Red Pottage Part 6

Rachel came and stood beside her at the little window. There was just room for them between the type-writer and the bed.

Far below, Hester's brougham was pacing up and down.

"Then are love and sympathy nothing?" she said. "Those are the real gifts. If I were rich to-morrow I should look to you just as I do now for the things which money can't buy. And those are the things"--Rachel's voice shook--"which you have always given me, and which I can't do without. You feel my poverty more than I do myself. It crushed me at first when I could not support myself. Now that I can--and in everything except money I am very rich--I am comparatively happy."

There was a long silence.

"Perhaps," said Rachel at last, with difficulty, "if I had remained an heiress Mr. Tristram might have married me. I feel nearly sure he would have married me. In that case I lost my money only just in time to prevent a much greater misfortune, and I am glad I am as I am."

Rachel remembered that conversation often in after-years with a sense of thankfulness that for once she, who was so reticent, had let Hester see how dear she was to her.

The two girls stood long together cheek against cheek.

And as Hester leaned against Rachel the yearning of her soul towards her suddenly lit up something which had long lain colossal, but inapprehended, in the depths of her mind. Her paroxysm of despair at her own powerlessness was followed by a lightning flash of self-revelation.

She saw, as in a dream, terrible, beautiful, inaccessible, but distinct, where her power lay, of which restless bewildering hints had so often mocked her. She had but to touch the houses and they would fall down.

She held her hands tightly together lest she should do it. The strength as of an infinite ocean swept in beneath her weakness, and bore it upon its surface like a leaf.

"You must go home," said Rachel gently, remembering Lady Susan's punctual habits.

Hester kissed her absently and went out into the new world which had been pressing upon her all her life, the gate of which Love had opened for her. For Love has many keys besides that of her own dwelling. Some who know her slightly affirm that she can only open her own cheap patent padlock with a secret word on it that everybody knows. But some who know her better hold that hers is the master-key which will one day turn all the locks in all the world.

A year later Hester's first book, _An Idyll of East London_, was reaping its harvest of astonished indignation and admiration, and her acquaintances--not her friends--were still wondering how she came to know so much of a life of which they decided she could know nothing, when suddenly Lady Susan Gresley died, and Hester went to live in the country with her clergyman brother.

A few months later still, and on a mild April day, when the poor London trees had black buds on them, Rachel brushed and folded away in the little painted chest of drawers her few threadbare clothes, and put the boots--which the cobbler, whose wife she had nursed, had patched for her--under the shelf which held her few cups and plates and the faithful tin kettle, which had always been a cheerful boiler. And she washed her seven coa.r.s.e handkerchiefs, and put them in the washhandstand drawer.

And then she raked out the fire and cleaned the grate, and set the room in order. It was quickly done. She took up her hat, which lay beside a bundle on the bed. Her hands trembled as she put it on. She looked wistfully round her, and her face worked. The little room which had looked so alien when she came to it six years ago had become a home. She went to the window and kissed the pane through which she had learned to see so much. Then she seized up the bundle and went quickly out, locking the door behind her, and taking the key with her.

"I am going away for a time, but I shall come back," she said to the cobbler's wife on the same landing.

"No one comes back as once goes," said the woman, without raising her eyes from the cheap blouse which she was finishing, which kept so well the grim secret of how it came into being that no one was afraid of buying it.

"I am keeping on the room."

The woman smiled incredulously, giving one sharp glance at the bundle.

She had seen many flittings. She should buy the kettle when Rachel's "sticks" were sold by the landlord in default of the rent.

"Well, you was a good neighbor," she said. "There's a-many as 'ull miss you. Good-bye, and good luck to ye. I sha'n't say as you've left."

"I shall come back," said Rachel, hoa.r.s.ely, and she slipped down-stairs like a thief. She felt like a thief. For she was rich. The man who had led her father into the speculations which had ruined him had died childless, and had bequeathed to her a colossal fortune.

CHAPTER VII

Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the p.a.w.nee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment?--EMERSON.

A fortnight had pa.s.sed since the drawing of lots, and Lady Newhaven remained in ignorance as to which of the two men had received his death-warrant. Few have found suspense easy to bear; but for the self-centred an intolerable element is added to it, which unselfish natures escape. From her early youth Lady Newhaven had been in the habit of viewing life in picturesque _tableaux vivants_ of which she invariably formed the central figure. At her confirmation the Bishop, the white-robed clergy, and the other candidates had served but as a nebulous background against which her own white-clad, kneeling figure, bowed in reverent devotion, stood out in high relief.

When she married Lord Newhaven he took so slight a part, though a necessary one, in the wedding groups that their completeness had never been marred by misgivings as to his exact position in them. When, six years later, after one or two mild flirtations which only served as a stimulus to her love of dress--when at last she met, as she would have expressed it, "the one love of her life," her first fluctuations and final deviation from the path of honor were the result of new arrangements round the same centre.

The first groups in which Hugh took part had been prodigies of virtue.

