Hester · Chapter 41 (1/2)

XLI

A Night’s Vigil

They had been sitting through all the night, examining everything. Catherine was not a woman to be the slave of passion, even when that was the one delusion of her life. She got over it with a stern and fierce struggle before they reached the gate of the Grange, whither Hester followed her, trembling and half stupefied, unable either to resist or to think of any course of action for herself. Catherine paused at the gate, and looked round her with a curious quivering smile. “Here is where I saw him going away,” she said; “here is where I heard the last words from him.” She laughed; her heart was throbbing with the wildest suffering. She dashed her hands together with a violence of which she was unaware. “Such words!” she cried. It was scarcely one o’clock, but in summer there is little night, and already the air had begun to whiten with some premonition of day. She held up her face to the sky⁠—an old face, with so many lines in it, suddenly smitten as with a deathblow. Her eyes, under the curve of pain, which makes the eyelids quiver, looked up to the pale skies with what is the last appeal of humanity. For why?⁠—for why?⁠—an honest life, an honourable career, a soul that had shrunk from no labour or pain, a hand that never had been closed to human distress⁠—and repaid with misery at the end! Is there no reason in it when God’s creature lifts a face of anguish to His throne, and asks why? She paused on the threshold of her house, which was desolate, and made that mute appeal. It was beyond all words or crying, as it was beyond all reply. The other, who was the companion of her misfortune, stood beside her, looking, not at heaven, but at her. Hester had got far beyond thinking of her own share in it. Fatigue and excitement had brought sensation almost to an end. She was not angry with Catherine, who had thrown her off. Everything was blurred to her in a sense of calamity common and universal, of which Catherine seemed the sign and emblem. She made no interruption in the silence. And it was only when Catherine turned to go in that she was recalled to a recollection of Hester by her side.

“I think⁠—I had better go home⁠—to my mother,” the girl said, looking along the road with a dreamy terror. She was afraid of the dark, the solitude, the distance⁠—and yet what was there left to her but to go home, which she seemed to have quitted, to have fled from, with the idea of never returning, years ago. Catherine put out her hand and grasped her. She was far the more vigorous of the two. She could have carried the girl into the house, where she now half led, half dragged her. They found Harry already waiting for them in great bewilderment and distress. He could not account for the entrance of these two together, or for their apparent union⁠—but Catherine gave him no explanation. She made him sit down and tell her at once everything he knew of the state of affairs: and when this was made plain to her, she flew out upon him with a wrath that made Harry shrink.

“Why did you leave everything in one person’s hands? Is it not a partner’s business to look after his own interests? You have piled all upon one man’s shoulders. He has had everything to do. It has been too much for his mind⁠—it has turned his head. If it had been yours, what would have happened to you?”

“I have been saying all that to myself, Aunt Catherine,” Harry said, humbly; “but you know I am not clever, and poor Ned⁠—”

She stamped her foot on the floor. “Let me have none of your commiserations,” she cried. “There is nothing poor about it at least.”

She put Hester down at the table with pen and ink to write for her. She had not said a word of compassion to her; this had been the way she had chosen to express her feeling, whatever it was. When Harry had interposed, begging to be allowed to do it, she had stopped him summarily; and had gone on thus, collecting information, dictating to Hester, examining papers with Harry, asking a hundred questions, till morning was blue in the skies. When she saw by that strange light stealing in, how wan and wretched her two companions looked, Catherine rose from her chair. She was not tired⁠—her colour was as fresh and her eyes as bright as ever, her mind full of impatient energy; but the powers of the others had flagged.

“Go home and rest,” she said to Harry. “Have old Rule there tomorrow morning to meet me. I will come to the bank tomorrow⁠—I mean today⁠—at eight, before you open. Go home and go to bed.”

“Not if I can be of any use to you, Aunt Catherine⁠—or to poor Ned.”

Her foot made the same impatient movement upon the carpet. “You can be of no use,” she said, “dropping asleep as you are: go and rest; at your age few can do without sleep. And Hester, go too, you can do no more.” It was not without a half contempt that she saw the overpowering of their young faculties by that which to her was nothing. There are so many things in which youth has the best of it, that age has a right to its dolorous triumph when that comes. She went down with Harry to the door to let him out, glad of the movement, and stood in the early light for a moment breathing in the fresh air. The birds were all twittering, making their morning thanksgiving, expressing their joy in the new day. Catherine looked out sternly upon the light and gladness in which she had no share. She thought again⁠—should she ever think of anything else?⁠—of the last words she had heard, and of his figure hurrying away in the darkness, deaf to her cry. It was a relief to go in again, even to see the poor little lamp flickering, and the light bursting in at every crevice of the ineffectual shutters. When she reached the room in which they had been at work, Hester, who had answered as far as her faculties could to every call upon her, had dropped back into the great chair in which she had been sitting, and had fallen asleep in utter exhaustion. It was a curious scene. The windows were all closed, and candles upon the table still burning: but the light swept in from above, over the top of the shutters, which were not so high as the glass, and lighted up the room in a strange abstract way like a studio or a prison. In the midst of this pale and colourless illumination Hester’s white face, with the blue veins showing in it, in an attitude of utter abandonment and exhaustion, pillowed upon the dark cushions of the chair, was the central point; her hand with the pen in it was still on the table, the candles flickering with a yellow uncertain blaze. Catherine went and stood by her for a moment and looked at her. Tears were upon the girl’s long eyelashes, her mouth seemed still quivering, the faint sound of a sob came out of her sleep. She looked younger even than she was, like a child that had cried itself asleep. Catherine looked at her with many a thought. John Vernon’s daughter, who had all but ruined her father’s house, and had wounded her own pride, if not her heart, in the way women feel most⁠—and bitterer still, Edward’s love, she, for whom he had planned to betray her own better claims, for whom he would have deserted her, for whom he had ruined her, this time perhaps without remedy. With a strange bitterness she looked at the young creature thus fatally connected with all the miseries of her life. It was not Hester’s fault. The table was covered with proofs of her submission and obedience. If it was true that but for her perhaps Catherine’s power would never have been disturbed, it was also true that but for her Catherine might have been ruined irretrievably, she and all she prized most. But this argument did not tell in the mind of the woman who stood gazing at her, so much as the look of utter infantile weariness, the broken sound of the sleeping sob, the glitter upon her eyelashes. She stood for a long time, and Hester never moved. Then she took a shawl and covered the sleeper as tenderly as her mother could have done it, and began to pace softly up and down in that weird clearness. She did not even extinguish the candles, but left them there amid all the disarray of the table, the scattered papers, covered with notes and figures. The young can sleep, but not the old. The romantic interest would be with Hester worn out with wretchedness and weariness; but the heavier burden was her own.

