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Red Pottage by Mary Cholmondeley

M >> Mary Cholmondeley >> Red Pottage




His mind cleared a little. Rachel's grave face stood out against a dark
background--a background darker surely than that of the summer night. He
remembered with self-contempt the extravagant emotion which she had
aroused in him.

"Absurd," Hugh said to himself, with the distrust of all sudden springs
of pure emotion which those who have misused them rarely escape. And
then another remembrance, which only a sleeping-draught had kept at bay,
darted upon him like a panther on its prey.

He had drawn the short lighter.

He started violently, and then fell back trembling.

"Oh, my God!" he said, involuntarily.

He lay still, telling himself that this dreadful nightmare would pass,
would fade in the light of common day.

His servant came in noiselessly with a cup of coffee and a little sheaf
of letters.

He pretended to be asleep; but when the man had gone he put out his
shaking hand for the coffee and drank it.

The mist before his mind gradually lifted. Gradually, too, the horror on
his face whitened to despair, as a twilight meadow whitens beneath the
evening frost. He had drawn the short lighter. Nothing in heaven or
earth could alter that fact.

He did not stop to wonder how Lord Newhaven had become aware of his own
dishonor, or at the strange weapon with which he had avenged himself. He
went over every detail of his encounter with him in the study. His hand
had been forced. He had been thrust into a vile position. He ought to
have refused to draw. He did not agree to draw. Nevertheless, he had
drawn. And Hugh knew that, if it had to be done again, he should again
have been compelled to draw by the iron will before which his was as
straw. He could not have met the scorn of those terrible half-closed
eyes if he had refused.

"There was no help for it," said Hugh, half aloud. And yet to die by his
own hand within five months! It was incredible. It was preposterous.

"I never agreed to it," he said, passionately.

_Nevertheless, he had drawn_. The remembrance ever returned to lay its
cold hand upon his heart, and with it came the grim conviction that if
Lord Newhaven had drawn the short lighter he would have carried out the
agreement to the letter. Whether it was extravagant, unchristian,
whatever might have been truly said of that unholy compact, Lord
Newhaven would have stood by it.

"I suppose I must stand by it, too," said Hugh to himself, the cold
sweat breaking out on his forehead. "I suppose I am bound in honor to
stand by it, too."

He suffered his mind to regard the alternative.

To wrong a man as deeply as he had wronged Lord Newhaven; to tacitly
accept. That was where his mistake had been. Another man, that
mahogany-faced fellow with the colonial accent, would have refused to
draw, and would have knocked Lord Newhaven down and half killed him, or
would have been knocked down and half killed by him. But to tacitly
accept a means by which the injured man risked his life to avenge his
honor, and then afterwards to shirk the fate which a perfectly even
chance had thrown upon him instead of on his antagonist! It was too
mean, too despicable. Hugh's pale cheek burned.

"I am bound," he said slowly to himself over and over again. There was
no way of escape.

Yesterday evening, with some intuition of coming peril, he had said, "I
will get out." The way of retreat had been open behind him. Now, by one
slight movement, he was cut off from it forever.

"I can't get out," said the starling, the feathers on its breast worn
away with beating against the bars.

"I can't get out," said Hugh, coming for the first time in contact with
the bars which he was to know so well--the bars of the prison that he
had made with his own hands.

He looked into the future with blank eyes. He had no future now. He
stared vacantly in front of him like a man who looks through his window
at the wide expanse of meadow and waving wood and distant hill which has
met his eye every morning of his life and finds it--gone. It was
incredible. He turned giddy. His reeling mind, shrinking back from the
abyss, struck against a fixed point, and, clutching it, came violently
to a stand-still.

_His mother!_

His mother was a widow and he was her only son. If he died by his own
hand it would break her heart. Hugh groaned, and thrust the thought from
him. It was too sharp. He could not suffer it.

His sin, not worse than that of many another man, had found him out. He
had done wrong. He admitted it, but this monstrous judgment on him was
out of all proportion to his offence. And, like some malignant
infectious disease, retribution would fall, not on him alone, but on
those nearest him, on his innocent mother and sister. It was unjust,
unjust, unjust!

A very bitter look came into his face. Hugh had never so far hated any
one, but now something very like hatred welled up in his heart against
Lady Newhaven. She had lured him to his destruction. She had tempted
him. This was undoubtedly true, though not probably the view which her
guardian angel would take of the matter.

