"Matilda?" said Margaret, looking up at her brother.

"She is very ill;--not likely to be better."

"And poor Mrs Howell is gone," said Hester. "What a sweep it is! Did you hear, love? Mrs Howell is dead."

"I hear. It is a terrible destruction that we have witnessed. But I trust it is nearly over. I know of only one or two cases of danger now, besides this little girl's. Poor Matilda! But we have little thought to spare, even for her, to-night. If I did not know that Margaret is ready for whatever may betide," he continued, fixing his benevolent gaze upon her, "and if, moreover, I were not afraid that some one would be coming to tell my news if I do not get it out at once, I should hesitate about saying what I have to say."

"Philip has been explaining--He is coming," said Margaret, with such calmness as she could command.

"Enderby is coming; and some one else, whose explanations are more to the purpose, has been explaining. Mrs Rowland, alarmed and shaken by her misery, has been acknowledging the whole series of falsehoods by which she persuaded, convinced her brother that you did not love him-- that you were, in fact, attached elsewhere. I see how angry you are, Hester. I see you asking in your own mind how Enderby could be thus deluded--how he could trust his sister rather than Margaret--how I can speak of him as deserving to have her after all this. Your questions are reasonable enough, love, and yet they cannot be answered. Your doubts of Enderby are reasonable enough; and yet I declare to you that he is in my eyes almost, if not quite, blameless."

"Thank you, brother!" said Margaret, looking up with swimming eyes.

"There is one great point to be settled," resumed Hope: "and that is, whether you will both be content to bury in silence the subject of this quarrel, from this hour, relying upon my testimony and Mrs Rowland's."

"Oh, Edward, do not put your name and hers together!"

"For Enderby's justification, and for Margaret's sake, my name shall be joined with the arch-fiend's, if necessary, my love. You must, as I was saying, rely upon the testimony of those who know the whole, that Enderby's conduct throughout has been, if not the very wisest and best, perfectly natural, and consistent with the love for Margaret which he has cherished to this hour."

"I knew it," murmured Margaret.

"He will himself disclose as much as he thinks proper, when he comes: but he comes full of fear and doubt about his reception."

Margaret hung her head, feeling that it was well she was reminded what reason there was for his coming with doubt and trembling in his heart.

"As he comes full of fear and doubt," resumed Hope, "I must tell you first that he never received your last letter, Margaret. He thought you would not answer his. He thought you took him at his word about not attempting explanation."

"What an unhappy accident!" cried Hester. "Who carried that letter?

How did it happen?"

"It was no accident, my dear. Mrs Rowland burned that letter."

Margaret covered her face with her hands; then, suddenly looking up, she cried:

"Did she read it?"

"No. She says she dared not. Why, Margaret, you seem sorry that she did not! You think it would have cleared you. I have no doubt she thought so too; and that that was the reason why she averted her eyes from it. Yes, it was a cruel injury, Margaret. Can you forgive it, do you think?"

"Not to-night," said Hester. "Do not ask it of her to-night."

"I believe I may ask it at this very moment. The happy can forgive. Is it not so, Margaret?"

"For myself I could and I do, brother. I would go now and nurse her child, and comfort her. But--"

"But you cannot forgive the wretchedness she has caused to Philip.

Well, if you each forgive her for your own part, there is a chance that she may yet lift up her humbled head."

"What possessed her to hate us so?" said Hester.

"Her hatred to us is the result of long habits of ill-will, of selfish pride, and of low pertinacity about small objects. That is the way in which I account for it all. She disliked you first for your connection with the Greys; and then she disliked me for my connection with you.

She nourished up all her personal feelings into an opposition to us and our doings; and when she had done this, and found her own only brother going over to the enemy, as she regarded it, her dislike grew into a pa.s.sion of hatred. Under the influence of this pa.s.sion, she has been led on to say and to do more and more that would suit her purposes, till she has found herself sunk in an abyss of guilt. I really believe she was not fully aware of her situation, till her misery of to-day revealed it to her."

"Poor thing!" said Margaret. "Is there nothing we can do to help her?"

"We will ask Enderby. I take hers to be no uncommon case. The dislikes of low and selfish minds generally bear very much the character of hers, though they may not be pampered by circ.u.mstances into such a luxuriance as in this case. In a city, Mrs Rowland might have been an ordinary spiteful fine lady. In such a place as Deerbrook, and with a family of rivals' cousins incessantly before her eyes, to exercise her pa.s.sions upon, she has ended in being--"

"What she is," said Margaret, as Hope stopped for a word.

"Margaret is less surprised than you expected, is she not?" said Hester.

"You did not suppose that she would sit and listen as she does to your a.n.a.lysis of Mrs Rowland. But if the truth were known, she carries a prophecy about her on her finger. I have no doubt she has been expecting this very news ever since she recovered her ring. Yes or no, Margaret?"

"I should rather say she has carried a prophecy in her heart all these long months," said Hope, "of which that on her finger is only the symbol."

"However it may be," said Hester, "it has prepared a reception for Mr Enderby. There is no resisting a prophecy. What is written is written."

"I must hear him, you know," said Margaret, gently.

"You must; and you must hear him favourably," said her brother.

