IT was the first of September, a brilliant sunshiny autumn day. The light streamed fall into my chamber window, and upon the figure of Alice standing before it, with her white apron and her white cap, so intensely white under the sunshine. She was drawing out rolls of white ribbon, and holding them suspended in the light for me to see them. They were dazzling in their silken snowy lustre. It was difficult to make a choice while this bright day glorified them all.
The room was not in disorder, yet it was littered everywhere with articles of dress. On my dining-table was a little open jewel-case with the bit of gold chain and the little diamond pendant which I had worn the first time I saw Harry—and the jewels were sparkling quietly, to themselves, in the shade. There were other ornaments, presents from him, lying beside this; and they made a subdued glow in the comparative dimness of that corner of the room. On my bed, catching a glance of sunshine, lay my bridal dress, its rich full folds and white brocaded flowers glistening in the light. On the little couch near the window were all the pretty things of lace which graced my trousseau—the veil arranged by Alice’s own hand over a heap of rich purple silk which lay there for my approval, and which brought out to perfection the delicate pattern of the lace. And this was not all, for every chair held something—boxes of artificial flowers, so beautifully made, that it was impossible not to like them, exquisite counterfeits of nature—boxes of gloves, in delicate pale colors, fit for a bride—and last of all, this box of snowy-white ribbons, from which we found it so difficult to choose.
People speak of the vanity of all these bridal preparations. I have heard often how foolish was all this display and bustle about a marriage. I do not think it. It is the one day in a woman’s life when everything and every one should do her honor. As I stood with Alice in my bright room, half blinded with the intense light upon the white ribbons, I was pleased with all the things about me. I had license to like everything, and to be interested with all the additions to my wardrobe. Only once in one’s life can one be a bride. And all these white, fine, shining dresses—all these flowers and draperies of lace and pretty ornaments—they are not minutes of vanity always, but expressions of a natural sentiment—and they were very pleasant to me.
“I’ll come out of the light, Miss Hester—here, dear, you can see them better now: though I like to see them shining in the sunshine. There is a beauty! will this one do?”
“Do you think that is the best?” said I, “then I will take it, Alice; and some for your cap now; here is a satin one, and here is gauze, but I must choose them myself; and you are to have your silk gown made and wear it—you are not to put it away in your drawer.”
Alice looked down at her dark green stuff gown, hanging quite dead and unbrightened even in that fervid sunshine, and shook her head with a smile of odd distress. “It is much too fine for me, I was never meant to be a lady,” said Alice, “but I’d wear white like a girl, sooner than cross you, my darling; and that is for me—bless your dear heart! that is a ribbon fit for a queen!”
“But the queen is not to be here,” said I, “so you must wear it, Alice; and I do not want you to be without your apron. I like that great white apron. I wonder if I will like to lay down my head upon it, Alice, when I am old?”
“When you are old, Alice will not be here, Miss Hester,” she said, with a smile; “you are like other young things, you think you will not be a young lady when you are married; but my darling, married or not married, the years take their full time to come.”
“Ah, I will never be a girl again,” said I, sighing with one of the half mock, half real sentimentalities of youth. “Alice, do you think, after all, my father is pleased?”
“I think,” she began, but she stopped and paused, and evidently took a second thought; “yes, Miss Hester, I think he is pleased,” she said, “he has every reason—yes, dear, don’t fear for your papa; it is all good—all better than anybody could have planned it—I know it is.”
“Do you know that you speak very oddly sometimes, Alice,” said I; “you speak as if you were a prophet, and knew something about us, that we did not ourselves know.”
“Don’t you think such things, Miss Hester,” said Alice, hurriedly, and her face reddened, “as I am no gipsy nor fortune-teller either, not a bit.”
“Are you angry?” said I, “angry at me, Alice?” I was a little surprised, and it was quite true that two or three times I had been at a loss to know what she meant.
“Angry at you—no, darling, nor never was all your life,” said Alice, “for all you have your own proud temper, Miss Hester—for I never was one to flatter. Will I send the box away? look, dear, if you have got all.”
