She had always loved Phemie; loved her spite of her faults, her whims, her injustice, her variableness; and she tried, when she answered the letter, to convey some assurance of this love to Mrs. Stondon.
The letter had been forwarded to her by Mrs. Hurlford. She said—“I would have answered it in person, but I am ill, dear, and I cannot go to you. I hear your health is far from good, or I would pray you to come and see me. If you are strong enough to travel here, I should like to see you, as it is scarcely probable I shall ever be able to leave Hastings again.”
That was the errand which brought Mrs. Stondon to Hastings, to see her old friend, to look in her face, and touch her hand once more. That! Phemie sat and thought about it, till at length, turning to her uncle, she said—
“I think she must be back by this time. Shall we go and see?”
He took his hat in silence, and they passed out of the hotel side by side. The radiant beauty of old was gone, and yet many a man turned to look after the fair widow as she swept along the Parade, turning her eyes neither to right nor to left, but looking straight forward, like one who sees something away in the indefinite distance.
They had inquired at the house in Robertson Terrace where Miss Derno lived, if she were come in, but the servant said she had not yet returned.
“Very likely, ma’am, she is on the Parade. She generally goes out about this time in a Bath-chair, to listen to the music and to watch the tide coming in.”
Along the Parade, therefore, Phemie walked, as I have said, with her black dress trailing behind her, with her eyes fixed on every advancing group, on every approaching figure.
There had been a time when on that same Parade she felt dreamily, dangerously happy; and as she walked along, the past was very present with her, and the woman’s heart bled, remembering the sweetness of the hours gone by, and contrasting that sweetness with the bitterness of the hours which were then passing.
Lonely and widowed, childless and deserted, with the man who had loved her so truly dead, with the man whom she had loved so passionately married to another woman, whose son would hereafter be master of Marshlands—no wonder that the people who looked admiringly at Phemie’s stately walk, and turned back for another glance at her queenly figure, felt instinctively that the widow’s dress, that the sweeping garments, covered a sorrowful story; that the new comer had wept bitter tears, kept weary vigils, passed through much sorrow, and seen bitter suffering.