Red Pottage Part 52

What was the use of asking it? He _was_ dead. And, fortunately, the two women firmly believed he had died by his own hand. Hugh as firmly believed that the death was accidental.

But it could not be his duty to set them right, to rake up the whole hideous story again.

By an extraordinary, by a miraculous chance, he was saved, as it were, a second time. It could do no good to allude to the dreadful subject again. Besides, he had promised Rachel never to speak of it again.

He groaned, and hid his face in his hands.

"Oh, coward and wretch that I am," he said. "Cannot I even be honest with myself? I lied to her to-day. I never thought I could have told Rachel a lie, but I did. I can't live without her. I must have her. I would rather die than lose her now. And I should have lost her if I'd told her the truth. I felt that. I am not worthy. It was an ill day for her when she took my tarnished life into her white hands. She ought to have trodden me under foot. But she does love me, and I will never deceive her again. She does love me, and, G.o.d helping me, I will make her happy."

The strain of conflict was upon Hugh--the old, old conflict of the seed with the earth, of the soul with love. How many little fibres and roots the seed puts out, pushed by an unrecognized need within itself, not without pain, not without a gradual rending of its being, not without a death unto self into a higher life. Love was dealing with Hugh's soul as the earth deals with the seed, and--he suffered.

It was a man who did not look like an accepted lover who presented himself at Rachel's door the following afternoon.

But Rachel was not there. Her secretary handed Hugh a little note which she had left for him, telling him that Hester had suddenly fallen ill, and that she had been sent for to Southminster. The note ended: "These first quiet days are past. So now you may tell your mother, and put our engagement in the _Morning Post_."

Hugh was astonished at the despair which overwhelmed him at the bare thought that he should not see Rachel that day and not the next either.

It was not to be borne. She had no right to make him suffer like this.

Day by day, when a certain restless fever returned upon him, he had known, as an opium-eater knows, that at a certain hour he should become rested and calm and sane once more. To be in the same room with Rachel, to hear her voice, to let his eyes dwell upon her, to lean his forehead for a moment against her hand, was to enter, as we enter in dreams, a world of joy and comfort, and boundless, endless, all-pervading peace.

And now he was suddenly left shivering in a bleak world without her.

With her he was himself, a released, freed self, growing daily further and further away from all he had once been. Without her he felt he was nothing but a fierce, wounded animal.

He tried to laugh at himself as he walked slowly away from Rachel's house. He told himself that he was absurd, that an absence of a few days was nothing. He turned his steps mechanically in the direction of his mother's lodgings. At any rate, he could tell her. He could talk about this cruel woman to her. The smart was momentarily soothed by his mother's painful joy. He wrenched himself somewhat out of himself as she wept the tears of jealous love, which all mothers must weep when the woman comes who takes their son away. "I am so glad," she kept repeating. "These are tears of joy, Hughie. I can forgive her for accepting you, but I should never have forgiven her if she had refused you--if she had made my boy miserable. And you have been miserable lately. I have seen it for a long time. I suppose it was all this coming on."

He said it was. The remembrance of other causes of irritation and moodiness had slipped entirely off his mind.

He stayed a long time with his mother, who pressed him to wait till his sister, who was shopping, returned. But his sister tarried long out-of-doors, and at last the pain of Rachel's absence returning on him, he left suddenly, promising to return in the evening.

He did not go back to his rooms. He wandered aimlessly through the darkening streets, impatient of the slow hours. At last he came out on the Embankment. The sun was setting redly, frostily, in a gray world of sky-mist and river-mist and spectral bridge and spire. A shaking path-way of pale flame came across the gray of the hidden river to meet him.

He stood a long time looking at it. The low sun touched and forsook, touched and forsook point by point the little crowded world which it was leaving.

"My poor mother," said Hugh to himself. "Poor, gentle, loving soul whom I so nearly brought down with sorrow to the grave. She will never know what an escape she has had. I might have been more to her. I might have made her happier, seeing her happiness is wrapped up in me. I will make up to her for it. I will be a better son to her in future. Rachel and I together will make her last years happy. Rachel and I together," said Hugh, over and over again.

And then he suddenly remembered that though Rachel had taken herself away he could write to her, and--he might look out the trains to Southminster. He leaped into a hansom and hurried back to his rooms.

