Hester Is Lured Back
On the Monday morning, Mr. William Bolton, the barrister, who had much
to his own inconvenience remained at Cambridge for the purpose of
carrying out the scheme which he had proposed, went over to Folking in a
fly. He had never been at the place before, and was personally less well
acquainted with the family into which his sister had married than any
other Bolton. Had everything been pleasant, nothing could have been more
natural than such a visit; but as things were very far from pleasant
Hester was much surprised when he was shown into her room. It had been
known to Robert Bolton that Caldigate now came every day into Cambridge
to see either his lawyer or his father, and that therefore he would
certainly not be found at home about the middle of the day. It was
henceforth to be a law with all the Boltons, at any rate till after the
trial, that they would not speak to, or if possible see, John Caldigate.
Not without very strong cause would William Bolton have entered his
house, but that strong cause existed.
'Oh, William! I am so glad to see you,' said Hester, rushing into her
brother's arms.
'I too am glad to see you, Hester, though the time is so sad to us all.'
'Yes; yes. It is sad;--oh, so sad! Is it not terrible that there should
be people so wicked, and that they should be able to cause so much
trouble to innocent persons.'
'With all my heart I feel for you,' said the brother, caressing his
young sister.
With quickest instinct she immediately perceived that a slight emphasis
given to the word 'you' implied the singular number. She drew herself
back a little, still feeling, however, that no offence had as yet been
committed against which she could express her indignation. But it was
necessary that a protest should be made at once. 'I am so sorry that my
husband is not here to welcome you. He has gone into Cambridge to fetch
his father. Poor Mr. Caldigate is so troubled by all this that he
prefers now to come and stay with us.'
'Ah, indeed! I dare say it will be better that the father and the son
should be together.'
'Father and son, or even mother and daughter, are not like husbands and
wives, are they?'
'No; they are not,' said the barrister, not quite knowing how to answer
so very self-evident a proposition, but understanding accurately the
line of thought which had rendered it necessary for the poor creature
to reassert at every moment the bond by which she would fain be bound
to the father of her child.
'But Mr. Caldigate is so good,--so good and gentle to me and baby, that
I am delighted that he should be here with John. You know of all this.'
'Yes, I know, of course.'
'And will feel all that John has to suffer.'
'It is very bad, very bad for everybody concerned. By his own showing,
his conduct----'
'William,' said she, 'let this be settled in one word. I will not hear a
syllable against my husband from you or any one else. I am delighted to
see you,--I cannot tell you how delighted. Oh, if papa would come,--or
mamma! Dear, dear mamma! You don't suppose but what I love you all!'
'I am sure you do.'
'But not from papa or mamma even will I hear a word against him. Would
Fanny,'--Fanny was the barrister's wife--'let her people come and say
things behind your back?'
'I hope not.'
'Then, believe that I can be as stout as Fanny. But we need not quarrel.
You will come and see baby, and have some lunch. I am afraid they will
not be here till three or four, but they will be so glad to see you if
you will wait.'
He would not wait, of course; but he allowed himself to be taken away to
see baby, and did eat his lunch. Then he brought forward the purport of
his mission. 'Your mother is most anxious to see you, Hester. You will
go and visit her?'
'Oh, yes,' said Hester, unaware of any danger. 'But I wish she would
come to me.'
'My dear girl, as things are at present that is impossible. You can
understand as much as that. There must be a trial.'
'I suppose so.'
'And till that has been held your mother would be wrong to come here. I
express no judgment against any one.'
'I should have thought mamma would have been the first to support
me,--me and baby,' she said sobbing.
'Certainly, if you were homeless--'
'But I am not. My husband gives me a house to live in, and I want none
other.'
'What I wish to explain is that if you were in want of anything--'
'I am in want of nothing--but sympathy.'
'You have it from me and from all of us. But pray, listen for a moment.
She cannot come to you till the trial be over. I am sure Mr. Caldigate
would understand that.'
'He comes to me,' she said, alluding to her father-in-law, and not
choosing to understand that her brother should have called her husband
'Mr. Caldigate.'
'But there can be no reason why you should not go to Chesterton.'
'Just to see mamma?'
'For a day or two,' he replied, blushing inwardly at his own lie. 'Could
you go to-morrow?'
'Oh no;--not to stay. Of course I must ask my husband. I'm sure he'll
let me go if I ask it, but not to-morrow. Why to-morrow?'
'Only that your mother longs to see you.' He had been specially
instigated to induce her to come as soon as possible. 'You may imagine
how anxious she is.'
'Poor mamma! Yes;--I know she suffers. I know mamma's feelings. Mamma
and I must, must, must quarrel if we talk about this. Of course I will
go to see her. But will you tell her this,--that if she cannot speak of
my husband with affection and respect it will be better that--she should
not mention him at all. I will not submit to a word even from her.'
When he took his departure it was settled that she should, with her
husband's permission, go over to Chesterton for a couple of nights in
the course of the next week; but that she could not fix the day till she
had seen him. Then, when he was taking his departure and kissing her
once again, she whispered a word to him. 'Try and be charitable,
William. I sometimes think that at Chesterton we hardly knew what
charity meant.'
