Red Pottage Part 35

"Loftus and I did him an ill turn when we pulled him out of the water."

The letter took its own time, for it had to avoid possible pitfalls. It shunned the company of the other Westhope letters, it avoided the village post-office, but after a day's delay it was launched, and lay among a hundred others in a station pillar-box. And then it hurried, hurried as fast as express train could take it, till it reached its London address, and went softly up-stairs, and laid itself, with a few others, on Hugh's breakfast-table.

For many weeks since his visit at Wilderleigh Hugh had been like a man in a boat without oars, drifting slowly, imperceptibly on the placid current of a mighty river, who far away hears the fall of Niagara droning like a b.u.mblebee in a lily cup.

Long ago, in the summer, he had recognized the sound, had realized the steep agony towards which the current was bearing him, and had struggled horribly, impotently, against the inevitable. But of late, though the sound was ever in his ears, welling up out of the blue distance, he had given up the useless struggle, and lay still in the sunshine watching the summer woods slide past and the clouds sail away, always away and away, to the birthplace of the river, to that little fluttering pulse in the heart of the hills which a woman's hand might cover, the infant pulse of the great river to be.

Hugh's thoughts went back, like the clouds, towards that tiny spring of pa.s.sion in his own life. He felt that he could have forgiven it--and himself--if he had been swept into the vortex of a headlong mountain torrent leaping down its own wild water-way, carrying all before it.

Other men he had seen who had been wrested off their feet, swept out of their own keeping by such a torrent on the steep hill-side of their youth. But it had not been so with him. He had walked more cautiously than they. As he walked he had stopped to look at the little thread of water which came bubbling up out of its white pebbles. It was so pretty, it was so feeble, it was so clear. Involuntarily he followed it, watched it grow, amused himself, half contemptuously, with it, helped its course by turning obstacles from its path. It never rushed. It never leaped. It was a toy. The day came when it spread itself safe and shallow on level land, and he embarked upon it. But he was quickly tired of it. It was beginning to run muddily through a commonplace country, past squalid polluting towns and villages. The hills were long since gone. He turned to row to the sh.o.r.e. And, behold, his oars were gone! He had been trapped to his destruction.

Hugh had never regarded seriously his intrigue with Lady Newhaven. He had been attracted, excited, partially, half-willingly enslaved. He had thought at the time that he loved her, and that supposition had confirmed him in his cheap cynicism about woman. This, then, was her paltry little court, where man offered mock homage, and where she played at being queen. Hugh had made the discovery that love was a much overrated pa.s.sion. He had always supposed so; but when he tired of Lady Newhaven he was sure of it. His experience was, after all, only the same as that which many men acquire by marriage, and hold unshaken through long and useful lives. But Hugh had not been able to keep the treasures of this early experience. It had been rendered worthless, perhaps rather contemptible by a later one--that of falling in love with Rachel, and the astonishing discovery that he was in love for the first time. He had sold his birthright for a mess of red pottage, as surely as any man or woman who marries for money or liking. He had not believed in his birthright, and holding it to be worthless, had given it to the first person who had offered him anything in exchange.

His whole soul had gradually hardened itself against Lady Newhaven. If he had loved her, he said to himself, he could have borne his fate. But the play had not been worth the candle. His position was d.a.m.nable; but that he could have borne--at least, so he thought if he had had his day. But he had not had it. That thought rankled. To be hounded out of life because he had mistaken paper money for real was not only unfair, it was grotesque.

Gradually, however, Hugh forgot his smouldering hate of Lady Newhaven, his sense of injustice and anger against fate; he forgot everything in his love for Rachel. It became the only reality of his life.

He had remained in London throughout October and November, cancelling all his engagements because she was there. What her work was he vaguely apprehended: that she was spending herself and part of her colossal fortune in the East End, but he took no interest in it. He was incapable of taking more interests into his life at this time. He pa.s.sed many quiet evenings with her in the house in Park Lane, which she had lately bought. The little secretary who lived with her had always a faint smile and more writing to do than usual on the evenings when he dined with them.