Among the letters which the servant had brought him he suddenly
recognized that the topmost was in Lady Newhaven's handwriting. Anger
and repulsion seized him. No doubt it was the first of a series. "Why
was he so altered? What had she done to offend him?" etc., etc. He knew
the contents beforehand, or thought he knew them. He got up
deliberately, threw the unopened note into the empty fireplace, and put
a match to it. He watched it burn.

It was his first overt act of rebellion against her yoke, the first step
along the nearest of the many well-worn paths that a man takes at random
to leave a woman. It did not occur to him that Lady Newhaven might have
written to him about his encounter with her husband. He knew Lord
Newhaven well enough to be absolutely certain that he would mention the
subject to no living creature, least of all to his wife.

"Neither will I," he said to himself; "and as for her, I will break with
her from this day forward."

The little pink notes with the dashing, twirly handwriting persisted for
a week or two and then ceased.

* * * * *

Hugh was a man of many social engagements. His first impulse, when later
in the day he remembered them, was to throw them all up and leave
London. But Lord Newhaven would hear of his departure, and would smile.
He decided to remain and to go on as if nothing had happened. When the
evening came he dressed with his usual care, verified the hour of his
engagement, and went out to dine with the Loftuses.




CHAPTER V

What the _Bandar-log_ think now the jungle will think later.
--Maxim of the _Bandar-log_, RUDYARD KIPLING.


It was Sybell Loftus's first season in London since her second marriage
with Mr. Doll Loftus. After a very brief sojourn in that city of
frivolity she had the acumen to discover that London society was
hopelessly worldly and mercenary; that people only met to eat and to
abuse each other; that the law of cutlet for cutlet was universal; that
young men, especially those in the Guards, were garrisoned by a full
complement of devils; that London girls lived only for dress and the
excitement of husband-hunting. In short, to use her own expression, she
"turned London society inside out."

London bore the process with equanimity, and presently Sybell determined
to raise the art of dinner-giving from the low estate to which she
avowed it had fallen to a higher level. She was young, she was pretty,
she was well-born, she was rich. All the social doors were open to her.
But one discovery is often only the prelude to another. She soon made
the further one that in order to raise the tone of social gatherings it
is absolutely necessary to infuse into them a leaven of "clever people."
Further light on this interesting subject showed her that most of the
really "clever people" did not belong to her set. The discovery which
all who love adulation quickly make--namely, that the truly appreciative
and sympathetic and gifted are for the greater part to be found in a
class below their own--was duly made and registered by Sybell. She
avowed that class differences were nothing to her with the enthusiasm of
all those who since the world began have preferred to be first in the
society which they gather round them.

Fortunately for Sybell she was not troubled by doubts respecting the
clearness of her own judgment. Eccentricity was in her eyes originality;
a wholesale contradiction of established facts was a new view. She had
not the horrid perception of difference between the real and the
imitation which spoils the lives of many. She was equally delighted with
both, and remained in blissful ignorance of the fact that her "deep"
conversation was felt to be exhaustingly superficial if by chance she
came across the real artist or thinker instead of his counterfeit.

Consequently to her house came the _rate_ in all his most virulent
developments; the "new woman" with stupendous lopsided opinions on
difficult Old Testament subjects; the "lady authoress" with a mission to
show up the vices of a society which she knew only by hearsay. Hither
came, unwittingly, simple-minded Church dignitaries, who, Sybell hoped,
might influence for his good the young agnostic poet who had written a
sonnet on her muff-chain, a very daring sonnet, which Doll, who did not
care for poetry, had not been shown. Hither, by mistake, thinking it was
an ordinary dinner-party, came Hugh, whom Sybell said she had
discovered, and who was not aware that he was in need of discovery. And
hither also on this particular evening came Rachel West, whom Sybell had
pronounced to be very intelligent a few days before, and who was
serenely unconscious that she was present on her probation, and that if
she did not say something striking she would never be asked again.

Doll Loftus, Sybell's husband, was standing by Rachel when Hugh came in.
He felt drawn towards her because she was not "clever," as far as her
appearance went. At any rate, she had not the touzled, ill-groomed hair
which he had learned to associate with female genius.

