Red Pottage Part 21

"You mean it did me good," said Rachel, "and that _he_ was a kind of benefactor in disguise. I dare say you are right, but you see I don't take a burning interest in my own character. I don't find my mental stand-point--isn't that what Mrs. Loftus calls it?--very engrossing."

"He was a benefactor, all the same," said Hester, with decision. "I did not think so at the time, and if I could have driven over him in an omnibus I would have done so with pleasure. But I believe that the day will come when you will cover that grave with a handsome monument, erected out of grat.i.tude to him for not marrying you. And now, Rachel, will you forgive me beforehand for what I am going to say?"

"Oh!" said Rachel, ruefully. "When you say that I know it is the prelude to something frightful. You are getting out a dagger, and I shall be its sheath directly."

"You are a true prophet, Rachel."

"Yes, executioner."

"My dear, dear friend, whom I love best in the world, when that happened my heart was wrung for you. I would have given everything I had, life itself--not that that is saying much--to have saved you from that hour."

"I know it."

"But I should have been the real enemy if I had had power to save you, which, thank G.o.d! I had not. That hour had to be. It was necessary. You may not care about your own character, but I do. There is something stubborn and inflexible in you--the seamy side of your courage and steadfastness--which cannot readily enter into the feelings of others or put itself in their place. I think it is want of imagination--I mean the power of seeing things as they are. You are the kind of woman who, if you had married comfortably some one you rather liked, might have become like Sybell Loftus, who never understands any feeling beyond her own microscopic ones, and who measures love by her own small preference for Doll. You would have had no more sympathy than she has. People, like Sybell, believe one can only sympathize with what one has experienced.

That is why they are always saying, 'as a mother,' or 'as a wife.' If that were true the world would have to get on without sympathy, for no two people have the same experience. Only a shallow nature believes that a resemblance in two cups means that they both contain the same wine. Sybell believes it, and you would have been very much the same, not from lack of perception, as in her case, but from want of using your powers of perception. If you had not undergone an agonized awakening, all the great realities of life--love, hatred, temptation, enthusiasm--would have remained for you as they have remained for Sybell, merely pretty words to string on light conversation. That is why I can't bear to hear her speak of them, because every word she says proves she has not known them. But the sword that pierced your heart forced an entrance for angels, who had been knocking where there was no door--until then."

Silence.

"Since when is it that people have turned to you for comfort and sympathy?"

No answer.

"Rachel, on your oath, did you ever really care for the London poor until you became poor yourself, and lived among them?"

"No."

"But they were there all the time. You saw them in the streets. It was not as if you only heard of them. You saw them. Their agony, their vice, was written large on their faces. There was a slum almost at the back of that great house in Portman Square where you lived many years in luxury with your parents."

"Don't," said Rachel, her lip trembling.

"I must. You did not care then. If a flagrant case came before you you gave something like other uncharitable people who hate feeling uncomfortable. But you care _now_. You seek out those who need you.

Answer me. Were they cheaply bought or not, that compa.s.sion and love for the degraded and the suffering which were the outcome of your years of poverty in Museum Buildings?"

"They were cheaply bought," said Rachel, with conviction, speaking with difficulty.

"Would you have learned them if you had gone on living in Portman Square?"

"Oh, Hester! would anybody?"

"Yes, they would. But that is not the question. Would _you?_"

"N--no," said Rachel.

There was a long silence.

Rachel's mind took its staff and travelled slowly, humbly, a few more difficult steps up that steep path where "Experience is converted into thought as a mulberry-leaf is converted into satin."

At last she turned her grave eyes upon her friend.

"I see what you mean," she said; "I have not reached the place yet; but I can believe that I shall come to it some day, when I shall feel as thankful for that trouble as I do feel now for having known poverty.

Yes, Hester, you are right. I was a hard woman, without imagination. I have been taught in the only way I could learn--by experience. I have been very fortunate."

Hester did not answer, but bent down and kissed Rachel's hands. It was as if she had said, "Forgive me for finding fault with one so far above me." And the action was so understood.

Rachel colored, and they sat for a moment hand close in hand, heart very near to heart.

"How is it you are so sure of these things, Hester?" said Rachel, in a whisper. "When you say them I see they are true, and I believe them, but how do you _know_ them?"

A shadow, a very slight one, fell across Hester's face. "'Love knows the secret of grief.' But can Love claim that knowledge if he is asked how he came by it by one who should have known?" The question crept in between the friends and moved them apart. Hester's voice altered.

"Minna would say that I picked them up from the conversation of James.

You know the Pratts are perfectly aware of what I have, of course, tried to conceal, namely, that the love-scenes in the _Idyll_ were put together from sc.r.a.ps I had collected of James's engagement to Minna. And all the humorous bits are claimed by a colony of cousins in Devonshire who say that any one 'who had heard them talk' could have written the _Idyll._ And any one who had not heard them apparently. The so-called profane pa.s.sages are all that are left to me as my own."

"You are profane now," said Rachel, smiling, but secretly wounded by the flippancy which she had brought upon herself.

A distant whoop distracted their attention, and they saw Regie galloping towards them, imitating a charger, while Fraulein and the two little girls followed.

Regie stopped short before Rachel, and looked suspiciously at her.

"Where is Uncle d.i.c.k?" he said.

"I don't know," said Rachel, reddening, in spite of herself, and her eyes falling guiltily before her questioner.

"Then he has not come with you?"

Regie's mind was what his father called "sure and steady." Mr. Gresley often said he preferred a child of that kind to one that was quick-witted and flashy.

"No, he has not come with me."

"Mary!" shrieked Regie, "he has not come."

"I knew he had not," said Mary. "When I saw he was not there I knew he was somewhere else."

Dear little Mary was naturally the Gresleys' favorite child. However thoroughly they might divest themselves of parental partiality, they could not but observe that she was as sensible as a grown-up person.

"I thought he might be somewhere near," explained Regie, "in a tree or something," looking up into the little yew. "You can't tell with a conjurer like Uncle d.i.c.k, can you, Auntie Hester, whatever Mary may say?"

"Mary is generally wrong," said Hester, "but she is right for once."

Mary, who was early acquiring the comfortable habit of hearing only the remarks that found an echo in her own breast, heard she was right, and said, shrilly:

"I told Regie when we was still on the road that Uncle d.i.c.k wasn't there. Mother doesn't always go with father, but he said he'd run and see."

"We shall be ver'r late for luncheon," said Fraulein, hastily, blushing down to the onyx brooch at her turn-down collar, and drawing Mary away.

"Perhaps he left the half-penny with you," said Regie. "Fraulein would like to see it."

"No, no," said Fraulein, the tears in her eyes. "I do not vish at all. I cry half the night when I hear of it."