Red Pottage Part 25

"I will speak seriously to her," said Mr. Gresley, dejectedly, who recollected that he had "spoken seriously" to Hester many times at his wife's instigation without visible result. And as he went alone to meet his sister he prayed earnestly that he might be given the right word to say to her.

A ray of sunlight, faint as an echo, stole through the lingering mist, parting it on either hand, and fell on Hester.

Hester, standing in a white gown under the veiled trees in a glade of silver and trembling opal, which surely mortal foot had never trod, seemed infinitely removed from him. Dimly he felt that she was at one with this mysterious morning world, and that he, the owner, was an alien and a trespa.s.ser in his own garden.

But a glimpse of his cuc.u.mber-frames in the background rea.s.sured him. He advanced with a firmer step, as one among allies.

Hester did not hear him.

She was gazing with an absorption that shut out all other sights and sounds at the solitary blossom on the magnolia-tree. Yesterday it had been a bud; but to-day the great almond-white petals which guarded it, overlapping each other so jealously, had opened wide, and the perfect flower, keeping nothing back, had laid bare all its pure white soul before its G.o.d.

As Mr. Gresley stopped beside her, Hester turned her little pinched, ravaged face towards him and smiled. Something of the pa.s.sionate self-surrender of the flower was reflected in her eyes.

"Dear Hester," he said, seeing only the wan, drawn face. "Are you ill?"

"Yes--no. I don't think so," said Hester, tremulously, recalled suddenly to herself. She looked hastily about her. The world of dew and silver had deserted her, had broken like an iridescent bubble at a touch. The magnolia withdrew itself. Hester found herself suddenly transplanted into the prose of life, emphasized by a long clerical coat and a bed of Brussels sprouts.

"I missed you," said Mr. Gresley, with emphasis.

"Where? When?" Hester's eyes had lost their fixed look and stared vacantly at him.

Mr. Gresley tried to subdue his rising annoyance.

Hester was acting, pretending not to understand, and he saw through it.

"At G.o.d's altar," he said, gravely, the priest getting the upper hand of the man.

"Have you not found me there?" said Hester, below her breath, but so low that fortunately her brother did not catch the words, and was spared their profanity.

"I will appeal to her better feelings," he said to himself. "They must be there, if I can only touch them."

He did not know that in order to touch the better feelings of our fellow-creatures we must be able to reach up to them, or by reason of our low stature we may succeed only in appealing to the lowest in them, in spite of our tiptoe good intentions. Is that why such appeals too often meet with bitter sarcasm and indignation?

But fortunately a robust belief in the a.s.siduities of the devil as the cause of all failures, and a conviction that who-so opposed Mr. Gresley opposed the Deity, supported and blindfolded the young Vicar in emergencies of this kind.

He spoke earnestly and at length to his sister. He waved aside her timid excuse that she had overslept herself after a sleepless night, and had finished dressing but the moment before he found her in the garden. He entreated her to put aside such insincerity as unworthy of her. He reminded her of the long months she had spent at Warpington with its peculiar spiritual opportunities; that he should be to blame if he did not press upon her the first importance of the religious life, the ever-present love of G.o.d, and the means of approaching Him through the sacraments. He entreated her to join her prayers with his that she might be saved from the worship of her own talent, which had shut out the worship of G.o.d, from this dreadful indifference to holy things, and the impatience of all religious teaching which he grieved to see in her.

He spoke well, the earnest, blind, would-be leader endeavoring to guide her to the ditch from which he knew not how she had emerged, pa.s.sionately distressed at the opposition he met with as he would have drawn her lovingly towards it.

The tears were in Hester's eyes, but the eyes themselves were as flint seen through water. She stifled many fierce and cruel impulses to speak as plainly as he did, to tell him that it was not religion that was abh.o.r.ent to her, but the form in which he presented it to her, and that the sin against the Holy Ghost was disbelief, like his, in the religion of others. But when have such words availed anything? When have they been believed? Hester had a sharp tongue, and she was slowly learning to beware of it as her worst enemy. She laid down many weapons before she trusted herself to speak.

"It is good of you to care what becomes of me," she said, gently, but her voice was cold. "I am sorry you regard me as you do. But from your point of view you were right to speak--as--as you have done. I value the affection that prompted it."

"She can't meet me fairly," said Mr. Gresley to himself, with sudden anger at the meanness of such tactics. "They say she is so clever, and she can't refute a word I say. She appears to yield and then defies me.

She always puts me off like that."

