"They left this afternoon, it is supposed to go abroad," Harry said.
"Still with the lady? That is very strange," said Hester, with a little quiver in her lips.
"There is reason now to suppose that he—married her in the meantime."
Hester had grasped by accident the post of the gate. She was glad she had done so. It was a support to her, at least. Married her! It gave her no immediate pain in her astonishment, which was unspeakable. In the dusk Harry did not see her face. He had no conception of the real state of the case. The fact that Edward had been discovered with another woman had confused Harry and diverted the natural suspicions which had risen in his mind when he had found Hester so linked with Catherine after the discovery of Edward's flight. He watched her with a little alarm, wondering and anxious. But the only sign of any emotion was the tightening of her hand upon the iron gate.
"You will know," he said, "whether it will be best to say anything of this. If it will hurt her more, let it alone till the crisis is past."
"If it will hurt her—more? I do not think anything—can hurt her more."
"And you are nearly over-worn," he said, with a tender and pitying cadence in his voice. "I can't say spare yourself, Hester. You are the only one she deserves nothing from. She ought to feel that: if he is gone who owes her everything, yet you are standing by her, who never owed her anything."
Hester could not bear it any longer. She waved her hand to him and went in—into the house that was not hers, where there was no one who had a thought to bestow upon her. Where was there any one? Her mother loved her with all her heart, but had nothing to say to her in this rending asunder of her being. She thought she was glad that it was all happening in a house which was not her home, which after, as Harry said, the crisis was past, she might never need to enter again. She went up stairs, to the unfamiliar room in which she had spent the previous night. There she sat down in the dark on the bed, and looked at it all, passing before her eyes, like a panorama. For this was the only description that could be given. The conversation just recorded occurred over again, as if it had been in a book. "With a lady!" "They left this afternoon." "Reason to suppose that in the meantime—" And then this talk, suspended in the air as it seemed, came to a pause. And Hester, through the interval, saw all her own long stormy wooing, its sudden climax with so much that was taken for granted—"My only love!—and I am your only love." That was all true. Those agitated scenes, the dances that were nothing but a love duel from beginning to end, the snatches of talk in the midst of the music and tumult, the one strange blessed moment in the verandah at home, the meeting so tragical and terrible of last night. That was a sort of interlude that faded again, giving place to Harry's steady subdued voice—
"Married her in the meantime! Married her!"
Hester said these words aloud, with a laugh of incredulous dismay and mockery. The sound terrified herself when she heard it. It was Catherine's laugh made terrible with a sort of tragic wonder. Married her! Had there been no place for Hester at all, nothing but delusion from beginning to end?