Perhaps had the truth been pursued to its depths it gave a certain satisfaction to Catherine to find herself at last left to contemplate alone that uttermost and profoundest loss which was hers. The girl slept though her heart might be broken; the woman whose last hope he was, whose faith in human nature was wound up in him, who believed in Edward, but on earth in no one else, slept not, rested not, could not forget. She walked from end to end of the room, her hands clasped, her face in all its comely age paled in a moment to the pallor of an old woman. People had said that her colour was like a girl’s still: her eye was not dim nor her natural force abated. But over her there had come this chill in a moment. And where was he, the cause of it all? Flying fast across the country somewhere, directing his way, no doubt, to some port where he could get out of England. For what, oh Heaven, for what? Was there any sacrifice she would not have made for him? He might have had his Hester, his own house like the others, if that was what he wanted. There was nothing, nothing she would have grudged him! She would have asked no gratitude, made no conditions. He should have had his freedom, and his love⁠—whatever he wanted. All this swept through her mind as she went to and fro in that blue clearness of the morning which swept down upon her from the skies over all the weariness and disarray of the night. Catherine did not ask herself what she would have said, all things being well, if she had been asked to consent to the effacing of herself, which now it seemed would have been so easy a solution of the problem. It seemed to her now that in love she would have granted all he could ask for, and in pride she certainly would have done it, scorning to ask how he could resign her so easily. Love and pride combined wrung her heart between them now. Up and down, up and down with a soft monotonous motion she walked unsubdued while the others sank. Her old frame felt no weariness, her old heart was yet high. She could no more sink down and acknowledge herself beaten, than she could drop her head and sleep like Hester. With impatience and an energy unbroken she waited for the day.

Catherine’s carriage stood outside the bank at eight o’clock in the morning, to the wonder yet admiration of the town. “Old as she is, she’s an example to the young ones,” the people said: though there were darker rumours, too, that one of the young men had gone wrong, and that it was a sharp and speedy inquiry into this that had brought Catherine into the town without delay. The still closed door was opened to her by Harry, who was pale with his sleepless night and with the anxiety from which he could now find no escape. Behind Harry was old Rule, who came forward with a face like a mute at a funeral, his hands held up, his countenance distorted with grief and sympathy. “Oh, my dear lady!” he cried; “oh, Miss Catherine, has it come to this? Who could suppose that you and I should meet together a second time in this way?”

Catherine made a sudden gesture of impatience. “How do you know what the way is until you hear?” she said. She sat down at the table where she had sat so often. Her old look of command, the energy and life of old, seemed in her face; if it was paled and jaded, the others, who were more shaken still than she, had no eyes to see it. The three were deep in their work before the clerks appeared, one by one, all those who were of any weight in the place, or cared for Vernon’s, asking anxiously if anything was known of Mr. Edward. When they were met by the astonishing statement “Miss Vernon is here,” the announcement was received in different ways, but with great excitement. “Then all is right,” said one; but another shook his head. “All must be very wrong,” he said, “or Catherine Vernon would not be here.” It was the cashier who uttered these words. He was an old servant of the bank, and had been a junior at the time when old Rule was head clerk and Catherine the soul of everything. After a while he was sent for into the mysterious room towards which the attention of everyone was now directed. There old Mr. Merridew was shown in with solemnity on his brows, and various others of the fathers of the town. Even outside there seemed a little excitement about to the anxious spectators within. If it had been market-day there might have been a run on the bank. As it was, there were one or two little groups about, anxiously noting the grave faces of the visitors. All day long they came and went; the great books were all spread about upon the table within, and when the door opened sometimes one anxious face would be seen, sometimes another. One of the younger men passing the door saw Catherine herself explaining and urging something upon the chief of the Bank of England in Redborough, who had joined the conclave. It was clearly then, they all felt, a matter of life and death. Some wine and biscuits were taken in in the middle of the day, but no one went away for luncheon, no one had time or leisure for any such thought. Mr. Pounceby, who was Catherine’s solicitor, stayed by her all day long, while the others went and came. The clerks, when their day’s work was done, left this secret conclave still sitting. The cashier and the head clerk were detained after the others. The younger men went away with an alarmed sense that Vernon’s might never open again.