But "Auntie Hester" was too late to see it.
CHAPTER XLI
And we are punished for our purest deeds,
And chasten'd for our holiest thoughts; alas!
There is no reason found in all the creeds,
Why these things are, nor whence they come to pass.
—OWEN MEREDITH
It was while Hester was at the Palace that Lord Newhaven died. She had perhaps hardly realized, till he was gone, how much his loyal friendship had been to her. Yet she had hardly seen him for the last year, partly because she was absorbed in her book, and partly because, to her astonishment, she found that her brother and his wife looked coldly upon "an unmarried woman receiving calls from a married man."
For in the country individuality has not yet emerged. People are married or they are unmarried—that is all. Just as in London they are agreeable or dull—that is all.
"Since I have been at Warpington," Hester said to Lord Newhaven one day, the last time he found her in, "I have realized that I am unmarried. I never thought of it all the years I lived in London, but when I visit among the country people here, as I drive through the park, I remember, with a qualm, that I am a spinster, no doubt because I can't help it. As I enter the hall I recall, with a pang, that I am eight-and-twenty. By the time I am in the drawing-room I am an old maid."
She had always imagined she would take up her friendship with him again, and when he died she reproached herself for having temporarily laid it aside. Perhaps no one, except Lord Newhaven's brothers, felt his death more than Dick and Hester and the Bishop. The Bishop had sincerely liked Lord Newhaven. A certain degree of friendship had existed between the two men, which had often trembled on the verge of intimacy. But the verge had never been crossed. It was the younger man who always drew back. The Bishop, with the instinct of the true priest, had an unshaken belief in his cynical neighbor. Lord Newhaven, who trusted no one, trusted the Bishop. They might have been friends. But there was a deeper reason for grief at his death than any sense of personal loss. The Bishop was secretly convinced that he had died by his own hand.
Lord Newhaven had come to see him, the night he left Westhope, on his way to the station. He had only stayed a few minutes, and had asked him to do him a trifling service. The older man had agreed, had seen a momentary hesitation as Lord Newhaven turned to leave the room, and had forgotten the incident immediately in the press of continuous business. But with the news of his death the remembrance of that momentary interview returned, and with it the instant conviction that that accidental death had been carefully planned.