‘I will never do that.’
’But unless I am turned out homeless on to the
roads, I will stay here where he left me. I have
only one sure way of doing right, and that is to obey
him as closely as I can. He cannot order me now,
but he has left his orders. He has told me to
remain under this roof, and to call myself by his
name, and in no way to derogate from my own honour
as his wife. By God’s help I will do as
he bids me. Nothing that any of them can say
shall turn me an inch from the way he has pointed out.
You are good to me.’
‘I will try to be good to you.’
’You are so good to me that I can hardly understand
your goodness. Trusting to that, I will wait
here till he shall come again and tell me where and
how I am to live.’
After that the old Squire made no further attempt
in the same direction, finding that no slightest hollow
had been made on that other stone.
The Boltons Are Much Troubled
The condition of the inhabitants of Puritan Grange
during the six weeks immediately after the verdict
was very sad indeed. I have described badly the
character of the lady living there, if I have induced
my readers to think that her heart was hardened against
her daughter. She was a woman of strong convictions
and bitter prejudices; but her heart was soft enough.
When she married, circumstances had separated her
widely from her own family, in which she had never
known either a brother or a sister; and the burden
of her marriage with an old man had been brightened
to her by the possession of an only child,—of
one daughter, who had been the lamp of her life, the
solitary delight of her heart, the single relief to
the otherwise solitary tedium of her monotonous existence.
She had, indeed attended to the religious training
of her girl with constant care;—but the
yearnings of her maternal heart had softened even
her religion, so that the laws, and dogmas, and texts,
and exercises by which her husband was oppressed, and
her servants afflicted, had been made lighter for
Hester,—sometimes not without pangs of
conscience on the part of the self-convicted parent.
She had known, as well as other mothers, how to gloat
over the sweet charms of the one thing which in all
the world had been quite her own. She had revelled
in kisses and soft touches. Her Hester’s
garments had been a delight to her, till she had taught
herself to think that though sackcloth and ashes were
the proper wear for herself and her husband, nothing
was too soft, too silken, too delicate for her little
girl. The roses in the garden, and the goldfish
in the bowl, and the pet spaniel, had been there because
such surroundings had been needed for the joyousness
of her girl. And the theological hardness of the
literature of the house had been somewhat mitigated
as Hester grew into reading, so that Watt was occasionally
relieved by Wordsworth, and Thomson’s ‘Seasons’
was alternated with George Withers’s ‘Hallelujah.’