That evening the proposed visit to Chesterton was discussed at Folking.
The old man had very strongly taken up his son's side, and was of
opinion that the Boltons were not only uncharitable, but perversely
ill-conditioned in the view which they took. To his thinking, Crinkett,
Adamson, and the woman were greedy, fraudulent scoundrels, who had
brought forward this charge solely with the view of extorting money. He
declared that the very fact that they had begun by asking for money
should have barred their evidence before any magistrates. The oaths of
the four 'scoundrels' were, according to him, worth nothing. The scrap
of paper purporting to be a copy of the marriage certificate, and the
clergyman's pretended letter, were mere forgeries, having about them no
evidence or probability of truth. Any one could have written them. As to
that envelope addressed to Mrs. Caldigate, with the Sydney postmark, he
had his own theory. He thought but little of the intercourse which his
son acknowledged with the woman, but was of opinion that his son 'had
been an ass' in writing those words. But a man does not marry a woman by
simply writing his own name with the word mistress prefixed to it on an
envelope. Any other woman might have adduced the envelope as evidence of
his marriage with her! It was, he said, monstrous that any one should
give credence to such bundles of lies. Therefore his words were gospel,
and his wishes were laws to Hester. She clung round him, and hovered
over him, and patted him like a very daughter, insisting that he should
nurse the baby, and talking of him to her husband as though he were
manifestly the wisest man in Cambridgeshire. She forgot even that little
flaw in his religious belief. To her thinking at the present moment, a
man who would believe that her baby was the honest son of an honest
father and mother had almost religion enough for all purposes.
'Quite right that you should go,' said the old man.
'I think so,' said the husband, 'though I am afraid they will trouble
her.'
'The only question is whether they will let her come back.'
'What!' exclaimed Hester.
'Whether they won't keep you when they've got you.'
'I won't be kept. I will come back. You don't suppose I'd let them talk
me over?'
'No, my dear; I don't think they'll be able to do that. But there are
such things as bolts and bars.'
'Impossible!' said his son.
'Do you mean that they'll send me to prison?' asked Hester.
'No; they can't do that. They wouldn't take you in at the county jail,
but they might make a prison of Puritan Grange. I don't say they will,
but they might try it.'
'I should get out, of course.'
'I daresay you would; but there might be trouble.'
'Papa would not allow that,' said Hester. 'Papa understands better than
that. I've a right to go where I like, just as anybody else;--that is,
if John tells me.' The matter was discussed at some length, but John
Caldigate was of opinion that no such attempt as the old man had
suggested was probable,--or even possible. The idea that in these days
any one should be kept a prisoner in a private house,--any one over whom
no one in that house possessed legitimate authority,--seemed to him to
be monstrous. That a husband should lock up his wife might be possible,
or a father his unmarried and dependent daughter; but that any one
should venture to lock up another man's wife was, he declared, out of
the question. Mr. Caldigate again said that he should not be surprised
if it were attempted; but acknowledged that the attempt could hardly be
successful.
As Hester was anxious to make the visit, it was arranged that she should
go. It was not that she expected much pleasure even in seeing her
mother;--but that it was expedient at such a time to maintain what
fellowship might still be possible with her own family. The trial would
of course liberate them from all their trouble; and then, when the trial
should be over, it would be very sad if an entire rupture between
herself and her parents should have been created. She would be true to
her husband; as true as a part must be to the whole, as the heart must
to the brain. They two were, and ever would be, one. But if her mother
could be spared to her, if she could be saved from a lasting quarrel
with her mother, it would be so much to her! Tears came into the eyes
even of the old man as he assented; and her husband swore to her that
for her sake he would forgive every injury from any one bearing the name
of Bolton when all this should be over.