"This sort of thing is beyond me," he said, mournfully, to Rachel, his
eyes travelling over the assembly gathered round his wife, whose remarks
were calling forth admiring laughter. "I don't understand half they
say, and when I do I sometimes wish I didn't. But I suppose--"
tentatively--"You go in for all this sort of thing?"

"I?" said Rachel, astonished. "I don't go in for anything. But what sort
of thing do you mean?"

"There is Scarlett," said Doll, with relief, who hated definitions, and
felt the conversation was on the slippery verge of becoming deep. "Do
you know him? Looks as if he'd seen a ghost, doesn't he?"

Rachel's interest, never a heavy sleeper, was instantly awakened as she
saw Sybell piloting Hugh towards her. She recognized him--the man she
had seen last night in the hansom and afterwards at the Newhavens. A
glance showed her that his trouble, whatever it might be, had pierced
beyond the surface feelings of anger and impatience and had reached the
quick of his heart. The young man, pallid and heavy-eyed, bore himself
well, and Rachel respected him for his quiet demeanor and a certain
dignity, which, for the moment, obliterated the slight indecision of his
face, and gave his mouth the firmness which it lacked. It seemed to
Rachel as if he had but now stood by a death-bed, and had brought with
him into the crowded room the shadow of an inexorable fate.

The others only perceived that he had a headache. Hugh did not deny it.
He complained of the great heat to Sybell, but not to Rachel. Something
in her clear eyes told him, as they told many others, that small lies
and petty deceits might be laid aside with impunity in dealing with her.
He felt no surprise at seeing her, no return of the sudden violent
emotion of the night before. He had never spoken to her till this
moment, but yet he felt that her eyes were old friends, tried to the
uttermost and found faithful in some forgotten past. Rachel's eyes had a
certain calm fixity in them that comes not of natural temperament, but
of past conflict, long waged, and barely but irrevocably won. A faint
ray of comfort stole across the desolation of his mind as he looked at
her. He did not notice whether she was handsome or ugly, any more than
we do when we look at the dear familiar faces which were with us in
their childhood and ours, which have grown up beside us under the same
roof, which have rejoiced with us and wept with us, and without which
heaven itself could never be a home.

In a few minutes he was taking her in to dinner. He had imagined that
she was a woman of few words, but after a faint attempt at conversation
he found that he had relapsed into silence, and that it was she who was
talking. Presently the heavy cloud upon his brain lifted. His strained
face relaxed. She glanced at him, and continued her little monologue.
Her face had brightened.

He had dreaded this dinner-party, this first essay to preserve his
balance in public with his frightful invisible burden; but he was
getting through it better than he had expected.

"I have come back to what is called society," Rachel was saying, "after
nearly seven years of an exile something like Nebuchadnezzar's, and
there are two things which I find as difficult as Kipling's 'silly
sailors' found their harps 'which they twanged unhandily.'"

"Is small talk one of them?" asked Hugh. "It has always been a
difficulty to me."

"On the contrary," said Rachel. "I plume myself on that. Surely my
present sample is not so much below the average that you need ask me
that."

"I did not recognize that it _was_ small talk," said Hugh, with a faint
smile. "If it really is, I can only say I shall have brain fever if you
pass on to what _you_ might call conversation."

It was to him as if a miniature wavelet of a great ocean somewhere in
the distance had crept up to laugh and break at his feet. He did not
recognize that this tiniest runlet which fell back at once was of the
same element as the tidal wave which had swept over him yesternight.

"But are you aware," said Rachel, dropping her voice a little, "it is
beginning to dawn upon me that this evening's gathering is met together
for exalted conversation, and perhaps we ought to be practising a
little. I feel certain that after dinner you will be 'drawn through the
clefts of confession' by Miss Barker, the woman in the high dinner gown
with orange velvet sleeves. Mrs. Loftus introduced her to me when I
arrived as the 'apostle of humanity.'"

"Why should you fix on that particular apostle for me?" said Hugh,
looking resentfully at a large-faced woman who was talking in an
"intense" manner to a slightly bewildered Bishop.

"It is a prophetic instinct, nothing more."

"I will have a prophetic instinct, too, then," said Hugh, helping
himself at last to the dish which was presented to him, to Rachel's
relief. "I shall give you the--" looking slowly down the table.

"The Bishop?"

"Certainly not, after your disposal of me."

