Red Pottage Part 57

Silence.

Captain Pratt turned the gold k.n.o.b of his stick slowly in his thick, white fingers. He looked carefully at Lady Newhaven, as a connoisseur with intent to buy looks at a piece of valuable china. She was accustomed to being looked at, but there was something in Captain Pratt's prolonged scrutiny which filled her with vague alarm. She writhed under it. He observed her uneasiness, but he did not remove his eyes.

Were the boys well?

They were quite well, thanks. She was cowed.

Were they fond of skating?

Very fond.

Might he suggest that they should come over and skate at Warpington Towers to-morrow. He himself would be there, and would take charge of them.

He rose slowly, as one who has made up his mind. Lady Newhaven feared it would be troubling Captain Pratt too much.

It would be no trouble to Captain Pratt; on the contrary, a pleasure.

His hand was now extended. Lady Newhaven had to put hers into it.

Perhaps next week if the frost held. She tried to withdraw her hand. Oh, well, then, to-morrow; certainly, to-morrow.

"You may rely on me to take care of them," said Captain Pratt, still holding her hand. He obliged her to look at him. His hard eyes met her frightened blue ones. "You may rely on my discretion entirely--in all matters," he said, meaningly.

Lady Newhaven winced, and her hand trembled violently in his.

He pressed the shrinking little hand, let it go, and went away.

CHAPTER XLVIII

"Le temps apporte, emporte, mais ne rapporte pas."

"May I come in?" said the Bishop, tapping at Hester's door.

"Do come in."

Hester was lying propped up by many cushions on a sofa in the little sitting-room leading out of her bedroom. She looked a mere shadow in the fire-light.

She smiled at him mechanically, but her face relapsed at once into the apathetic expression which sat so ill upon it. Her l.u.s.treless eyes fixed themselves again on the fire.

"And what are you going to do this afternoon?" she said, politely. It was obvious she did not care what he did.

"I am going to Westhope on business," he said, looking narrowly at her.

It was all very well for Dr. Brown to say she must be roused; but how were his instructions to be carried out?

"I am a great deal of trouble to you," said Hester. "Could not I be sent to a home, or a place where you go through a cure, where I should be out of the way till I'm well?"

"Have I deserved that, Hester?"

"No; but you know I always try to wound my best friends."

"You don't succeed, my child, because they know you are in heavy trouble."

"We will not speak of that," said Hester, quickly.

"Yes, the time has come to speak of it. Why do you shut us out of this sorrow? Don't you see that you make our burdens heavier by refusing to let us share yours?"

"You can't share it," said Hester; "no one can."

"Do you think I have not grieved over it?"

"I know you have, but it was waste of time. It's no good--no good.

Please don't cheer me, and tell me I shall write better books yet, and that this trial is for my good. Dear Bishop, don't try and comfort me. I can't bear it."

"My poor child, I firmly believe you will write better books than the one which is lost, and I firmly believe that you will one day look back upon this time as a stop in your spiritual life, but I had not intended to say so. The thought was in my mind, but it was you who put the words into my mouth."

"I was so afraid that--"

"That I was going to improve the occasion?"

"Yes. Dr. Brown and the nurse are so dreadfully cheerful now, and always talking about the future, and how celebrated I shall be some day. If you and Rachel follow suit I shall--I think I shall--go out of my mind."

The Bishop did not answer.

"Dr. Brown may be right," Hester went on. "I may live to seventy, and I may become--what does he call it?--a distinguished author. I don't know and I don't care. But whatever happens in the future, nothing will bring back the book which was burned."

The Bishop did not speak. He dared not.

"If I had a child," Hester continued, in the exhausted voice with which he was becoming familiar, "and it died, I might have ten more, beautiful and clever and affectionate, but they would not replace the one I had lost. Only if it were a child," a little tremor broke the dead level of the pa.s.sionless voice, "I should meet it again in heaven. There is the resurrection of the body for the children of the body, but there is no resurrection that I ever heard of for the children of the brain."

Hester held her thin right hand with its disfigured first finger to the fire.

"A great writer who had married and had children, whom she worshipped, once told me that the pang of motherhood is that even your children don't seem your very own. They are often more like some one else than their parents, perhaps the spinster sister-in-law, whom every one dislikes, or some entire alien. Look at Regie. He is just like me, which must be a great trial to Minna. And they grow up bewildering their parents at every turn by characteristics they don't understand. But she said the spiritual children, the books, are really ours.

"If you were other than you are," said Hester, after a long pause, "you would reprove me for worshipping my own work. I suppose love is worship.

I loved it for itself, not for anything it was to bring me. That is what people like Dr. Brown don't understand. It was part of myself. But it was the better part. The side of me which loves success, and which he is always appealing to, had no hand in it. My one prayer was that I might be worthy to write it, that it might not suffer by contact with me. I spent myself upon it." Hester's voice sank. "I knew what I was doing. I joyfully spent my health, my eyesight, my very life upon it. I was impelled to do it by what you perhaps will call a blind instinct, what I, poor simpleton and dupe, believed at the time to be nothing less than the will of G.o.d."

"You will think so again," said the Bishop, "when you realize that the book has left its mark and influence upon your character. It has taught you a great deal. The mere fact of writing it has strengthened you. The outward and visible form is dead, but its spirit lives on in you. You will realize this presently."

"Shall I? On the contrary, the only thing I realize is that it is not G.o.d who is mocked, but His foolish children who try to do His bidding.

It seems He is not above putting a lying spirit in the mouth of his prophets. Do you think I still blame poor James for his bonfire, or his jealous little wife who wanted to get rid of me? Why should I? They acted up to their lights as your beloved Jock did when he squeezed the life out of that rabbit in Westhope Park. In all those days when I did not say anything, it was because I felt I had been deceived. I had done my part. G.o.d had not done His. He should have seen to it that the book was not destroyed. You prayed by me once when you thought I was unconscious. I heard all right. I should have laughed if I could, but it was too much trouble."

"These thoughts will pa.s.s away with your illness," said the Bishop. "You are like a man who has had a blow, who staggers about giddy and dazed, and sees the pavement rising up to strike him. The pavement is firm under his feet all the time."

"Half of me knows in a dim blind way that G.o.d is the same always," said Hester, "while the other half says, 'Curse G.o.d and die.'"