The young mother with the Madonna face--Lady Newhaven firmly believed that her face, with the crimped fringe drawn down to the eyebrows, resembled that of a Madonna--with her children round her, Lord Newhaven as usual somewhat out of focus in the background; and Hugh, young, handsome, devoted, heartbroken, and enn.o.bled for life by the contemplation of such impregnable virtue.

"You accuse me of coldness," she had imagined herself saying in a later scene, when the children and the husband would have made too much of a crowd, and were consequently omitted. "I wish to Heaven I were as cold as I appear."

And she had really said it later on. Hugh never did accuse her of coldness, but that was a detail. Those words, conned over many times, had nevertheless actually proceeded out of her mouth. Few of us have the power of saying anything we intend to say. But Lady Newhaven had that power, and enjoyed also in consequence a profound belief in her prophetic instincts; while others, Hugh not excepted, detected a premeditated tone in her conversation, and a sense of incongruity between her remarks and the occasion which called them forth.

From an early date in their married life Lord Newhaven had been in the habit of discounting these remarks by making them in rapid rotation himself before proceeding to the matter in hand.

"Having noticed that a mother--I mean a young mother--is never really happy in the absence of her children, and that their affection makes up for the carelessness of their father, may I ask, Violet, what day you wish to return to Westhope?" he said one morning at breakfast.

"Any day," she replied. "I am as miserable in one place as in another."

"We will say Friday week, then," returned Lord Newhaven, ignoring, as he invariably did, any allusions to their relative position, and because he ignored them she made many. "The country," he added, hurriedly, "will be very refreshing after the glare and dust and empty worldly society of London."

She looked at him in anger. She did not understand the reason, but she had long vaguely felt that all conversation seemed to dry up in his presence. He mopped it all into his own sponge, so to speak, and left every subject exhausted.

She rose in silent dignity, and went to her boudoir and lay down there.

The heat was very great, and another fire was burning within her, withering her round cheek, and making her small, plump hand look shrunk and thin. A fortnight had pa.s.sed, and she had not heard from Hugh. She had written to him many times, at first only imploring him to meet her, but afterwards telling him she knew what had happened, and entreating him to put her out of suspense, to send her one line that his life was not endangered. She had received no answer to any of her letters. She came to the conclusion that they had been intercepted by Lord Newhaven, and that no doubt the same fate had befallen Hugh's letters to herself.

For some time past, before the drawing of lots, she had noticed that Hugh's letters had become less frequent and shorter in length. She understood the reason now. Half of them had been intercepted. How that fact could account for the shortness of the remainder may not be immediately apparent to the prosaic mind, but it was obvious to Lady Newhaven. That Hugh had begun to weary of her could not force the narrow entrance to her mind. Such a possibility had never been even considered in the pictures of the future with which her imagination busied itself.

But what would the future be? The road along which she was walking forked before her eyes, and her usual perspicacity was at fault. She knew not in which of those two diverging paths the future would lie.

Would she in eighteen months' time--she should certainly refuse to marry within the year--be standing at the altar in a "confection" of lilac and white with Hugh; or would she be a miserable wife, moving ghostlike about her house, in colored raiment, while a distant grave was always white with flowers sent by a nameless friend of the dead? "How some one must have loved him!" she imagined Hugh's aged mother saying. And once, as that bereaved mother came in the dusk to weep beside the grave, did she not see a shadowy figure start up, black-robed, from the flower-laden sod, and, hastily drawing a thick veil over a beautiful, despairing face, glide away among the trees? At this point Lady Newhaven always began to cry. It was too heart-rending. And her mind in violent recoil was caught once more, and broken on the same wheel. "Which?

_Which_?"

A servant entered.

"Would her ladyship see Miss West for a few minutes?"

"Yes," said Lady Newhaven, glad to be delivered from herself, if only by the presence of an acquaintance.

"It is very charitable of you to see me," said Rachel. "Personally, I think morning calls ought to be a penal offence. But I came at the entreaty of a former servant of yours. I feel sure you will let me carry some message of forgiveness to her, as she is dying. Her name is Morgan.

Do you remember her?"

"I once had a maid called Morgan," said Lady Newhaven. "She was drunken, and I had to part with her in the end; but I kept her as long as I could in spite of it. She had a genius for hair-dressing."

"She took your diamond heart pendant," continued Rachel. "She was never found out. She can't return it, for, of course, she sold it and spent the money. But now at last she feels she did wrong, and she says she will die easier for your forgiveness."

"Oh! I forgive her," said Lady Newhaven, indifferently. "I often wondered how I lost it. I never cared about it." She glanced at Rachel, and added tremulously, "My husband gave it me."

A sudden impulse was urging her to confide in this grave, gentle-eyed woman. The temptation was all the stronger because Rachel, who had only lately appeared in society, was not connected with any portion of her previous life. She was as much a chance acquaintance as a fellow-pa.s.senger in a railway carriage.

Rachel rose and held out her hand.

"Don't go," whispered Lady Newhaven, taking her outstretched hand and holding it.