A great peace was over all their intercourse. Perhaps it was the hush before the storm, the shadow of which was falling, falling, with each succeeding day across the minds of both. Once only a sudden gust of emotion stirred the quiet air, but it dropped again immediately. It came with the hour when Hugh confessed to her the blot upon his past. The past was taking upon itself ever an uglier and more repulsive aspect as he saw more of Rachel. It was hard to put into words, but he spoke of it. The spectre of love rose like a ghost between them, as they looked earnestly at each other, each pale even in the ruddy fire-light.

Hugh was truthful in intention. He was determined he would never lie to Rachel. He implied an intrigue with a married woman, a deviation not only from morality, but from honor. More he did not say. But as he looked at her strained face it seemed to him that she expected something more. A dreadful silence fell between them when he had finished. Had she then no word for him. Her eyes--mute, imploring, dark with an agony of suspense--met his for a second and fell instantly. She did not speak.

Her silence filled him with despair. He got up. "It's getting late. I must go," he stammered.

She rose, mechanically, and put out her hand.

"May I come again?" he said, holding it more tightly than he knew, and looking intently at her. Was he going to be dismissed?

The pain he caused her hand recalled her to herself. A look of bewilderment crossed her face, and then she realized his suspense and said, gravely, "You may come again."

He kissed the hand he held, and, as he did so, he knew for the first time that she loved him. But he could not speak of love after what he had just told her. He looked back when he reached the door, and saw her standing where he had left her. She had raised the hand he had kissed to her lips.

That was three days ago. Since then he had not dared to go and see her.

He could not ask her to marry him when he was within a few days of the time when he was bound in so-called honor to give Lord Newhaven satisfaction. He certainly could not be in her presence again without asking her. The shadows of the last weeks had suddenly become ghastly realities once more. The roar of Niagara drowned all other sounds. What was he going to do? What was he going to do in the predicament towards which he had been drifting so long, which was now actually upon him? Who shall say what horror, what agony of mind, what frenzied searching for a way of escape, what anguish of baffled love crowded in on Hugh's mind during those last days? At the last moment he caught at a straw, and wrote to Lord Newhaven offering to fight him. He did not ask himself what he should do if Lord Newhaven refused. But when Lord Newhaven did refuse his determination, long unconsciously fostered, sprang full-grown into existence in a sudden access of pa.s.sionate anger and blind rage.

"He won't fight, won't he! He thinks I will die like a rat in a trap with all my life before me. I will not. I offered him a fair chance of revenging himself--I would have fired into the air--and if he won't take it is his own look-out, d.a.m.n him! He can shoot me at sight if he likes.

Let him."

CHAPTER x.x.xII

On ne peut jamais dire.

"Fontaine je ne boirai jamais de ton eau."

If we could choose our ills we should not choose suspense. Rachel aged perceptibly during these last weeks. Her strong white hands became thinner; her l.u.s.treless eyes and haggard face betrayed her. In years gone by she had said to herself, when a human love had failed her, "I will never put myself through this torture a second time. Whatever happens I will not endure it again."

And now she was enduring it again, though in a different form. There is an element of mother-love in the devotion which some women give to men.

In the first instance it had opened the door of Rachel's heart to Hugh, and had gradually merged, with other feelings, and deepened into the painful love of a woman not in her first youth for a man of whom she is not sure.

Rachel was not sure of Hugh. Of his love for her she was sure, but not of the man himself, the gentle, refined, lovable nature that mutely worshipped and clung to her. She could not repulse him any more than she could repulse a child. But through all her knowledge of him--the knowledge of love, the only true knowledge of our fellow-creatures--a thread of doubtful anxiety was interwoven. She could form some idea how men like d.i.c.k, Lord Newhaven, or the Bishop would act in given circ.u.mstances, but she could form no definite idea how Hugh would act in the same circ.u.mstances. Yet she knew Hugh a thousand times better than any of the others. Why was this? Many women before Rachel have sought diligently to find, and have shut their eyes diligently, lest they should discover what it is that is dark to them in the character of the man they love.

Perhaps Rachel half knew all the time the subtle inequality in Hugh's character. Perhaps she loved him all the better for it. Perhaps she knew that if he had been without a certain undefinable weakness he would not have been drawn towards her strength. She was stronger than he, and perhaps she loved him more than she could have loved an equal.