I had got all that we wanted, and when she went away, I drew my chair to the window, and began a labor of love. Alice never changed the fashion of her garments, and while she labored night and day for me, I was making a cap for her, and braiding a great muslin apron, which she was to wear on the day. I was very busy with the apron, doing it after a fashion of my own, and in a pattern which Alice would think all the more of because it was my own design, though I am not very sure that it gained much in effect by that circumstance. I drew my seat near to the open window, into the sunshine, and began to work, singing to myself very quietly but very gladly, as the pattern grew under my fingers. My heart rejoiced in the beautiful day, and in its own gladness; and I do not know that this joy was less pleasant for the tremor of expectation, and the flutter of fear, which my strange new circumstances brought me. I glanced from the window, hearing a step in the garden, and there was Harry, wandering about looking up at me.
When he caught my eye, he began to beckon with all his might, and try to get me to come down to him. I had seen him already this morning, so I knew it was not because he had anything to say to me, and I shook my head, and returned to my work. Then he began to telegraph to me his despair, his impatience, his particular wish to talk to me—and kept me so occupied smiling at him, and answering his signals, that the apron did not make much more progress than if I had gone down. At last, however, Alice came back, and I looked from the window no more, but went on soberly with my occupation. I had no young friends to come to see my pretty things, so Alice began to put them away.
A fortnight was gone, since that day when we were engaged, as Alice called it; and in a week, only a week now, the other day was to come.
“You have never told me yet, Miss Hester,” said Alice, as she passed behind me, “where you are going, after—”
I interrupted her hurriedly. I was frightened for a mention of this dreadful ceremony, in so many words; and the idea of going away was enough to overset my composure at any time—I who had never left home before, and such a going away as this!
“We are to go abroad,” I answered hurriedly; “but only for a few weeks, and then to have a house in Cambridgeshire, if we can find one very near at hand, Alice.”
“Yes,” answered Alice.
There was so much implied in this “yes,” it seemed so full of information and consciousness, as if she could tell me more than I told her, that I was annoyed and almost irritated. In the displeasure of the moment I could not continue the conversation; it was very strange what Alice could mean by these inferences, and then to look so much offended when I spoke to her about them. I saw that Harry was still in the garden, looking up, and beckoning to me again, when he saw me look out—so I put away my work, and went down to hear what he had to say.
He had not anything very particular to say; but it was not disagreeable, though there was little originality in it, and I had heard most of it before; and he helped me with some flowers in the green-house which had been sadly neglected, and we cut some of the finest of them in the garden, for the vase upon my little table upstairs; and he told me I ought to wear flowers in my hair, and he said he would bring me a wreath of briony. “I should like to bind the beautiful clustered berries over those brown locks of yours, Hester,” he said. “I will tell you some day how I came to know the briony first, and fell in love with it—it was one of the first incidents in my life.”
“Tell me now then,” said I.
But he shook his head and smiled. “Not now—wait till I can get a wreath of it fresh from a Cambridgeshire hedgerow, and then I will tell you my tale.”
“I shall think it is a tale about a lady, if you speak of it so mysteriously,” said I, and when I turned to him I saw he blushed. “It was so then,” I said, with the slightest pique possible. I was not quite pleased.
“There never was but one in the world to me, Hester,” he said, and I very soon cast down my eyes, “so it could not be about a lady, unless it happened in a dream, and the lady was you.”
I looked at him with a strange perplexity, he was almost as hard to understand as Alice was—but he suddenly changed the conversation, and made me quite helpless for any further controversy by talking about what we were to do next week, after—I was always silenced in a moment by a reference to that.
Then my father looked out from the library window and called to us. My father had been a good deal occupied with Harry, and I pleased myself with thinking that he began to like him already. They seemed very good friends, and Harry showed him so much deference and was so anxious to follow his wishes in everything, that I was very grateful to him; and all the more because I thought it was from his own natural goodness he did this, fully more than from a wish to please me.
