“He is not worse!” I exclaimed eagerly.
“No, Hester, he is not worse—but he is not strong, you know. Now go and put this away, and remember my words like a good child.”
When I took it upstairs Alice was in the room; and when she saw it, Alice wept on it, and exclaimed how like it was. Then she clasped it on my neck, and kissed me, and cried, and said how glad she was that I should have such a token of my mother; and then Alice, too, began to admonish me. “Oh! think of her sometimes, Miss Hester! Think how her young life and all her hopes were lost. It was no blame of her’s, my sweet young lady! Oh! think of your mother, dear child.” I was strangely shaken by all these admonitions. I did not know whether to reject this indignantly, or to sit down on the floor, and cry with mortification and annoyance. What occasion had they all to be afraid of my spirit or temper? I put away this beautiful little portrait, at last, with a vexed and sullen pain. Why did everybody preach to me on this text? I had never harmed my mother, and how could my circumstances possibly resemble those she was placed in? If this sweet, gentle smile of hers was to be a perpetual reproach to me, how could I have any pleasure in it? I was annoyed and vexed with everybody, and though in the rebound my heart clung to my father, I could not go to him to seek for sympathy. I wandered out into the garden, into the twilight, thinking with a deeper pity of his disappointed heart. I forgave him all his hard words and coldness, thinking mysteriously of the darkness which had fallen over all his life; and I could not be patient with my advisers who had been warning me by his example. How could they tell what he had suffered? What was it to them that he had looked for love, and had not found it? In imagination, I stood by my father’s side, vindicating and defending, and said to myself with indignant earnestness: “Nobody shall blame him to me.”
I was not even satisfied with Harry. He had not answered me plainly, and he had gone away. I paced up and down the springy, fragrant grass with short, impatient steps. I forgot that the night-wind was chill, and that I had nothing to protect me from it. I was not at all in a sweet or satisfactory mood of mind; and when I thought of the continual happy smile of the miniature, it rather chafed and annoyed than calmed me. While I was thus unhappily wandering in the garden, at issue with myself and every one around, I suddenly heard a step behind, and as suddenly felt a great, soft shawl thrown over me. I resisted my first impatient impulse to throw it off, and submitted to have myself wrapped in it, and a fold of it thrown over my head like a hood—the warmth and shelter it seemed to give, had something strangely pleasant in them. I was soothed against my will—and Harry drew my arm through his, and we continued our walk in silence. It was pleasant to be taken possession of so quietly—it was pleasant to feel that some one had a right to take care of me, whether I would or no.
And then Harry had all the talk to himself for a long time, though it was not the less agreeable on that account; and then my troubled mood went away, and I told him of Mr. Osborne’s present, and how they had been cautioning me on his behalf—and, indeed, with a confession of the temper I was in when he came to me—things were very different now. I perceived it was a beautiful dewy Autumn night, with a young moon in the sky, and pale silvery stars half lost in the mist of the Milky Way, and there was a breath of faint fragrance in the air, and one by one the lights were beginning to shine in the college windows—these friendly lights which I had watched so long—then my father’s lamp was lighted in the library. In the stillness and darkness we wandered through the garden, speaking little, finding no great necessity to speak. Out of all the agitation of the day, it happened to me now to become very quiet, and very happy; my heart beat quick, yet softly; I no longer felt the chill evening breath, or chafed at what had been said to me—what mattered all that had been said to me? When Harry and I were together, I knew nothing could ever step in between us. Nobody else understood me as he did. Nobody else, like me, trusted in him.
THE TENTH DAY.
IT was my marriage day.
I awoke when the morning was breaking with its chill harmony of tints in the east. I went to my window, to watch the song-thrushes rising upon the grey of the dawn; to look upon those long wide lines of clouds which seemed to stretch out their vain ineffectual barriers to keep down the rising day. I lingered till the early sunshine came down aslant upon the top-most boughs, and woke the birds to twitter their good-morrow—till the darkness in the garden paths underneath yielded and fled before this sweet invasion, and took a momentary refuge in the depths of dreary shadow, under the three elm trees at the boundary wall. No one was astir but I—there was not a sound but the chirp of little housewives in their leafy nests, up betimes to seek the day’s provisions. I saw nothing but the sky, the clouds, the early light, the dew glistening on the trees, and the sunshine touching the little deep-set windows of Corpus, and the morning mist just clearing from the brown outline of its wall.
It was my wedding-day—the first grand crisis of my life—and I had no lack of material for my thoughts; but I was not thinking as I knelt by the window in my white dressing-gown, vacantly looking out upon the rising day. My mind was full of a vague tumult of imagination. I myself was passive and made no exertion, but looked at the floating pictures before me, as I might have looked in a dream. My fancy was like the enchanted mirror in the story; out of the mist, scenes and figures developed themselves for a moment, and faded into vapor once more. The scenes were those of my girlish life; so many recollections of it came back upon me; so many glimpses I had of that careless sunshine, those unencumbered days! when I was a child at Cottiswoode, where I was the young lady of the Manor, and knew all these lands over which I looked in my frank girlish pride to be our own. Then the time when the new heir came—and then all those years and days which had gone over me here. I saw myself in the garden on which I was looking now with dreamy eyes—I saw myself in the corner of the window-seat looking out upon the twinkling lights of Corpus, and thinking to myself in my silence and solitude of the owners of these lights; and then Harry glided in upon my dreams, and I woke with a startling flush of consciousness to remember what day this was, and to know that I myself was a bride!
Yes, a bride! to go away from my father’s house in a few hours, never to come back to it again as to my home. To take farewell of all my girlish loneliness, and retirements, and wild fancies—to give up all the involuntary romancings and possibilities, the uncommunicated and self-contained life of my youth. I almost fancied, with a sudden shrinking and tremor, that this was the last hour of all my life in which I should be alone. I buried my face in my hands at the thought, though there was no one there to see me; I felt my face burn with a hot heavy glow. I had in me a restless sense of excitement, a reluctant heart, and yet a passive consciousness of certainty, of necessity, of something fixed and absolute, from which there was neither way nor means to recede. A thing which must be, always roused a little defiance, a little resistance; and the morning of a bridal is seldom a time of perfect happiness to anybody concerned. I lay with my head upon the cushion of my chair, kneeling before it. I tried to say my prayers, but my thoughts wandered off from the familiar words. My thoughts seemed wandering everywhere, and would not be composed into steady attention for a moment; and after I had said the words, I knew with a certain shock and distress that I had meant nothing by them, and that those childish sentences that claimed sincerity more than the most elaborate compositions could have done, were only a cover for a tumult of agitating thoughts. After this, in real distress at my involuntary mocking of prayer, I spoke aloud, and trembling, with my face still hidden, what plain words I could think of, asking for a blessing. “Oh, Lord, bless us, bless us.” I almost think that was all that I could keep my mind to; and after I had made this child’s outcry, I lay still, kneeling, hiding my face, in this little pause of vacant time, on the threshold of my fate.