But this mood was changed by the simplest of domestic arguments. Mrs. John, fresh and smiling in her black gown and her white cap, came down to breakfast. Not a suspicion of anything out of the ordinary routine was in Mrs. John's mind. It was a lovely morning; the sunshine pleased her as it did the flowers who hold up their heads to it and open out and feel themselves alive. Her chair was on the sunny side of the table, as it always was. She liked to sit in it and be warmed by it. She began to talk of all the little household things as she took her tea; of how the strawberries would soon be cheap enough for jam. That was the one thing that remained in Hester's mind years after. In a moment, while her thoughts were full of a final and sudden flight, that little speech about the jam and the strawberries brought her to herself. She felt herself to come back with a sudden harsh jarring and stumbling to solid ground. "The strawberries!" she said, looking at her mother with wild eyes of dismay as if there had been something tragic in them. "In about a fortnight, my dear, they will be quite cheap enough," Mrs. John said, with a contented nod of her head. In a fortnight! a fortnight!—a century would not mean so much. A fortnight hence what would the mother be thinking, where would the daughter be? Then there came to Hester another revelation as sudden, as all-potent as the first—that it was Impossible—that she must be mad or dreaming. What! fly, go away, disappear, whatever might be the word? She suddenly laughed out, her mother could not tell why, dropping a china cup, over which Mrs. John made many lamentations. It broke a set, it was old Worcester, worth a great deal of money. It had been her grandmother's. "Oh, my dear, I wish you would not be so careless!" But of anything else that was broken, or of the mystery of that sudden laugh which corresponded with no expression of mirth on Hester's face, Mrs. John knew nothing. Impossible! Why there was not a word to be said, not a moment's hesitation. It could not be—how could it be? Edward, a young man full of engagements, caught by a hundred bonds of duty, of work, of affection—why, if nothing else, of business—to whom it was difficult to be absent for a week, who had sometimes to run up and down to town in twenty-four hours—that he should be able to go away! He must mean something else by it, she said to herself; the words must bear a second signification. And she herself, who had no business, or duty, or tie of any sort except one, but that one enough to move heaven and earth, her mother—who in a fortnight would be making the jam if the strawberries were cheap enough. The thought moved her to laughter again, a laugh out of a strangely solemn, excited countenance. But this sudden revulsion of feeling had given the whole matter a certain grotesque mixture of the ludicrous: it demonstrated the impossibility of any such overturn with such a sarcastic touch. Hester said to herself that she must have been nearly making some tragical mistake, and compromising her character for good sense for ever. Of course it was impossible. Whatever he meant by the words he did not mean that.
After breakfast, when she was alone and had read the note over again, and could find no interpretation of it but the first one, and had begun to enter into the agonies of a mental struggle, Hester relieved the conflict by putting it down on paper—writing to Edward, to herself, in the first instance, through him. She asked him what he meant, what other sense there was in his words which she had not grasped? He go away! how could he, with Catherine trusting in him, with Vernon's depending upon him, with his work and his reputation, and so much at stake; and she with her mother? Did not he see that it was impossible? Impossible! He might say that she should have pointed this out before, but she had never realised it; it had been words to her, no more; and it was words now, was it not? words that meant something beyond her understanding—a test of her understanding; but she had no understanding it appeared. Hester thought that she would send this letter to await him when he reached the Grange, and then she would keep his appointment and find him—ready to laugh at her, as she had laughed at herself. She put it hurriedly into her desk when Harry appeared, with a guilty sense that Harry, if he saw it, would not only divine whom it was addressed to, but even what it said. But Harry was no warlock, and though he saw the hurried movement and the withdrawal of the papers, never asked himself what it was.
But after Harry was gone, she wrote no more. She gave one glance at the pages full of anxious pleading, of tender remonstrances, of love and perplexity; then closed the lid upon them, as if it had been the lid of a coffin, and locked it securely. They were obsolete, and out of date, as if her grandmother had written them. They had nothing to do with the real question; they were as fictitious as if they had been taken out of a novel. All that she had said was foolishness, like the drivelling of an idiot. Duty! she had asked triumphantly, how could he disengage himself from that? how could she leave her mother behind?—when, great heaven! all that he wanted was to shake duty off, and get rid of every tie. Harry's revelation brought such a contrast before her, that Hester could but stare at the two pictures with dumb consternation. On one side the bank in gloomy disarray, its ordinary course of action stopped, the business "all wrong," poor people besieging its doors for their money, the clerks bewildered, and not knowing what to do; and poor Harry faithful, but incapable, knowing no better than they. On the other, Edward, in all a bridegroom's excitement, with the woman he loved beside him, travelling far away into the night, flushed with pleasure, with novelty, with the success of his actions whatever they were, and with the world before him. It seemed to Hester that she saw the two scenes, although she herself would have to be an actor in one of them if it ever came to pass. She saw them to the most insignificant details. The bank (Vernon's—that sheet-anchor of the race, for which she herself felt a hot partisanship, a desire to build it up with the prop of her own life if that would do it), full of angry and miserable people cursing its very name—while the fugitives, with every comfort about them, were fast getting out of sight and hearing of everything that could recall what they had left. Deserter! traitor! Were these the words that would be used? and was he going to fly from the ruin he had made? That last most terrible question of all began to force itself to her lips, and all the air seemed to grow alive and be filled with darting tongues and voices and hissings of reply. And then it was that Hester felt as if her very hair began to writhe and twist in living horror about her shoulders, and that her eyes, wide with fright and terror, were becoming like Medusa's, things that might turn all that was living to stone.
But to think through a long summer day is a terrible ordeal, and many changes and turns of the mind are inevitable. It was a pitiless long day, imagine it! in June, when not a moment is spared you. It was very bright, all nature enjoying the light. The sun seemed to stand still in the sky, as on that day when he stopped to watch the slaughter in Ajalon; and even when he disappeared at last, the twilight lasted and lingered as if it would never be done.
Hester had put away her long letter of appeal, but she wrote a brief, almost stern note, which she sent to the Grange in the early evening. It ran thus:—
"Harry has told us that all is going wrong at the bank, that you are wanted urgently there, that only you can set things right. You cannot have known this when you wrote to me. I take it for granted this changes everything, but I will come to-night to the place you name."
She sent her note in the afternoon, and then waited, like a condemned criminal, faintly hoping still for a reprieve; for perhaps to know this would stop him still; perhaps he had not known it. She went out just after sunset, escaping not without difficulty from her mother's care.