We went in together to the library. My father was reading papers, some of those long straggling papers tied together at the top, which always look so ominous, and are so long-winded. His book was put away, and instead he had pen and ink and his great blotting-book before him. My father had been writing much and reading little, during these two weeks; the occupation of his life was rudely broken in upon by these arrangements, and though I could not understand how it was that he had so much business thrown upon him, the fact seemed to be certain. There was more life even in the room, it was less orderly, and there was a litter of papers upon the table. My father looked well, pale, and self-possessed, but not so deadly calm, and he called Harry to him with a kind and familiar gesture. I had not yet overcome the embarrassment which I always felt when I was with them both; and when I saw that my father was pointing out sundry things in the papers to Harry, that they were consulting about them, and that I was not a necessary spectator, I turned over some books for a few minutes, and then I turned to go away. When he saw me moving towards the door, my father looked up. “Wait a little, Hester, I may want you by and by,” he said. I was obedient and came back, but I did not like being here with Harry. I did not feel that our young life and our bright prospects were fit to intrude into this hermit’s room, and I wondered if it would look drearier or more solitary—if my father would feel any want of me in my familiar place, when I went away.
But I had very little reason to flatter myself that he would miss me. He conducted all these matters with a certain satisfaction, I thought. He was glad to have me “settled;” and though I think he had been kinder than usual ever since that night, he had never said that it would grieve him to part with me, or that the house would be sad when I was gone.
There was a pause in their consultation. I heard, for I did not see, because I had turned to the window, and they were behind me, and then my father said—“Come here, Hester, we have now talked together of these arrangements—sit down by me, here, and see if it will not distress you too much to hear the programme of the drama in which you are to be a principal actor—here is a chair, sit down.”
I turned, and went slowly to the seat he pointed out to me. I was very reluctant, but I could not disobey him, not even though I saw Harry’s face bending forward eagerly to know if this was disagreeable to me.
“In the first place,” said my father with a smile, “it is perhaps well that Hester is no heiress, as she once was supposed to be. Had my daughter inherited the family estate, her husband must have taken her name, and that is a harder condition than the one I stipulated for.”
As there was no answer for a moment, I glanced shyly under the hand which supported my head at Harry. To my great surprise, he seemed strangely and painfully agitated. There was a deep color on his face. He did not lift his eyes, but shifted uneasily, and almost with an air of guilt, upon his chair; and he began to speak abruptly with an emotion which the subject surely did not deserve.
“Hester is worth a greater sacrifice than that of a name like mine,” he said; “it would give me pleasure to show my sense of the honor you do me by admitting me into your family. I have no connexions whom I can gain by abandoning my own name, and I have no love for it, even though Hester has made it pleasanter to my ear. Let me be called Southcote. I would have proposed it myself had I thought it would be agreeable to you. You have no son. When you give Hester to me, make me altogether your representative. I will feel you do me a favor. Pray let us settle it so.”
My father looked at him with more scrutinizing eyes—“When I was your age, young man, not for all the bounties of life, would I have relinquished my name.”
Once more Harry blushed painfully. I too, for the moment, would rather that he had not made this proposal, yet how very kind it was of him! and I could not but appreciate the sacrifice which he made for me.
“Your name was the name of a venerable family, distinguished and dear to you,” he said, after a little pause. “I am an orphan, with no recollections that endear it to me. Nay, Mr. Southcote, do not fear, I have no antecedents which make me ashamed of it; but for Hester’s sake and yours, I will gladly relinquish this name of mine. If you do not wish it, that is another question.”
There was a suppressed eagerness in his tone which impressed me very strangely. I could understand how, in an impulse of generosity, he could make the proposal; but I could not tell why he should be so anxious about it. It was very strange.
“I have not sufficient self-denial to say that,” said my father. “I do wish it. It will gratify me more than anything else can, and I do not see indeed why, being satisfied on every other point, I should quarrel with you for proposing to do what I most desire; but regard for his own name is so universal in every man, I confess in other circumstances I should have been disposed to despise the man who accepted my heiress and her name with her. You, of course, are in an entirely different position. I can only accept your offer with gratitude. It is true, as you say, I have no son—you shall be my representative—yes, and I will be glad to think,” said my father, with a momentary softening, and in a slow and lingering tone, “that she is Hester Southcote still.”
