When the verdict was given, Caldigate was at once marched round into the dock, having hitherto been allowed to sit in front of the dock between Mr. Seely and his father. But, standing in the dock, he heard the sentence pronounced upon him. ‘I never married the woman, my lord,’ he said, in a loud voice. But what he said could be of no avail. And then men looked at him as he disappeared with the jailers down the steps leading to regions below, and away to his prison, and they knew that he would no more be seen or heard of for two years. He had vanished. But there was the lady who was not his wife out at Folking,— the lady whom the jury had declared not to be his wife. What would become of her?

There was an old gentleman there in the court who had known Mr. Caldigate for many years,— one Mr. Ryder, who had been himself a practising barrister but had now retired. In those days they seldom saw each other; but, nevertheless, they were friends. ‘Caldigate,’ he said, ‘you had better let her go back to her own people.’

‘She shall stay with me,’ he replied.

‘Better not. Believe me, she had better not. If so, how will it be with her when he is released? The two years will soon go by, and then she will be in his house. If that woman should die, he might marry her,— but till then she had better be with her own people.’

‘She shall stay with me,’ the old man said again, repeating the words angrily, and shaking his head. He was so stunned by the blow that he could not argue the matter, but he knew that he had made the promise, and that he was resolved to abide by it.

She had better go back to her own people! All the world was saying it. She had no husband now. Everybody would respect her misfortune. Everybody would acknowledge her innocence. All would sympathise with her. All would love her. But she must go back to her own people. There was not a dissentient voice. ‘Of course she must go back to you now,’ Nicholas Bolton said to her father, and Nicholas Bolton seldom interfered in anything. ‘The poor lady will of course be restored to her family,’ the judge had said in private to his marshal, and the marshal had of course made known what the judge had said. On the next morning there came a letter from William Bolton to Robert. ‘Of course Hester must come back now. Nothing else is possible.’ Everybody decided that she must come back. It was a matter which admitted of no doubt. But how was she to be brought to Chesterton?

None of them who decided with so much confidence as to her future, understood her ideas of her position as a wife. ‘I am bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh,’ she said to herself, ‘made so by a sacrament which no jury can touch. What matters what the people say? They may make me more unhappy than I am. They may kill me by their cruelty. But they cannot make me believe myself not to be his wife. And while I am his wife, I will obey him, and him only.’

分享到：