Red Pottage Part 55

"And your head does not ache to-day, does it?"

"Nothing to matter. But I feel as if I had fallen on it from the top of the cathedral. Dr. Brown says that is nonsense, but I think so all the same. When you believe a thing, and you're told it's nonsense, and you still believe it, that is an hallucination, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"I have had a great many," said Hester, slowly. "I suppose I have been more ill than I knew. I thought I saw, I really did see, the spirits of the frost and the snow looking in at the window. And I talked to them a long time, and asked them what quarrel they had with me, their sister, that since I was a child they had always been going about to kill me.

Aunt Susan always seemed to think they were enemies who gave me bronchitis. And I told them how I loved them and all their works. And they breathed on the pane and wrote beautiful things in frost-work, and I read them all. Now, Rachel, is that an hallucination about the frost-work, because it seems to me still, now that I am better, though I can't explain it, that I do see the meaning of it at last, and that I shall never be afraid of them again."

Rachel did not answer.

She had long since realized that Hester, when in her normal condition, saw things which she herself did not see. She had long since realized that Hester always accepted as final the limit of vision of the person she was with, but that that limit changed with every person she met.

Rachel had seen her adjust it to persons more short-sighted than herself, with secret self-satisfaction, and then with sudden bewilderment had heard Hester accept as a commonplace from some one else what appeared to Rachel fantastic in the extreme. If Rachel had considered her own mind as the measure of the normal of all other minds, she could not have escaped the conclusion that Hester was a victim of manifold delusions. But, fortunately for herself, she saw that most ladders possessed more than the one rung on which she was standing.

"That is quite different, isn't it," said Hester, "from thinking Dr.

Brown is a gray wolf?"

"Quite different. That was an hallucination of fever. You see that for yourself now that you have no fever."

"I see that, of course, now that I have no fever," repeated Hester, her eyes widening. "But one hallucination quite as foolish as that is always coming back, and I can't shake it off. The wolf was gone directly, but this is just the same now I am better, only it gets worse and worse. I have never spoken of it to any one, because I know it is so silly. But Rachel--I have no fever now--and yet--I know you'll laugh at me--I laugh at my own foolish self--and yet all the time I have a horrible feeling that"--Hester's eyes had in them a terror that was hardly human--"that my book is burned."

CHAPTER XLVII

The soul of thy brother is a dark forest. --_Russian Proverb_.

"A marriage has been arranged, and will shortly take place, between Hugh St. John Scarlett, of Kenstone Manor, Shropshire, only son of the late Lord Henry Scarlett, and Rachel, only child of the late Joshua Hopkins West, of Birmingham."

This announcement appeared in the _Morning Post_ a few days after Christmas, and aroused many different emotions in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of those who read it.

"She has done it to spite me," said Mr. Tristram to himself over his morning rasher, in the little eating-house near his studio. "I knew there was some one else in her mind when she refused me. I rather thought it was that weedy fellow with the high nose. Will he make her happy because he is a lord's son? That is what I should like to ask her.

Poor Rachel, if we had been able to marry five years ago we should never have heard of this society craze. Well, it's all over now." And Mr.

Tristram henceforward took the position of a man suffering from an indelible attachment to a woman who had thrown him over for a t.i.tle.

The Gresleys were astonished at the engagement. It was so extraordinary that they should know both persons. Now that they came to think of it, both of them had been to tea at the Vicarage only last summer.

"A good many people pop in and out of this house," they agreed.

"I am as certain as that I stand here," said Mr. Gresley, who was sitting down, "that that noisy boor, that underbred, foul-mouthed d.i.c.k Vernon wanted to marry her."

"Don't mention him," said Mrs. Gresley. "When I think of what he dared to say--"

"My love," said Mr. Gresley, "I have forgiven him. I have put from my mind all he said, for I am convinced he was under the influence of drink at the time. We must make allowance for those who live in hot climates.

I bear him no grudge. But I am glad that a man of that stamp should not marry Miss West. Drunkenness makes a h.e.l.l of married life. Mr. Scarlett, though he looked delicate, had at least the appearance of being abstemious."

Fraulein heard the news as she was packing her boxes to leave Warpington Vicarage. She was greatly depressed. She could not be with her dear Miss Gresley in this mysterious illness which some secret sorrow had brought upon her; but at least Miss West could minister to her. And now it seemed Miss West was thinking of "Brautigams" more than of Hester.

Fraulein had been very uncomfortable at the Vicarage, but she wept at leaving. Mrs. Gresley had never attained to treating her with the consideration which she would have accorded to one whom she considered her equal. The servants were allowed to disregard with impunity her small polite requests. The nurse was consistently, ferociously jealous of her. But the children had made up for all, and now she was leaving them; and she did not own it to herself, for she was but five-and-thirty and the shyest of the shy; but she should see no more that n.o.ble-hearted, that musical Herr B-r-r-rown.

"Doll," said Sybell Loftus to her husband at breakfast, "I've made another match. I thought at the time he liked her. You remember Rachel West, not pretty, but with a nice expression--and what does beauty matter? She is engaged to Mr. Scarlett."

"Quiet, decent chap," said Doll; "and I like _her_. No nonsense about her. Good thing he wasn't drowned."

"Mr. Harvey will feel it. He confided to me that she was his ideal. Now Rachel is everything that is sweet and good and dear, and she will make a most excellent wife, but I should never have thought, would you, that she could be anybody's ideal?"

Doll opened his mouth to say, "That depends," but remembered that his wife had taken an unaccountable dislike to that simple phrase, and remained silent.

Captain Pratt, who was spending Christmas with his family, was the only person at Warpington Towers who read the papers. On this particular morning he came down to a late breakfast after the others had finished.

His father, who was always down at eight, secretly admired his son's aristocratic habits, while he affected to laugh at them. "Shameful luxurious ways, these young men in the Guards. Fashionable society is rotten, sir; rotten to the core. Never get up till noon. My boy is as bad as any of them."

Captain Pratt propped up the paper open before him while he sipped his coffee and glanced down the columns. His travelling eye reached Hugh's engagement.

Captain Pratt rarely betrayed any feeling except ennui, but as he read, astonishment got the better of him.

"By George!" he said, below his breath.

The bit of omelette on its way to his mouth was slowly lowered again, and remained sticking on the end of his fork.

_What did it mean?_ He recalled that scene in Hugh's rooms _only last week_. He had spoken of it to no one, for he intended to earn grat.i.tude by his discretion. Of course, Scarlett was going to marry Lady Newhaven after a decent interval. She was a very beautiful woman, with a large jointure, and she was obviously in love with him. The question of her conduct was not considered. It never entered Captain Pratt's head, any more than that of a ten-year-old child. He was aware that all the women of the upper cla.s.ses were immoral, except newly come-out girls. That was an established fact. The only difference between the individuals, which caused a separation as of the sheep from the goats, was whether they were compromised or not. Lady Newhaven was not, unless he chose to compromise her. No breath of scandal had ever touched her.

But what was Scarlett about? Could they have quarrelled? What did it mean? _And what would she do now?_

"By George!" said Captain Pratt, again, and the agate eyes narrowed down to two slits.

He sat a long time motionless, his untasted breakfast before him. His mind was working, weighing, applying now its scales, now its thermometer.

Rachel and Hugh were sitting together looking at a paragraph in the _Morning Post_.

"Does Miss Gresley take any interest?" said Hugh.

He was a little jealous of Hester. This illness, the cause of which had sincerely grieved him, had come at an inopportune moment. Hester was always taking Rachel from him.

"Yes," said Rachel, "a little when she remembers. But she can only think of one thing."

"That unhappy book."