Ah, those lingering touches of tenderness, how they overpowered me! I did not wish to let my father see me cry, like a weak girl; but I put my hands on my eyes to conceal my tears. He did care for me, though he expressed it so little; and when he said that, I was glad too, that I was still to bear my father’s name—glad of this one proof of Harry’s regard, and proud of the self-relinquishment—the devotion he showed to me.
There was a considerable pause after that—we did not seem at our ease, any one of us, and when I glanced up again, Harry, though he looked relieved, was still heated and embarrassed, and watched my father eagerly. He cleared his voice a great many times, as if to speak—changed his position, glanced at me; but did not seem able to say anything after all. My father had a faint smile upon his face—though it was a smile, I did not think it a pleasant one—and I was quite silent, with a vague fear of what was to follow.
But nothing followed to confirm my alarm. When my father spoke again it was quite in his usual tone.
“Then, with this one change—which, by the bye, requires our instant attention as to the papers and everything necessary—our arrangements stand as before; and you leave Cambridge on Tuesday, and return in a month, either here or to some house which Mr. Osborne may find for you. Osborne is your agent, I understand? You leave these matters in his hands? Now, I must know the hour you will leave me—how you are to travel, and where you will go first; and if I may depend certainly on the time of your return?”
“We will fix it for any time you choose,” said Harry, quickly and with an air of relief. “I will be only too proud to bring Hester home, and to see her in her own settled house; but you must give us our moon; we have a right to that—I have a right to that. You will not grudge us our charmed holiday. I shall be content to have no other all my life.”
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.
“You are very grave, Hester; are you thinking of what your father said?” he asked me at last.
“I do not quite know what I am thinking of,” I said, with a faint sigh.
“No, it is a summer cloud,” said Harry, “something floating over this beautiful sky of our happiness; but it will not last, Hester. I know you may trust yourself; your sweet young life and all its hopes. I think you need not fear to trust them with me.”
“I have no fear—it is not that,” said I; “do not heed me. I cannot tell what it is that troubles me.”
He bent down upon his knee to see my face, which was stooping over Alice’s apron, and he put his hand upon mine, and arrested my fingers, which were playing nervously with the braid. “Do you remember the compact you made with me, Hester? ‘Cannot tell’ is for other people; but what troubles you should trouble me also.”
“Nay, I would not have that,” said I, hurriedly, “that would be selfish, but indeed I don’t know what it is—I rather feel as if there was something which I did not know—as if there was a secret somewhere which somebody ought to tell me; I cannot guess what or where it is, but I think there is surely something. Do you know of anything, Harry?”
He continued to kneel at my knee, holding my hand, and looking up in my face, and I gazed at him wistfully, wondering to see the color rise to his very hair. He did not remove his eyes from me, but what could it be that brought that burning crimson to his face?
But I did not wait for his answer. In my womanish foolishness, afraid that I was grieving him, I took away the opportunity, that opportunity—what misery it might have saved me: and spoke myself, wearing the time away till he had quite recovered himself. “I do not think you would hide anything from me, Harry, which I ought to know; my father scarcely knows that I am a woman now; it is hard for him to get over the habit of thinking me a child, but you are no older than I am; we are equal then—and you would not use me as if I was unfit to know all that concerns us both.”
“We are equal then,” he said, repeating my words hurriedly, but without any answer to the meaning of them; “but I do not think we are nearly equals in anything else, Hester. Your sincere heart—oh, if I begin to speak of that, I will soon make myself out a poor fellow, and I would rather you did not think me so just yet; equal! why I am justly entitled to call myself your superior in that particular at least, for do you know I am two or three years older than you are?”
“I was not speaking of that,” said I gravely.
“I know you were not speaking of that,” said Harry, “you were speaking of the summer cloud. See, Hester, there is another on the sky; look how it floats away with the sunshine and the wind. There shall be neither secret nor mystery between us, trust me. I want your help and sympathy too much for that.”
