have gone mad if the saving had not occupied her;
and a very dreary life poor Joel must have had whilst
she was scraping together the passage-money.
He still steadily and sternly disapproved the whole,
and when at two years’ end she had put together
enough to bring her and her boy home, and maintain
them there for a few weeks, he still refused to go
with her. The last thing he said was, “Remember,
Hester, what was the price of all the kingdoms of
the world! Thou wilt have it, then! Would
that I could say, my blessing go with thee.”
And he took his child, and held him long in his arms,
and never spoke one word over him but, “My poor
boy!”
I suppose I had better tell what we had been doing
all this time. Adela and I had come out, and
had a season or two in London, and my father had enjoyed
our pleasure in it, and paid a good deal of court
to our pretty Adela, because there was no driving Torwood
into anything warmer than easy brotherly companionship.
In fact, Torwood had never cared for anyone but little
Emily Deerhurst. Once he had come to her rescue,
when she was only nine or ten years old, and her schoolboy
cousins were teasing her, and at every Twelfth-day
party since she and he had come together as by right.
There was something irresistible in her great soft
plaintive brown eyes, though she was scarcely pretty
otherwise, and we used to call her the White Doe of
Rylstone. Torwood was six or seven years older,
and no one supposed that he seriously cared for her,
till she was sixteen. Then, when my father spoke
point blank to him about Adela, he was driven into
owning what he wished.
My father thought it utter absurdity. The connection
was not pleasant to him; Mrs. Deerhurst was always
looked on as a designing widow, who managed to marry
off her daughters cleverly, and he could believe no
good of Emily.
Now Adela always had more power with papa than any
of us. She had a coaxing way, which his stately
old-school courtesy never could resist. She
used when we were children to beg for holidays, and
get treats for us; and even now, many a request which
we should never have dared to utter, she could, with
her droll arch way, make him think the most sensible
thing in the world.
What odd things people can do who have lived together
like brothers and sisters! I can hardly help
laughing when I think of Torwood coming disconsolately
up from the library, and replying, in answer to our
vigorous demands, that his lordship had some besotted
notion past all reason.
Then we pressed him harder—Adela with indignation,
and I with sympathy—till we forced out
of him that he had been forbidden ever to think or
speak again of Emily, and all his faith in her laughed
to scorn, as delusions induced by Mrs. Deerhurst.
“I’m sure I hope you’ll take Ormerod,
Adela,” I remember he ended; “then at
least you would be out of the way.”
