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By
"After the Red Pottage comes the exceeding bitter cry"
GEORGE MEREDITH.
In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:
We are betray'd by what is false within.
"I will get out," said Hugh Scarlett to himself, seeing no
bars, but half conscious of a cage. "I will get out," he
repeated, as his hansom took him swiftly from the house in Portman Square,
where he had been dining, towards that other house in Carlton House
Terrace, whither his thoughts had travelled on before him, outdistancing
the Trip-Clip-Clop, Trip-Clip-Clop of the horse.
It was a hot night in June. Hugh had thrown back his overcoat, and the
throng of passers-by in the street could see, if they cared to see,
"the glass of fashion" in the shape of white waistcoat and
shirt front, surmounted by the handsome, irritated face of their owner,
leaning back with his hat tilted over his eyes.
Trip-Clip-Clop went the horse.
A great deal of thinking may be compressed into a quarter of an hour,
especially if it has been long eluded.
"I will get out," he said again to himself with an impatient
movement. It was beginning to weary him, this common-
place intrigue which had been so new and alluring a year ago. He did not own it to himself, but he was tired of it. Perhaps the reason why good resolutions have earned for themselves such an evil repute as paving stones is because they are often the result, not of repentance, but of the restlessness that dogs an evaporating pleasure. This liaison had been alternately his pride and his shame for many months. But now it was becoming something more, which it had been all the time, only he had not noticed it till lately--a fetter, a clog, something irksome, to be cast off and pushed out of sight. Decidedly the moment for the good resolution had arrived.
"I will break it off," he said again. "Thank heaven
not a soul has ever guessed it."
How could any one have guessed it?
He remembered the day when he had first met her a year ago, and had
looked upon her as merely a pretty woman. He remembered other days, and the
gradual building up between them of a fairy palace. He had added a stone
here, she a stone there, until suddenly it became--a prison. Had he
been tempter or tempted? He did not know. He did not care. He wanted only
to be out of it. His better feelings and his conscience had been awakened
by the first touch of weariness. His brief infatuation had run its course.
His judgment had been whirled--he told himself it had been whirled,
but it had really only been tweaked--from its centre, had performed
its giddy orbit, and now the check-string had brought it back to the point
from whence it had set out, namely, that she was merely a pretty woman.
"I will break with her gradually," he said, like the tyro he
was, and he pictured to himself the wretched scenes in which she would
abuse him, reproach him, probably compromise herself, the letters she would
write to him. At any rate he need not read them. Oh! how tired he was of
the whole thing beforehand. Why had he been such a fool? He looked at the
termination of the liaison as a bad sailor
looks at an inevitable sea passage at the end of a journey. It must be
gone through, but the prospect of undergoing it filled him with disgust.
A brougham passed him swiftly on noiseless wheels, and the woman in it
caught a glimpse of the high-bred clean-shaved face, half savage, half
sullen in the hansom.
"Anger, impatience and remorse," she said to herself, and
finished buttoning her gloves.
"Thank heaven not a soul has ever guessed it," repeated Hugh
fervently, as the hansom came suddenly to a standstill.
In another moment he was taking Lady Newhaven's hand as she stood
at the entrance of her amber drawing-room beside a grove of pink
orchids.
He chatted a moment, greeted Lord Newhaven, and passed on into the
crowded rooms. How could any one have guessed it? No breath of scandal had
ever touched Lady Newhaven. She stood beside her pink orchids, near her
fatigued-looking, gentle-mannered husband, a very pretty woman in white
satin and diamonds. Perhaps her blonde hair was a shade darker at the roots
than in its waved coils; perhaps her blue eyes did not look quite in
harmony with their blue-black lashes; but the whole effect had the delicate
conventional perfection of a cleverly touched-up chromo-lithograph. Of
course tastes differ. Some people like chromo-lithographs, others
don't. But even those who do are apt to become estranged. They may
inspire love, admiration, but never fidelity. Most of us have in our time
hammered nails into our walls, which, though they now decorously support
the engravings and etchings of our maturer years, were nevertheless
originally driven in to uphold the cherished, the long since discarded
chromos of our foolish youth.
The diamond sun upon Lady Newhaven's breast quivered a little, a
very little, as Hugh greeted her, and she turned to offer the same small
smile and gloved hand to the next comer, whose name was leaping before him
from one footman to another.
"Mr. Richard Vernon."
Lady Newhaven's wide blue eyes looked vague. Her hand hesitated.
This strongly built, ill-dressed man, with his keen brown deeply scarred
face and crooked mouth, was unknown to her.
Lord Newhaven darted forward.
"Dick!" he exclaimed, and Dick shot forth an immense
mahogany hand, and shook Lord Newhaven's warmly.
"Well," he said, after Lord Newhaven had introduced him to
his wife, "I'm dashed if I knew who either of you were. But I
found your invitation at my club when I landed yesterday, so I decided to
come and have a look at you. And so it is only you, Cackles, after
all"--(Lord Newhaven's habit of silence had earned for him
the
sobriquet of
"Cackles")--"I quite thought I was going
into--well, ahem!--into society. I did not know you had got a
handle to your name. How did you find out I was in England?"
"My dear fellow, I didn't," said Lord Newhaven, gently
drawing Dick aside, whose back was serenely blocking a stream of new
arrivals. "I fancy--in fact, I'm simply delighted to see
you. How is the wine getting on? But I suppose there must be other Dick
Vernons on my wife's list. Have you the card with you?"
"Rather," said Dick, "always take the card with me
since I was kicked out of a miner's hop at Broken Hill because I
forgot it. 'No gentleman will be admitted in a paper shirt' was
mentioned on it, I remember. A concertina and candles in bottles. Ripping
while it lasted. I wish you had been there."