“There shall be!” I said to myself in an under tone. I was quite satisfied; this promise was fortunate, and Henry did not say: “there is not.”
But at this moment we heard the door open below, and Mr. Osborne’s voice asking for my father.
I rose in great haste and ran up stairs. I forgot everything of more importance, and only remembered how embarrassed and uncomfortable I should be, if Mr. Osborne came in and found us together. I went back again to my room with my heart beating quick. The vague and uncertain doubtfulness which had taken possession of me did not prompt any distrust of Harry. It was not that I found that he was deceiving me, or that I dreamed of such a possibility. The utmost length to which my suspicions went, was to a little jealousy of something which I did not know, and was not told of, and when I reflected over it in my own room, I found no particular foundation for these doubts of mine; but still I should have much preferred that Harry had not offered to take our name. It was generous like himself. I was no heiress that he should have done it for the land, or for the rank I brought him. Instead of that, he did it for pure love; but I was perverse still, and I was not pleased.
When I went down stairs, I found that Mr. Osborne was to dine with us, and that Harry had not gone away; and after a little time, I found that I was very glad of Mr. Osborne’s presence at table. My father spoke very little, and seemed more abstracted than usual. Harry was almost talkative, on the contrary, but he was less easy than I had seen him; and as for me, I said nothing, but watched them with a strange fascination, as if I was the spectator of some drama of which I must find out the secret. It was a relief to see Mr. Osborne’s uninterrupted spirits, his usual manner and bearing. I wonder if they are happier than other people, those men who have nobody to disturb their equanimity, no one to put them out of temper, or break their hearts—but at any rate, it was a comfort to look at Mr. Osborne, and to see, whatever change might be in us, that there was none in him.
After dinner, Harry left us, though only for a time, and when I had been by myself in the drawing-room for nearly an hour, Mr. Osborne came in, and approached me with something in his hand. When he opened it, it turned out to be another little gold chain with something hanging from it, very much like my little diamond ornament; but this was a very small miniature of a very young sweet face, so smiling, and loving, and gentle, that it was pleasant to look at it. “I think this is the fittest present I can make you,” said Mr. Osborne. “You know who it is, Hester?”
“No,” I said; though from the look he gave me, I guessed at once.
“It is very like her,” he said in a low voice; “like what she was when I had a young man’s fancy for that pretty sweet young face. No, Hester, you need not glance at me so wistfully, she did not break my heart; but I love you the better, my child, that she was your mother.”
“And this is my mother!” I said. It was younger than me, this innocent simple girlish face—my heart was touched by its gentleness, its happiness, the love and kindness in its sweet eyes—my tears began to fall fast upon the jewelled rim—this was my mother! and it was not a face to make any one unhappy. I did not think of thanking Mr. Osborne, I only thought of her.
“She must have been very happy,” I said, softly; we sank our voices speaking of her.
“She was very happy then,” said Mr. Osborne; “the sunshine was her very life, Hester; and when it faded away from her, she died.”
These words recalled me to myself. I could not permit him to go on, perhaps to blame my father—so I interrupted him to thank him very gratefully for his present.
“She used to wear an ornament like this; and the miniature is from a sketch I myself made of her in her first youth,” said Mr. Osborne. “I know your father has no portrait, but there is one in the possession of her friends.”
“Her friends! has she friends living?” I asked eagerly; “I do not know what it is to have relations. I wonder if they know anything of us.”
“You have one relation at least, Hester,” said Mr. Osborne; “is it possible, after all his attempts to become acquainted with you, that you have never given a kind thought to your cousin?”
“I do not know my cousin, sir,” I answered rather haughtily, “I do not wish to know him; we have nothing in common with each other, he and I.”
“How do you know that?” said my companion. “Hester, when you do know him, do him justice. I have seen Edgar Southcote; I know few like him, and he ill deserves unkindness, or distrust, or resentment at your hands. Now hear me, Hester. I have given you this portrait of your mother, because I loved her in my youth; and because you are as dear to me as if you were my own child; but I give it you also as a charm against the cruel injustice, the suspicion, and the pride of your race. A false conception of her motives, obstinately