"Well, then, the poet? I am sure he is a poet because his tie is uneven
and his hair is so long. Why do literary men wear their hair long, and
literary women wear it short. I should _like_ the poet."

"You shall not have him," said Hugh, with decision. "I am hesitating
between the bald young man with the fat hand and the immense ring and
the old professor who is drawing plans on the table-cloth."

"The apostle told me with bated breath that the young man with the ring
is Mr. Harvey, the author of _Unashamed_."

Hugh looked at his plate to conceal his disgust.

There was a pause in the buzz of conversation, and into it fell
straightway the voice of the apostle like a brick through a skylight.

"The need of the present age is the realization of our brotherhood with
sin and suffering and poverty. West London in satin and diamonds does
not hear her sister East London in rags calling to her to deliver her.
The voice of East London has been drowned in the dance-music of the West
End."

Sybell gazed with awed admiration at the apostle.

"What a beautiful thought," she said.

"Miss Gresley's _Idyll of East London_," said Hugh, "is a voice which,
at any rate, has been fully heard."

The apostle put up a _pince-nez_ on a bone leg and looked at Hugh.

"I entirely disapprove of that little book," she said. "It is misleading
and wilfully one-sided."

"Hester Gresley is a dear friend of mine," said Sybell, "and I must
stand up for her. She is the sister of our clergyman, who is a very
clever man. In fact, I am not sure he isn't the cleverest of the two.
She and I have great talks. We have so much in common. How strange it
seems that she who lives in the depths of the country should have
written a story of the East End!"

"That is always so," said the author of _Unashamed_, in a sonorous
voice. "The novel has of late been dwarfed to the scope of the young
English girl"--he pronounced it gurl--"who writes from her imagination
and not from her experience. What true art requires of us is a faithful
rendering of a great experience."

He looked round, as if challenging the world to say that _Unashamed_ was
not a lurid personal reminiscence.

Sybell was charmed. She felt that none of her previous dinner-parties
had reached such a high level as this one.

"A faithful rendering of a great experience," she repeated. "How I wish
Hester were here to hear that. I often tell her she ought to see life,
and cultivated society would do so much for her. I found her out a year
ago, and I'm always begging people to read her book, and I simply long
to introduce her to clever people and oblige the world to recognize her
talent."

"I agree with you, it is not yet fully recognized," said Hugh, in a
level voice; "but if _The Idyll_ received only partial recognition, it
was, at any rate, enthusiastic. And it is not forgotten."

Sybell felt vaguely uncomfortable, and conceived a faint dislike of Hugh
as an uncongenial person.

The apostle and the poet began to speak simultaneously, but the female
key was the highest, and prevailed.

"We all agree in admiring Miss Gresley's delicate piece of workmanship,"
said the apostle, both elbows on the table after the manner of her kind,
"but it is a misfortune to the cause of suffering humanity--to _our_
cause--when the books which pretend to set forth certain phases of its
existence are written by persons entirely ignorant of the life they
describe."

"How true!" said Sybell. "I have often thought it, but I never could put
it into words as you do. Oh! how I agree with you and Mr. Harvey! As I
often say to Hester, 'How can you describe anything if you don't go
anywhere or see anything? I can't give you my experience. No one can.' I
said that to her only a month ago, when she refused to come up to London
with me."

Rachel's white face and neck had taken on them the pink transparent
color that generally dwelt only in the curves of her small ears.

"Why do you think Miss Gresley is ignorant of the life she describes?"
she said, addressing the apostle.

The author and the apostle both opened their mouths at the same moment,
only to register a second triumph of the female tongue.

Miss Barker was in her element. The whole table was listening. She
shrugged her orange-velvet shoulders.

"Those who have cast in their lot with the poor," she said,
sententiously, "would recognize at once the impossibility of Miss
Gresley's characters and situations."

"To me they seem real," said Rachel.

"Ah, my dear Miss West, you will excuse me, but a young lady like
yourself, nursed in the lap of luxury, can hardly be expected to look at
life with the same eyes as a poor waif like myself, who has penetrated
to the very core of the city, and who has heard the stifled sigh of a
vast perishing humanity."

"I lived in the midst of it for six years," said Rachel. "I did not cast
in my lot with the poor, for I was one of them, and earned my bread
among them. Miss Gresley's book may not be palatable in some respects,
the district visitor and the woman missionary are certainly treated with
harshness, but, as far as my experience goes, _The Idyll_ is a true word
from first to last."