A day was therefore fixed, and a note was written, and on the last day
of February she and her baby and her nurse were taken over to Puritan
Grange. In the meantime telegrams at a very great cost had been flying
backwards and forwards between Cambridge and Sydney. William and Robert
Bolton had determined among them that, at whatever expense to the
family, the truth must be ascertained; and to this the old banker had
assented. So far they were right, no doubt. If the daughter and sister
was not in truth a wife,--if by grossest, by most cruel ill-usage she
had been lured to a ruin for which there could be no remedy in this
world,--it would be better that the fact should be known at once, so
that her life might be pure though it could never again be bright. But
it was strange that, with all these Boltons, there was a desire, an
anxiety, to prove the man's guilt rather than his innocence. Mrs. Bolton
had always regarded him as a guilty man,--though guilty of she knew not
what. She had always predicted misery from a marriage so distasteful to
her; and her husband, though he had been brought to oppose her and to
sanction the marriage, had, from the moment in which the sanction was
given, been induced by her influence to reject it. Robert Bolton, when
the charge was first made, when the letter from the woman was first
shown to him, had become aware that he had made a mistake in allowing
this trouble to come upon the family; and then, as from point to point
the evidence had been opened out to him, he had gradually convinced
himself that the son-in-law and brother-in-law, whom he had, as it
were, forced into the family, was a bigamist. There was present to them
all an intense desire to prove the man's guilt, which was startling to
all around who heard anything of the matter. Up to this time the Bolton
telegrams and the Caldigate telegrams had elicited two facts,--that
Allan the Wesleyan minister had gone to the Fiji Islands and had there
died, and that they at Nobble who had last known Dick Shand's address,
now knew it no longer. Caldigate had himself gone to Pollington, and had
there ascertained that no tidings had been received from Dick by any of
the Shand family for the last twelve months. It had been decided that
the trial must be postponed at any rate till the summer assizes, which
would be held in Cambridge about the last week in August; and it was
thought by some that even then the case would not be ready. There was,
no doubt, an opinion prevalent in Cambridge that the unfortunate young
mother should be taken home to her own family till the matter should be
decided; and among the ladies of the town John Caldigate himself was
blamed severely for not allowing her to place herself under her father's
protection; but the ladies of the town generally were not probably well
acquainted with the disposition and temper of the young wife herself.
Things were in this condition when Hester and her baby went to her
father's house. Though that suspicion as to some intended durance which
Mr. Caldigate had expressed was not credited by her, still, as she was
driven up to the house, the idea was in her mind. She looked at the door
and she looked at the window, and she could not conceive it possible
that such a thing should be attempted. She thought of her own knowledge
of the house; how, if it were necessary, she could escape from the back
of the garden into the little field running down to the river, and how
she could cross the ferry. Of course she knew every outlet and inlet
about the place, and was sure that confinement would be impossible. But
she did not think of her bonnet nor of her boots, nor of the horror
which it would be to her should she be driven to wander forth into the
town, and to seek a conveyance back to Folking in the public streets.
She went on a Monday with an understanding that she was to remain there
till Wednesday. Mrs. Bolton almost wished that a shorter visit had been
arranged in order that she might at once commence her hostile operations
without any intermediate and hypocritical pretences. She had planned her
campaign thoroughly in her own mind, and had taken the cook into her
confidence, the cook being the oldest and most religious servant in the
house. When the day of departure should have come the cook was to lock
the doors, and the gardener was to close the little gate at the bottom
of the garden; and the bonnet and other things were to be removed, and
then the mother would declare her purpose. But in the meantime allusions
to that intended return to Folking must be accepted, and listened to
with false assent. It was very grievous, but so it was arranged. As soon
as Hester was in the house the mother felt how much better it would have
been to declare to her daughter at once that she was a prisoner;--but it
was then too late to alter their proposed plans.
It very nearly came to pass that Hester left her mother on the morning
of her arrival. They had both determined to be cautious, reticent, and
forbearing but the difference between them was so vital that reticence
was impossible. At first there was a profusion of natural tears, and a
profusion of embraces. Each clung to the other for a while as though some
feeling might be satisfied by mere contact; and then the woe of the
thing, the woe of it, was acknowledged on both sides! They could agree
that the wickedness of the wicked was very wicked. Wherever might lie
the sin of fraud and falsehood, the unmerited misfortunes of poor
Hester were palpable enough. They could weep together over the wrongs
inflicted on that darling baby. But by degrees it was impossible to
abstain from alluding to the cause of their sorrow;--and such allusion
became absolutely necessary when an attempt was made to persuade Hester
to remain at her old home with her own consent. This was done by her
father on the evening of her arrival, in compliance with the plan that
had been arranged. 'No, papa, no; I cannot do that,' she said, with a
tone of angry determination.
'It is your duty, Hester. All your friends will tell you so.'
'My duty is to my husband,' she said, 'and in such a matter I can allow
myself to listen to no other friend.' She was so firm and fixed in this
that he did not even dare to go on with his expostulation.
But afterwards, when they were upstairs together, Mrs. Bolton spoke out
more at length and with more energy. 'Mamma, it is of no use,' said
Hester.
'It ought to be of use. Do you know the position in which you are?'
'Very well. I am my husband's wife.'
'If it be so, well. But if it be not so, and if you remain with him
while there is a doubt upon the matter, then you are his mistress.'
'If I am not his wife, then I will be his mistress,' said Hester,
standing up and looking as she spoke much as her mother would look in
her most determined moments.
'My child!'
'What is the use of all this, mamma? Nothing shall make me leave him.
Others may be ashamed of me; but because of this I shall never be
ashamed of myself. You are ashamed of me!'
'If you could mean what you said just now I should be ashamed of you.'
'I do mean it. Though the juries and the judges should say that he was
not my husband, though all the judges in England should say it, I would
not believe them. They may put him in prison and so divide us; but they
never shall divide my bone from his bone, and my flesh from his flesh.
As you are ashamed of me, I had better go back to-morrow.'
Then Mrs. Bolton determined that early in the morning she would look to
the bolts and bars; but when the morning came matters had softened
themselves a little.