My father looked at him with a smile, almost of scorn, but it soon settled into a fixed and stern gravity. “I will not grudge your pleasure—no,” he said, in the tone of a monitor who means to imply “it is all vanity,” “but I wish to have your assurance that I may trust your word. And you, Hester, are you nearly ready to go away from me?”
“Oh! papa, papa!” I cried wildly. Was he disposed to regret me at last?
“Nay, nay, child, we must have no lamentations,” said my father, “no weeping for the house you leave behind. On the verge of your life be sparing of your tears, Hester—if you have not occasion for them all one day or another you will be strangely favored. Are you ready? tell me? I have been hard upon you sometimes; I am not a man of genial temper, and what kindness was in me was soured. There—I apologize to you, Hester, for wounding your sensibilities—they distress me; and now answer my question.”
“I will be ready,” I said. This dreadful coldness of his always drove me into a sullen gloom.
“Very well, you have chosen each other,” said my father gravely; “and now you are about to begin your life. I am no dealer in good advice or moral maxims. I only bid you remember that it is of your own free will you bind yourselves in this eternal contract. This union, on which you are entering, has a beginning, but no end. Its effects are everlasting; you can never deliver yourself from its influences, its results. On the very heart and soul of each of you will be the bonds of your marriage; and neither separation, nor change, nor death, can obliterate the mark they will make. I do not speak to discourage you. I only bid you think of the life before you, and remember that you pursue it together of your own free choice.”
“We do not need that you should use such solemn words; they are not for us, father,” said Harry, advancing to my side, and drawing my hand within his arm. He was afraid that I could not bear this, when he saw me drooping and leaning on the chair from which I had just risen. He did not know what a spirit of defiance these words roused in me. “Hester trusts me and does not fear that I will make her life wretched; and, as for me, my happiness is secure when I claim the right thus to stand by her, and call her mine. There are no dark prognostics in our lot—think not so. We will fear God and love each other; and I desire to feel the bonds of my marriage in my very soul and heart. I do not care to have a thought that is not hers—not a wish that my wife will not share with me. Say gentler words to us, father! Bless us as you bless her in your heart. She is a young, tender, delicate woman. She trembles already; but you will not speak only those words which make her tremble more?”
My father stood by himself, stooping slightly, leaning his hands upon the table before him, and looking at us. Harry’s firm voice shook a little as he ended; his eyes were glistening, and there was a noble tender humility about his whole look and attitude, which was a very great and strange contrast to the cold, self-possessed man before him. I saw that my father was struck by it. I saw that the absence of any thought for himself—that his care and regard for me moved with a strange wonder my father’s unaccustomed heart. The young man’s generous life and love, the very strength of all the youthful modest power of which he would make no boast—his entire absence of offence, yet firm and quiet assertion of what was due to our young expectations and hopes, and perhaps the way in which we stood together, my arm in his, leaning upon him, impressed my father. He looked at us long, with a steady, full look; and then he spoke.
“You are right—it does not become me to bode evil to my own child, nor to her bridegroom. God bless you! I say the words heartily; and now leave me, I am weary, and will call you if I need you, Hester! I am not ill, do not fear for me.”
He took our hands, Harry’s and mine, and held them tightly within his own; then he said again, “Children, God bless you!” and sent us away.
We went up to the drawing-room together; Harry had spent almost all of the day with us for at least a week past, and even now he did not seem disposed to go away. When I told him that I had something to do, he bade me bring it and work beside him—he would like to see me working, so I did what he said—and while I was busy with Alice’s apron, he talked to me, for I did not speak a great deal myself. My mind was somewhat troubled by what my father had said. I had an uneasy sense of something doubtful and uncertain in our circumstances, of some event or mystery, though I could not tell what it was. I do not think I was pleased that Harry should be so willing to resign his name. It was one of those concessions that a woman does not like to have made to her. A true woman is far happier to receive rank than to confer it. When she is placed in these latter circumstances, she is thrown upon the false expedient of undervaluing herself, and what she has to bestow. I would much rather have felt that Harry was quite superior to me in the external matters—then we could have stood on our natural ground to each other, and I should have been proud of his name; but it was not a pleasant thought to me that he himself thought it unworthy, and that he was to adopt mine.