There was in Rachel's voice a restrained force that vaguely stirred all
the occupants of the room. Every one looked at her, and for a moment no
one spoke. She became quite colorless.

"Very striking. Just what I should have said in her place," said Sybell
to herself. "I will ask her again."

"I can hear it raining," said Doll's voice from the head of the table to
the company in general. "If it will only go on for a week without
stopping there may be some hope for the crops yet."

The conversation buzzed up again, and Rachel turned instantly to Hugh,
before Mr. Harvey, leaning forward with his ring, had time to address
her.

Hugh alone saw what a superhuman effort it had been to her to overcome
her shrinking from mentioning, not her previous poverty, but her
personal experience. She had sacrificed her natural reserve, which he
could see was great; she had even set good taste at defiance to defend
Hester Gresley's book. Hugh had shuddered as he heard her speak. He felt
that he could not have obtruded himself on so mixed an assembly. Yet he
saw that it had cost her more to do so than it would have cost him.

He began to remember having heard people speak of an iron-master's
daughter, whose father had failed and died, and who, after several years
of dire poverty, had lately inherited a vast fortune from her father's
partner. It had been talked about at the time, a few months ago. This
must be she.

"You have a great affection for Miss Gresley," he said, in a low voice.

"I have," said Rachel, her lip still quivering. "But if I disliked her I
hope I should have said the same. Surely it is not necessary to love
the writer in order to defend the book."

Hugh was silent. He looked at her, and wished that she might always be
on his side.

"About two courses ago I was going to tell you," said Rachel, smiling,
"of one of my chief difficulties on my return to the civilized world and
'Society.' But now you have had an example of it. I am trying to cure
myself of the trick of becoming interested in conversation. I must learn
to use words as counters, not as coins. I need not disbelieve what I
say, but I must not speak of anything to which I attach value. I
perceive that to do this is an art and a means of defence from invasion.
But I, on the contrary, become interested, as you have just seen. I
forget that I am only playing a game, and I rush into a subject like a
bull into a china-shop, and knock about all the crockery until--as I am
not opposed by my native pitchfork--I suddenly return to my senses, and
discover that I have mistaken a game for real earnest."

"We were all in earnest five minutes ago," said Hugh; "at least, I was.
I could not bear to hear Miss Gresley patronized by all these failures
and amateurs. But, unless I am very much mistaken, you will find several
pitchforks laid up for you in the drawing-room."

"I don't mean to smash any more china," said Rachel.

Another wavelet skimmed in and broke a little further up the sand. A
sense of freshness, of expectation was in the air. The great gathered
ocean was stirring itself in the distance. Hugh had forgotten his
trouble.

He turned the conversation back to Hester Gresley and her writing. He
spoke of her with sympathy and appreciation, and presently detected a
softness in Rachel's eyes which made him jealous of Hester.

By the time the evening was over the imperceptible travelling of the
summer sea had reached as far as the tidal wave.

Hugh left when Rachel did, accompanying her to her carriage. At the
door were the darkness and the rain. At the door with them the horror
and despair of the morning were in wait for him, and laid hold upon him.
Hugh shuddered, and turned instinctively to Rachel.

She was holding out her hand to him. He took it and held it tightly in
his sudden fear and desolation.

"When shall I meet you again?" he said, hoarsely.

A long look passed between them. Hugh's tortured soul, full of
passionate entreaty, leaped to his eyes. Hers, sad and steadfast, met
the appeal in his, and recognized it as a claim. There was no surprise
in her quiet face.

"I ride early in the Row," she said. "You can join me there if you wish.
Good-night."

She took her hand with great gentleness out of his and drove away.

And the darkness shut down again on Hugh's heart.




CHAPTER VI

Ici bas tous les hommes pleurent
Leurs amities et leurs amours.
--BOURGET.


Many sarcastic but true words have been said by man, and in no jealous
spirit, concerning woman's friendship for woman. The passing judgment of
the majority of men on such devotion might be summed up in the words,
"Occupy till I come." It does occupy till they do come. And if they
don't come the hastily improvised friendship may hold together for
years, like an unseaworthy boat in a harbor, which looks like a boat but
never goes out to sea.

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