"_Les esprits faibles ne sont jamais sinceres_." She had come across that sentence one day in a book she was reading, and had turned suddenly blind and cold with anger. "He is sincere," she said, fiercely, as if repelling an accusation. "He would never deceive me." But no one had accused Hugh.

The same evening he made the confession for which she had waited so long. As he began to speak an intolerable suspense, like a new and acute form of a familiar disease, lay hold on her. Was he going to live or die. She should know at last. Was she to part with him, to bury love for the second time? Or was she to keep him, to be his wife, the mother of his children?

As he went on, his language becoming more confused; she hardly listened to him. She had known all that too long. She had forgiven it, not without tears; but still, she had forgiven it long ago. Then he stopped.

It seemed to Rachel as if she had reached a moment in life which she could not bear. She waited, but still he did not speak. Then she was not to know. She was to be ground between the millstones of four more dreadful days and nights. She suddenly became aware, as she stared at Hugh's blanching face, that he believed she was about to dismiss him.

The thought had never entered her mind.

"Do you not know that I love you?" she said, silently, to him, as he kissed her hand.

When he had left her a gleam of comfort came to her, the only gleam that lightened the days and nights that followed. It was not his fault if he had made a half-confession. If he had gone on, and had told her of the drawing of lots, and which had drawn the fatal lot, he would have been wanting in sense of honor. He owed it to the man he had injured to preserve entire secrecy.

"He told me of the sin which might affect my marrying him," said Rachel, "but the rest had nothing to do with me. He was right not to speak of it. If he had told me, and then a few days afterwards Lord Newhaven had committed suicide, he would know I should put two and two together, and who the woman was, and the secret would not have died with Lord Newhaven as it ought to do. But if Hugh were the man who had to kill himself, he might have told me so without a breach of confidence, because then I should never have guessed who the others were. If he were the man he could have told me, he certainly _would_ have told me, for it could have done no harm to any one. Surely Lady Newhaven must be right when she was so certain that her husband had drawn the short lighter. And she herself had gained the same impression from what Hugh had vaguely said at Wilderleigh. But what are impressions, suppositions, except the food of suspense." Rachel sighed, and took up her burden as best she could.

Hugh's confession had at least one source of comfort in it, deadly cold comfort if he were about to leave her. She knew that night as she lay awake that she had not quite trusted him up till now, by the sense of entire trust and faith in him which rose up to meet his self-accusation.

What might have turned away Rachel's heart from him had had the opposite effect. "He told me the worst of himself, though he risked losing me by doing it. He wished me to know before he asked me to marry him. Though he acted dishonorably once he is an honorable man. He has shown himself upright in his dealing with me."

Hugh came back no more after that evening. Rachel told herself she knew why--she understood. He could not speak of love and marriage when the man he had injured was on the brink of death. Her heart stood still when she thought of Lord Newhaven, the gentle, kindly man who was almost her friend, and who was playing with such quiet dignity a losing game.

Hugh had taken from him his wife, and by that act was now taking from him his life too.

"It was an even chance," she groaned. "Hugh is not responsible for his death. Oh, my G.o.d! At least he is not responsible for that. It might have been he who had to die instead of Lord Newhaven. But if it _is_ he, surely he could not leave me without a word. If it _is_ he, he would have come to bid me good-bye. He cannot go down into silence without a word. If it _is_ he, he will come yet."

She endured through the two remaining days, turning faint with terror each time the door-bell rang, lest it might be Hugh.

But Hugh did not come.

Then, after repeated frantic telegrams from Lady Newhaven, she left London precipitately to go to her, as she had promised, on the twenty-eighth of November, the evening of the last day of the five months.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

"And he went out immediately, and it was night."

It was nearly dark when Rachel reached Westhope Abbey. A great peace seemed to pervade the long, dim lines of the gardens, and to be gathered into the solemn arches of the ruins against the darkening sky. Through the low door-way a faint light of welcome peered. As she drove up she was aware of two tall figures pacing amicably together in the dusk. As she pa.s.sed them she heard Lord Newhaven's low laugh at something his companion said.

A sense of unreality seized her. It was not the world which was out of joint, which was rushing to its destruction. It must be she who was mad--stark mad--to have believed these chimeras.

As she got out of the carriage a step came lightly along the gravel, and Lord Newhaven emerged into the little ring of light by the archway.