The sun had vanquished the mist, and in the brilliant light the two figures moved silently, side by side, back to the house, one with something very like rage in his heart, the rage that in bygone days found expression in stake and f.a.got.

Perhaps the heaviest trouble which Hester was ever called upon to bear had its mysterious beginnings on that morning of opal and gossamer when the magnolia opened.

CHAPTER XXIV

Il le fit avec des arguments inconsistants et irrefutables, de ces arguments qui fondent devant la raison comme la neige an feu, et qu'on ne peut saisir, des arguments absurdes et triomphants, de cure de campagne qul demontre Dieu.--Guy DE MAUPa.s.sANT.

Sybell's party broke up on Sat.u.r.day, with the exception of Rachel and Mr. Tristram, who had been unable to finish by that date a sketch he was making of Sybell. When Doll discovered that his wife had asked that gentleman to stay over Sunday he entreated Hugh, in moving terms, to do the same.

"I am not literary," said Doll, who always thought it necessary to explain that he was not what no one thought he was. "I hate all that sort of thing. Utter rot, I call it. For goodness' sake, Scarlett, sit tight. I must be decent to the beast in my own house, and if you go I shall have to have him alone jawing at me till all hours of the night in the smoking-room."

Hugh was easily persuaded, and so it came about that the morning congregation at Warpington had the advantage of furtively watching Hugh and Mr. Tristram as they sat together in the carved Wilderleigh pew, with Sybell and Rachel at one end of it, and Doll at the other. No one looked at Rachel. Her hat attracted a momentary attention, but her face none.

The Miss Pratts, on the contrary, well caparisoned by their man milliner, well groomed, well curled, were a marked feature of the spa.r.s.e congregation. The spectator of so many points, all made the most of, unconsciously felt with a sense of oppression that everything that could be done had been done. No stone had been left unturned.

Their brother, Captain Algernon Pratt, sitting behind them, looked critically at them, and owned that they were smart women. But he was not entirely satisfied with them, as he had been in the old days, before he went into the Guards and began the real work of his life, raising himself in society.

Captain Pratt was a tall, pale young man--_a.s.sez beau garcon_--faultlessly dressed, with a quiet acquired manner. He was not ill-looking, the long upper lip concealed by a perfectly kept mustache, but the haggard eye and the thin line in the cheek, which did not suggest thought and overwork as their cause, made his appearance vaguely repellent.

"Jesu, lover of my soul,"

sang the shrill voices of the choir-boys, echoed by Regie and Mary, standing together, holding their joint hymnbook exactly equally between them, their two small thumbs touching.

Fraulein, on Hester's other side, was singing with her whole soul, accompanied by a pendulous movement of the body:

"Cover my defenceless 'ead, Wiz ze sadow of Zy wing."

Mr. Gresley, after baying like a blood-hound through the opening verses, ascended the pulpit and engaged in prayer. The congregation amened and settled itself. Mary leaned her blond head against her mother, Regie against Hester.

The supreme moment of the week had come for Mr. Gresley.

He gave out the text:

"Can the blind lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?"

All of us who are Churchmen are aware that the sermon is a period admirably suited for quiet reflection.

"A good woman loves but once," said Mr. Tristram to himself, in an att.i.tude of attention, his fine eyes fixed decorously on a pillar in front of him. Some of us would be as helpless without a Bowdlerized generality or a plat.i.tude to sustain our minds as the invalid would be without his peptonized beef-tea.

"Rachel is a good woman, a saint. Such a woman does not love in a hurry, but when she does she loves forever." What was that poem he and she had so often read together? Tennyson, wasn't it? About love not altering "when it alteration finds," but bears it out even to the crack of doom.

Fine poet, Tennyson; he knew the human heart. She had certainly adored him four years ago, just in the devoted way in which he needed to be loved. And how he had worshipped her! Of course he had behaved badly. He saw that now. But if he had it was not from want of love. She had been unable to see that at the time. Good women were narrow, and they were hard, and they did not understand men. Those were their faults. Had she learned better by now? Did she realize that she had far better marry a man who had loved her for herself, and who still loved her, rather than some fortune-hunter, like that weedy fellow Scarlett. (Mr. Tristram called all slender men weedy.) He would frankly own his fault and ask for forgiveness. He glanced for a moment at the gentle, familiar face beside him.

"She will forgive me," he said, rea.s.suring himself, in spite of an inward qualm of misgiving. "I am glad I arranged to stay on. I will speak to her this afternoon. She has become much softened, and we will bury the past and make a fresh start together."