who would soon have to cross "the black water" again. Then, with his habitual calm taking possession of him once more, Mr. Morpeth hurried away to face a more difficult and trying day than Hester had any idea of.
She too had her hours of storm and stress as the long, hot hours wore on. The terrible tension arising from the suspense was now at an end. Her weak, erring husband had gone to another Bar than the earthly one she had so dreaded for him. Her brief married life lay in ruins, and though love was dead, its spectre haunted her at every turn. Now it was the beautiful face, the impassioned eyes of the almost unknown suitor in the Woodglade arbour that rose before her. Again, it was one incident after another disclosing his disordered heart; scenes before which she had learnt to quail in fear—not for herself, she soon learnt to outlive that—but for the restless, unhappy one to whom she had pledged her wedded troth. Sometimes it was the recollection of that morning on which he had spoken such insulting words to his own father that sprang into her mind. And as she vividly recalled the scene, she began to wonder if, all along, Alfred could have had some subconscious glimmering of the close relationship between him and the noble-hearted man he was spurning which goaded him to a sense of desperation. Then the memory of her happy morning ride with Mark Cheveril came to her mind. How kind, how comforting, how high-toned and self-restrained he had ever proved, and yet, for her sake, he had to endure taunts which, had they been flung at him by any other than her husband, she felt sure would have been dealt with very differently. Yet it had been that friend who had smoothed the dying pillow of her disgraced husband!
Deeply grateful as she was to Mark Cheveril for all that he had been to her, she felt no desire to meet him on this dark day, and was thankful that Mr. Morpeth, and not he, had been the messenger of the evil tidings. Perhaps Mark and she would never meet again in this world; yet between them she felt there would ever be the bond forged during these eventful months when faith and honour and fealty had called her to turn from the true man to him whom she had too late awakened to find deeply false, although he was the husband of her youth.
Even the thought of the home-going—that thought so thrilling to the hearts of Anglo-Indians—brought no lightening to Hester's load of pain that day, nor for many a succeeding one.