"I wish you would not say Catherine Vernon and me!" said Hester passionately; "there is no likeness, none at all—none at all!"
But the old captain only laughed, and turned her attention to the sunset, which was lighting up all the western sky. The pines stood up against it like rigid black shadows, cut out against the golden light which was belted with flaming lines of crimson. Overhead the sky ascended in varying tints of daffodil and faint ethereal greenness up to the deep yet bright summer blue. The last gleams caught the yellow gorse upon the Common and turned every blossom into gold, and all the peaks of the Vernonry rose black against the radiance of the west.
"I wonder if the people up there have any hand in it?" said the old man. "I should like to think so. The old landscape painters, perhaps, that never had such colours to work with before. But in that case there would be nothing for me to do," he added with a laugh, "unless it was some small post about the gunneries. I was always fond of my guns."
To Hester this light suggestion, and the laugh with which it was accompanied, sounded profane. She shrank from anything which could take away the awe and mystery from death, just as the old man, who was so near the threshold, liked to familiarise himself with the thought of going over it, and still finding himself a recognisable creature there.
CHAPTER X.
A LOVER.
It was about this time that Hester became aware of a circumstance the most important that could possibly happen in a young woman's life. There had been no opportunity for her to become acquainted with the emulations and rivalship of other girls. Girls there were none about the Vernonry, nor did they abound in the neighbourhood, in the class from which alone her mother's visitors were chosen. Mrs. John, it has been said, belonged to a county family, a fact of which she was as proud as it is natural and becoming a woman should be. She did not altogether frown upon the few callers from the town who thought it only their duty to Miss Vernon, the most hospitable entertainer in the neighbourhood, to take a little notice of the pensioners, as the poor ladies at the Vernonry were called; but she did not encourage these benevolent visitors. "They are all ladies, and as good as any of us," Mrs. Redfern had been heard to say, who was the mayor's lady, and considered herself a leader of society; and it was a beautiful sight to see Mrs. John, in her old-fashioned dark room and simplest black gown, receiving with kind condescension, and endeavouring to set at her ease, this very fine lady, who considered herself to be paying the poor widow a quite undeserved honour. Mrs. John returned cards only in acknowledgment of Mrs. Redfern's visit, and there the acquaintance ended. So that Hester lost altogether the opportunity of knowing how ordinary girls looked and talked, and what was the object of their ambition. She had not even, which may surprise some people, come to any conclusion whatever in respect to her own personal appearance. Sometimes indeed, it cannot be denied, she had looked up in the midst of a novel, where all the young persons in whom the reader was supposed to take any interest were beautiful, and asked herself vaguely, with a blush, feeling ashamed of the question, whether she was pretty. But partly she was ashamed to give the time necessary to the solution of the problem, and partly she had not the data upon which to form her conclusions. There was a beautiful girl in Redborough in a humble position, upon whose claims everybody was agreed, but she was a queenly creature, with dark hair and blue eyes, and features of the most exquisite regularity, to whom Hester could not flatter herself that she bore the slightest resemblance. Nor was she like Ellen Vernon, with her lovely fairness, her look of wax and confectionary. Hester was not ethereal at all. There was no smallness about her, though she was slim as became her age. "The springy motion in her gait," the swift, light step which never tired, were beautiful in their way, and so was the eager outlook in her eyes, which seemed to contract and expand according to the degree of interest with which outside subjects moved them; but all this rather as exponents of the mind within than as merely physical features. Her hair had never grown long, not much longer indeed than was just necessary to twist into the knot behind which proved her to be grown up, and it remained full of curl and ready to break the smoothness of outline then thought necessary, on the smallest provocation. Her complexion was very variable, sometimes radiant with flutters of sudden colour, sometimes relapsing into a rose-tinted whiteness, more white than pale. Her features were not much to brag of; it was the play of prompt feeling in her face, the interest, the indignation, the pity, the perpetual change and vicissitude, that made it attractive, and on this point of course Hester could not judge. Seeing that her mouth was too large, and her nose too short, and her eyebrows too marked, she concluded that she was not pretty, and regretted it, though in her circumstances it mattered very little; her friends liked her just as well, whether or not; and she was never likely to produce the effect which the heroines in novels—even though comparatively plain—did produce. So she decided, with a little shame to think that she could have been disturbed about the matter, that it was not worth going into it further. All the same it is a pity, for the sake of young readers, that all the girls in novels, with so very rare exceptions—and Jane Eyre, if not pretty, probably was less plain than she thought, and certainly was agaçante, which is much more effective—should be beautiful and should have so much admiration and conquest. The girls who read are apt to wonder how it is that they have not the same fortune. Hester, for her part, had a fine scorn of feminine victories in this sort; they had never come within the possibilities of her lot. She never went to balls, nor met in society gangs of suitors contending for her smile; she did not believe in such things, and she thought she despised them.
It was in the very midst of this scepticism that she suddenly became aware of certain facts which, as we have said, were of the kind generally supposed to be most important in a young woman's life. Harry Vernon had been for some time alone in the splendour of the White House; Ellen, who had inflicted so deep a wound upon Hester's inexperienced girlhood, had married the previous summer, and in the lack of young ladies worthy to swell her train on that occasion, had selected Hester as one of her bridesmaids. Hester had never forgiven her frivolous kinswoman for that first disenchantment of her youth, but her mother, upon whom her exclusion from society and from all opportunities of distinguishing herself there weighed heavily, had insisted on the acceptance of the invitation, and Hester had figured accordingly in a white muslin frock, much too simple to match the toilette of the other bridesmaids in the pageant, greatly to her own disquiet. She was the only Vernon in it, and thus had been specially put forward, and Ellen, altogether unconscious of previous offence, had exhausted herself in demonstrations of affection to her young relative. It was she whom Harry led out in the morning's procession, and he had, in the intervals of his duty to his guests, come back again and again to her side. Hester, all inexperienced and unknowing, had paid little attention to these early indications. She did not identify him with his sister's guilt towards her. He was a weak, good-natured, genial fellow, and no more. If Harry did anything wrong, no doubt it was because of being led astray. In himself he wished nothing but good to any one. He was not clever, he was steady and stolid, and went through both work and pleasure without much discrimination as to which was which, carrying on both in the same way. When he began to come to the Vernonry evening after evening, Hester paid little attention to him. She would go out to walk with old Captain Morgan in the very face of the young visitor whose "intentions" all the community considered to be of such importance. Hester never thought of his "intentions." She had none herself in which he was anyhow involved. She was perfectly friendly when they met, but she did not care whether they ever met or not, and repulsed him as much as steady indifference can repulse an obstinate and not very clear-sighted young man. But this was not saying much. Harry knew as well as any one that his suit was a wonderful chance for his distant cousin; that Hester had no right to look for such good fortune as that of being the object of his affections. He knew that he was bringing in his hand everything a girl need wish for. And so far as Hester's course of action was concerned, though he was much irritated by it sometimes, he still felt that it was what she had a right to employ in the circumstances. It "drew a