Red Pottage Part 31

"I must go back to my boys now," he said, "or they will be getting into mischief."

Doll nodded. He and Lord Newhaven had had a hard fight to get the leaking boat to land with Hugh at the bottom of it. It had filled ominously when Doll ceased baling to help to drag in the heavy, unconscious body.

There had been a moment when, inapprehensive as he was, Doll had remembered, with a qualm, that Lord Newhaven could not swim.

"Every fellow ought to swim," was the moral he drew from the incident and repeated to his wife, who, struck by the soundness of the remark, repeated it to the Gresleys.

Lord Newhaven retraced his steps slowly along the bank in his water-logged boots. He was tired, and he did not hurry, for he could see in the distance two small figures sitting faithfully on a log where he had left them.

"Good little chaps," he said, half aloud.

In spite of himself his thoughts went back to Hugh. His feelings towards him had not changed, but they had been forced during the last half-hour out of their original intrenchments into the open, and were liable to attack from new directions.

It was not that he had virtually saved Hugh's life, for Doll would never have got him into the leaking boat and kept it afloat single-handed.

That first moment of enthusiasm, when he had rubbed the senseless limbs and breathed into the cold lips, and had felt his heart leap when life came halting back into them, that moment had pa.s.sed and left him cold.

But Hugh's melancholy eyes, as they opened once more on this world and met his unflinchingly, haunted him, and the sudden anger at his interference. It was the intrenchment of his contempt that Lord Newhaven missed.

A meaner nature would not have let him off so easily as Hugh had done.

"It _was_ an accident," he said to himself, unwillingly. "He need not have admitted that, but I should have been on a gridiron if he had not.

In different circ.u.mstances that man and I might have been friends. And if he had got into a sc.r.a.pe of this kind a little further afield I might have helped to get him out of it. He feels it. He has aged during the last two months. But as it is--Upon my word, if he were a boy I should have had to let him off. It would have been too bloodthirsty. But he is seven-and-twenty. He is old enough to know better. She made a fool of him, of course. She made a greater one of me once, for I--married her."

Lord Newhaven reviewed with a dispa.s.sionate eye his courtship and marriage.

"A wood anemone," he said to himself; "I likened her to a wood anemone.

Good Lord! And I was thirty years of age, while this poor devil is twenty-seven."

Lord Newhaven stopped short with fixed eyes.

"I believe I should have to let him off," he said, half-aloud. "I believe I would let him off if I was not as certain as I stand here that he will never do it."

CHAPTER XXVIII

"The less wit a man has, the less he knows that he wants it."

Hester always took charge of the three elder children and Fraulein of the baby during the six-o'clock service, so that the nurse might go to church. On this particular Sunday afternoon Hester and the children were waiting in the little hall till the bell stopped, before which moment they were forbidden to leave the house. Mr. and Mrs. Gresley had just started for the church, Mr. Gresley looking worn and hara.s.sed, for since luncheon he had received what he called "a perfectly unaccountable letter" from one of his princ.i.p.al parishioners, a Dissenter, who had been present at the morning service, and who Mr. Gresley had confidently hoped might have been struck by the sermon. This hope had been justified, but not in the manner Mr. Gresley had expected. Mr. Walsh opined, in a large round hand, that as worms (twice under-dashed) did not usually pay voluntary church and school rates he no longer felt himself under an obligation to do so, etc. The letter was a great, an unexpected blow. Who could have foreseen such a result of the morning's eloquence.

"The truth is," said Mr. Gresley, tremulously, "that they can't and won't hear reason. They can't controvert what I say, so they take refuge in petty spite like this. I must own I am disappointed in Walsh. He is a man of some education, and liberal as regards money. I had thought he was better than most of them, and now he turns on me like this."

"It's a way worms have," said Hester.

"Oh, don't run a simile to death, Hester," said Mr. Gresley, impatiently. "If you had listened to what I tried to say this morning you would have seen I only used the word _worm_ figuratively. I never meant it literally, as any one could see who was not determined to misunderstand me. Worms pay school-rates! Such folly is positively sickening, if it were not malicious."

Hester had remained silent. She had been deeply vexed for her brother at the incident.

As the church-bell stopped the swing-door opened, and Boulou hurried in, like a great personage, conscious that others have waited, and bearing with him an aroma of Irish stew and onions, which showed that he had been exchanging affabilities with the cook. For the truth must be owned.

