"What was Job's lesson? It was, 'Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him,'" Captain Morgan said.
"Oh, my Rowley!" cried the old lady, "I was wrong to say you were of little faith! It is you that are the faithful one, and not me. I am just nothing beside you, as I have always been."
The old captain took his wife's old hands in his, and gave her a kiss upon her faded cheek, and they smiled upon each other, the two who had been one for nearly sixty years. Meanwhile, Hester sitting by, looked on with large eyes of wonder and almost affright. She did not know what it meant. She could not divine what it could be that made them differ, yet made them agree. What harm could they do to the house that sheltered them, two old, good, peaceful people, who were kind to everybody? She gazed at them with her wondering young eyes, and did what she could to fathom the mystery: then retired from it, thinking it perhaps some little fad of the old people, which she had no knowledge of, nor means of understanding. The best people, Hester thought, when they grew old take strange notions into their heads, and trouble themselves about nothing; and of course they missed Roland. She broke in upon them in that moment of feeling, as soon as she dared speak for wonder, making an effort to amuse them, and bring them back to their usual ways; and that effort was not in vain.
[CHAPTER VI.]
DANCING TEAS.
It was shortly after the departure of Roland that a new era dawned for Hester in social life. Mrs. Algernon Merridew had felt from the moment of her return from Abroad that there was a work for her to do in Redborough. It was not the same as in her maiden days, when she had been at the head of Harry's household, wonderfully enfranchised indeed, but still somewhat under the awe of Aunt Catherine. But now she was altogether independent, and nobody had any right to make suggestions as to who she should invite or how she should entertain, to a married lady, with an admiring husband, not to speak of brother—and sisters-in-law, eagerly anticipating social elevation by her means, at her back. Ellen was not ill-natured. She was very willing to promote the happiness and prosperity of others, so long as she could do so without any diminution of her own—a negative goodness which the world at large is very well pleased to acknowledge as satisfactory. And it is not at all probable that the representations of Harry, or the good-humoured suggestions of Algernon inspired by Harry, to the effect that it would be sublimely good of her to take up and brighten the life of Hester, would have come to very much, had it not at the same time occurred to Ellen that Hester was the best assistant she could have on her own side of the house, in the indispensable work of making her Thursdays "go." Rather than that they should not "go," she would have embraced her worst enemy, had she possessed one; and she did not care to rely upon the Merridew girls, feeling as she did that she had condescended in entering their family, and that they must never be allowed to forget that they owed everything to her, and she nothing to them. But at the same time she required a feminine auxiliary, a somebody to be her right hand, and help to make everything "go." The result of her cogitations on this subject was that she set out for the Vernonry one afternoon in the little victoria, which Algernon, rather tremulous about the cost, had set up for her, and which, with the smart coachman who for the moment condescended to be gardener too, and the boy on the box who was of quite a fashionable size, looked a very imposing little equipage. Ellen lay back in her little carriage enveloped in her new sealskin, with a little hat of the same upon her head, and a muff also of the same, and her light hair looking all the brighter against that dark background, with bracelets enough to make a jingle wherever she went, and which she had to push up upon her arm from time to time, and a violet scent about herself and all her garments, at least the scent which is called violet at Piesse and Lubin's, which served her purpose. When she drove up in this state, it may be supposed what a flutter she made in the afternoon atmosphere. The inmates of the Vernonry rushed to their windows.
"It is that little doll Ellen, come to show off more of her finery," said one sister.
"I wonder why she comes here, when you set her down so, Matilda," said the other.