"I had forgotten," said Hester, ringing the bell. "Morris, a good fire in the breakfast-room, immediately."

Within the hour, Philip and Margaret were by that fireside, finally wedded in heart and soul. It was astonishing how little explanation was needed when Margaret had once been told, in addition to the fact of her letter having been destroyed, that she was declared to have made Mrs Enderby the depository of her confidence about a prior attachment.

There was, however, as much to relate as there was little to explain.

How Enderby's heart burned within him, when, in sporting with the idea of a prior attachment, it came out what Margaret had felt at the moment of his intrusion upon the conference with Hope, of which he had since, as at the time, been so jealous! the amus.e.m.e.nt on her own part, and the joy on Hester's, which she was trying to conceal by her downcast looks!

How his soul melted within him when she owned her momentary regret at being saved from under the ice, and the consolation and stimulus she had derived from her brother's expression of affection for her on the spot!

How clear, how true a refutation were these revealings of the imputations that had been cast upon her! and how strangely had the facts been distorted by a prejudiced imagination! How sweet in the telling was the story of the ring, so sad in the experience! and the recountings of the times that they had seen each other of late. Philip had caught more glimpses than she. He came down--he dared not say to watch over her in this time of sickness--but because he could not stay away when he heard of the condition of Deerbrook. But for this sickness would they have met--should they ever have understood each other again? This was a speculation on which they could not dwell--it led them too near the verge of the grave which was yawning for Matilda. Mrs Rowland would have been relieved, but the relief would have been not unmixed with humiliation, if she could have known how easily she was let off in this long conference. Not only can the happy easily forgive, but they are exceedingly apt to forget the causes and the history of their woes; and the wretched lady who, in the midst of her grief and terror for her child, trembled at home at the image of the lovers she had injured, was, to those lovers in their happiness, much as if she had never existed.

"Mrs Howell!" said Margaret, hearing her sister mention their departed neighbour, after Philip was gone. "Is it possible that it was this very afternoon that I saw that poor woman die?"

"Even so, dear. How many days, or months, or years, have you lived since? A whole age of bliss, Margaret!"

Margaret's blush said "Yes."

CHAPTER FORTY SIX.

DEERBROOK IN SUNSHINE.

On the first news of the fever being gone, the Greys returned to Deerbrook, and Dr Levitt's family soon followed. The place wore a strange appearance to those who had been absent for some time. Large patches of gra.s.s overspread the main street, and cows might have pastured on the thatch of some of the cottages, while the once green churchyard looked brown and bare from the number of new graves crowded in among the old ones. In many a court were the spring-flowers running wild over the weedy borders, for want of hands to tend them; and the birds built in many a chimney from which the blue smoke had been wont to rise in the morning air. Sophia and her sisters noted these things as they walked through the place on the morning after their arrival, while their father was engaged in inspecting the parish register, to learn how many of his neighbours were gone, and their mother was paying her visit of condolence to Mrs Rowland.

f.a.n.n.y and Mary were much impressed this day with Matilda's death. They had first wondered, and then wept, when they heard of it at a distance: and now, when once more on the spot where they had seen her daily, and had hourly criticised her looks, her sayings, and doings, they were under a strong sense of the meanness and frivolity of their talk, and the unkindness of their feelings about one whose faults could hardly be called her own, and who might now, they supposed, be living and moving in scenes and amidst circ.u.mstances whose solemnity and importance put to shame the petty intercourse they had carried on with her here. Both resolved in their hearts that if Anna Rowland should praise her own dancing, and flatten her back before she spoke, and talk often of the time when she should be married, they would let it all pa.s.s, and not tell mamma or Sophia, or exchange satirical looks with each other. They remembered now that Matilda had done good and kind things, which had been disregarded at the time when they were bent on ridiculing her. It was just hereabouts that she took off her worsted gloves, one bitter day in the winter, and put them on the hands of her little brother who was crying with cold; and it was by yonder corner that she directed a stranger gentleman into the right road so prettily that he looked after her as she walked away, and said she would be the pride of the place some day. Alas! there she lay--in the vault under the church; and she would be no one's pride in this world, except in her poor mother's heart.

"There is somebody not in mourning," cried f.a.n.n.y; "the very first, besides my cousins, that we have seen to-day. Oh, it is Mrs James!

Shall we not speak to her?"

Mrs James seemed warmed out of her usual indifference. She shook hands almost affectionately with Sophia. The meeting of acquaintances who find themselves alive after a pestilence is unlike any other kind of meeting: it animates the most indifferent, and almost makes friends of enemies. While Mrs James and Sophia were making mutual inquiries, Mary called f.a.n.n.y's attention to what was to be seen opposite. There was a glittering row of large, freshly-gilt letters--"Miskin, late Howell, Haberdasher, etcetera." Miss Miskin, in the deepest mourning, with a countenance trained to melancholy, was peeping through the ribbons and handkerchiefs which veiled her window, to see whether the Miss Greys were on their way to her or not. Sophia would not have been able to resist going in, but that, on parting from Mrs James, she saw the true object of her morning walk approaching in the person of Mr Walcot. Her intention had been to meet him in his rounds; and here he was.