No spinster over forty could look unmoved on Boulou. Alas! for the Vicarage cook, who "had kept herself _to_ herself" for nearly fifty years, only to fall the victim of a "grande pa.s.sion" for Boulou.

The little Lovelace bounded in, and the expedition started. It was Regie's turn to choose where they should go, and he decided on the "shrubbery," a little wood through which ran the private path to Wilderleigh. Doll Loftus had given the Gresleys leave to take the children there.

"Oh, Regie, we always go there," said Mary, plaintively, who invariably chose the Pratts' park, with its rustic bridges and _chalets_, which Mr.

Pratt, in a gracious moment, had "thrown open" to the Gresleys on Sundays, because, as he expressed it, "they must feel so cramped in their little garden."

But Regie adhered to his determination, and to the "shrubberies" they went. Hester was too tired to play with them, too tired even to tell them a story; so she sat under a tree while they circled in the coppice near at hand.

As we grow older we realize that in the new gardens where life leads us we never learn the shrubs and trees by heart as we did as children in our old Garden of Eden, round the little gabled house where we were born. We were so thorough as children. We knew the underneath of every laurel-bush, the shape of its bunches of darkling branches, the green dust that our small restless bodies rubbed off from its under twigs. We see now as strangers those little hanging horse-tails of pink, which sad-faced elders call _ribes_; but once long ago, when the world was young, we knew them eye to eye, and the compact little black insects on them, and the quaint taste of them, and the clean, clean smell of them.

Everything had a taste in those days, and was submitted to that test, just as until it had been licked the real color of any object of interest was not ascertained. There was a certain scarlet berry, very red without and very white within, which we were warned was deadly poison. How well, after a quarter of a century, we remember the bitter taste of it; how much better than many other forbidden fruits duly essayed in later years. We ate those scarlet berries and lived, though warned to the contrary.

Presently Boulou, who could do nothing simply, found a dead mouse, where any one else could have found it, in the middle of the path, and made it an occasion for a theatrical display of growlings and shakings. The children decided to bury it, and after a becoming silence their voices could be heard singing "Home, Sweet Home," as the body was being lowered into the grave previously dug by Boulou, who had to be forcibly restrained from going on digging it after the obsequies were over.

"He never knows when to stop," said Regie, wearily, as Boulou, with a little plaster of earth on his nose, was carried coughing back to Hester.

As she took him Rachel and Sybell came slowly down the path towards them, and the latter greeted Hester with an effusion which suggested that when two is not company three may be.

"A most vexing thing has happened," said Sybell, in a gratified tone, sitting down under Hester's tree. "I really don't think I am to blame.

You know Mr. Tristram, the charming artist who has been staying with us?"

"I know him," said Hester.

"Well, he was set on making a sketch of me for one of his large pictures, and it was to have been finished to-day. I don't see any harm myself in drawing on Sunday. I know the Gresleys do, and I love the Gresleys, he has such a powerful mind; but one must think for one's self, and it was only the upper lip, so I consented to sit for him at four o'clock. I noticed he seemed a little--well rather--"

"Just so," said Hester.

"The last few days. But, of course, I took no notice of it. A married woman often has to deal with such things without making a fuss about them. Well, I overslept myself, and it was nearly half-past four before I awoke. And when I went into my sitting-room a servant brought me a note. It was from him, saying he had been obliged to leave Wilderleigh suddenly on urgent business, and asking that his baggage might be sent after him."

Hester raised her eyes slightly, as if words failed her. Sybell's conversation always interested her.

"Perhaps the reason she is never told anything," she said to herself, "is because the ground the confidence would cover is invariably built over already by a fiction of her own which it would not please her to see destroyed."

"Who would have thought," continued Sybell, "that he would have behaved in that way because I was one little half-hour late. And of course the pretext of urgent business is too transparent, because there is no Sunday post, and the telegraph-boy had not been up. I asked that. And he was so anxious to finish the sketch. He almost asked to stay over Sunday on purpose."

Rachel and Hester looked on the ground.

"Rachel said he was all right in the garden just before, didn't you, Rachel?"

"I said I thought he was a little nervous."

And what did he talk to you about?"

"He spoke about the low tone of the morals of the day, and about marriage."

"Ah! I don't wonder he talked to you, Rachel, you are so sympathetic. I expect lots of people confide in you about their troubles and love affairs. Morals of the day! Marriage! Poor, poor Mr. Tristram! I shall tell Doll quietly this evening. On the whole, it is just as well he is gone."

"Just as well," said Rachel and Hester, with surprising unanimity.