The porter met him in a mysterious manner in the entrance. Lady waiting to see him. Lady said she was his sister. Had been waiting two hours. In his rooms now.

Hugh laughed, and ran up the wide, common staircase. His sister had heard the news from his mother and had rushed over at once.

As he stooped a little to fit the latch-key on his chain into the lock a man, who was coming down the stairs feeling in his pockets, stopped with a sudden exclamation. It was Captain Pratt, pallid, smiling, hair newly varnished, resplendent in a magnificent fur overcoat.

"What luck," he said. "Scarlett, I think. We met at Wilderleigh. Have you such a thing as a match about you?"

Hugh felt in his pockets. He had not one.

"Never mind," he said, opening the door. "I've plenty inside. Come in."

Hugh went in first, extricating his key. Captain Pratt followed, murmuring, "Nice little dens, these. A pal of mine lives just above--Streatham. You know Streatham, son of Lord--"

The remainder of the sentence was lost.

The door opened straight into the little sitting-room.

A woman in deep mourning rose suddenly out of a chair by the fire and came towards them.

"Hughie!" she said.

It was Lady Newhaven.

It is probable that none of the tableaux she had arranged were quite so dramatic as this one, in which she had not reckoned on that elaborate figure in the door-way.

Captain Pratt's opinion of Hugh, whom he had hitherto regarded as a pauper with an involved estate, leaped from temperate to summer heat--blood-heat. After the first instant he kept his eyes steadily fixed on Hugh.

"I--er--thank you, Scarlett. I have found my matches. A thousand thanks.

Good-night."

He was disappearing, but Hugh, his eyes flashing in his gray face, held him forcibly by the arm.

"Lady Newhaven," he said, "the porter is inexcusable. These are my rooms which he has shown you into by mistake, not Mr. Streatham's, your nephew. He is just above. I think," turning to Captain Pratt, "Streatham is out of town."

"He is out of town," said Captain Pratt, looking with cold admiration at Hugh. "Admirable," he said to himself; "a born gentleman."

"This is not the first time Streatham's visitors have been shown in here," continued Hugh. "The porter shall be dismissed. I trust you will forgive me my share in the annoyance he has caused you. Is your carriage waiting?"

"No," said Lady Newhaven, faintly, quite thrown off the lines of her prepared scene by the sudden intrusion into it of a foreign body.

"My hansom is below," said Captain Pratt, deferentially, venturing, now that the situation was, so to speak, draped, to turn his discreet agate eyes towards Lady Newhaven. "If it could be of the least use, I myself should prefer to walk."

Now that he looked at her, he looked very hard at her. She was a beautiful woman.

Lady Newhaven's self-possession had returned sufficiently for her to take up her fur cloak.

"Thank you," she said, letting Captain Pratt help her on with it. "I shall be glad to make use of your hansom, if you are sure you can spare it. I am shocked at having taken possession of your rooms," turning to Hugh; "I will write to Georgie Streatham to-night. I am staying with my mother, and I came across to ask him to take my boys to the pantomime, as I cannot take them myself--so soon," with a glance at her c.r.a.pe.

"Don't come down, Mr. Scarlett. I have given you enough trouble already."

Captain Pratt's arm was crooked. He conducted her in his best manner to the foot of the staircase and helped her into his hansom. His manner was not so unctuous as his father's, but it was slightly adhesive. Lady Newhaven shuddered involuntarily as she took his arm.

Hugh followed.

"I hope you will both come and see my mother," she said, with an attempt at graciousness. "You know Lady Trentham, I think?"--to Captain Pratt.

"Very slightly. No. Delighted!" murmured Captain Pratt, closing the hansom doors in an intimate manner. "And if I could be of the least use at any time in taking your boys to the pantomime--er--only too glad. The gla.s.s down, Richards!"

The hansom with its splendid bay horse rattled off.

Captain Pratt nodded to Hugh, who was still standing on the steps, and turned away to buy a box of matches from a pa.s.sing urchin. Then he turned up his fur collar, and proceeded leisurely on his way.

"Very stand-off both of them in the past," he said to himself, "but they will have to be civil in future. I wonder if he will make her keep her t.i.tle. Deuced awkward for them both though, only a month after Newhaven's death. I wish that sort of _contre-temps_ would happen to me when I'm bringing in a lot of fellows suddenly. An opening like that is all I want to give me a start, and I should get on as well as anybody.