"I wish I had." Lord Newhaven's tired, half-closed eye
opened a little. "But the end seems to have been
unfortunate."
"Not at all," said Dick, watching the new arrivals with his
head thrown back. "Fine girl that; I'll take a look at the whole
mob of them directly. They came round next day to say it had been a
mistake, but there were four or five cripples who found that out the night
before. Here is the card."
Lord Newhaven glanced at it attentively, and then laughed.
"It is four years old," he said; "I must have put you
on my mother's list, not knowing you had left London. It is in her
writing."
"I'm rather late," said Dick composedly, "but I
am here at last. Now, Cack--Newhaven, if that's your noble
name--as I am here, trot out a few heiresses, would you? I want to
take one or two back with me. I say, ought I to put my gloves
on?"
"No, no. Clutch them in your great fist as you are doing
now."
"Thanks. I suppose, old chap, I'm all right? Not had on an
evening-coat for four years."
Dick's trousers were too short for him, and he had tied his white
tie with a waist to it. Lord Newhaven had seen both details before he
recognised him.
"Quite right," he said hastily. "Now, who is to be the
happy woman?"
Dick's hawk-eye promenaded over the crowd in the second room, in
the doorway of which he was standing.
"That one," he said, "the tall girl in the green gown
talking to the Bishop."
"You have a wonderful eye for heiresses. You have picked out the
greatest in London. That is Miss Rachel West. You say you want
two."
"One at a time, thanks. I shall take her down to supper. I
suppose--er--there is supper at this sort of thing,
isn't there?"
"Of a kind. You need not be afraid of the claret; it isn't
yours."
"Catch you giving your best at a crush," retorted Dick.
"The Bishop's moving. Hurry up."
RUDYARD KIPLING.
But as he groped against the wall, two hands upon him fell,
The King behind his shoulder spake: "Dead man, thou dost not well."
A woman in a pale green gown was standing near the open window, her
white profile outlined against the framed darkness, as she listened with
evident amusement to the tall, ill-dressed man beside her.
Hugh's eyes lost the veiled scorn with which it was their wont to
look at society and the indulgent patronage which lurked in them for pretty
women.
Rachel West slowly turned her face towards him without seeing him, and
his heart leaped. She was not beautiful except with the beauty of health,
and a certain dignity of carriage which is the outcome of a head and hands
and body that are at unity with each other, and with a mind absolutely
unconscious of self. She had not the long nose which so frequently usurps
more than its share of the faces of the well bred, nor had she, alas! the
short upper lip which redeems everything. Her features were as
insignificant as her colouring. People rarely noticed that Rachel's
hair was brown, and that her deep-set eyes were grey. But upon her grave
face the word "Helper" was plainly written: and something else.
What was it?
Just as in the faces of seamen we trace the onslaught of storm and sun
and brine, and the puckering of the skin
round the eyes that comes of long watching in half lights, so in some faces, calm and pure as Rachel's, on which the sun and rain have never beaten, there is an expression betokening strong resistance from within of the brunt of a whirlwind from without. The marks of conflict and endurance on a young face--who shall see them unmoved! The Mother of Jesus must have noticed a great difference in her Son when she first saw Him again after the temptation in the wilderness.
Rachel's grave amused glance fell upon Hugh. Their eyes met, and he
instantly perceived to his astonishment that she recognised him. But she
did not bow, and a moment later left the nearly empty rooms with the man
who was talking to her.
Hugh was excited out of recognition of his former half-scornful,
half-blasé self. That woman must be
his wife. She would save him from himself, this cynical restless self which
never remained in one stay. The half acknowledged weakness in his nature
unconsciously flung itself upon her strength, a strength which had been
tried. She would love him, and uphold him. There would be no more yielding
to circumstances if that pure strong soul were close beside him. He would
lean upon her, and the ugly bypaths of these last years would know him no
more. Her presence would leaven his whole life. In the momentary insanity,
which was perhaps after all only a prophetic intuition, he had no fears, no
misgivings. He thought that with that face it was not possible that she
could be so wicked as to refuse him.
"She will marry me," he said to himself. "She
must."
Lady Newhaven touched him gently on the arm.
"I dared not speak to you before," she said. "Nearly
every one has gone. Will you take me down to supper? I am tired
out."
He stared at her, not recognising her.
"Have I vexed you?" she faltered.
And with a sudden horrible revulsion of feeling he remembered. The poor
chromo had fallen violently from its
nail. But the nail remained--ready. He took her into the supper room and got her a glass of champagne. She subsided on to a sofa beside another woman, vaguely suspecting trouble in the air. He felt thankful that Rachel had already gone. Dick, nearly the last, was putting on his coat, arranging to meet Lord Newhaven the following morning at his club. They had been in Australia together, and were evidently old friends.
Lord Newhaven's listless manner returned as Dick marched out. Hugh
had got one arm in his coat. An instinct of flight possessed him, a vague
horror of the woman in diamonds furtively watching him under her lowered
eyelids through the open door.
"Oh, Scarlett!" said Lord Newhaven, detaining him languidly,
"I want three minutes of your valuable time. Come into my
study."
"Another crossbow for Westhope Abbey?" said Hugh, trying to
speak unconcernedly, as he followed his host to a back room on the ground
floor. Lord Newhaven was collecting arms for the hall of his country
house.
"No! much simpler than those elaborate machines," said the
older man, turning on the electric light. Hugh went in, and Lord Newhaven
closed the door.
Over the mantel-shelf were hung a few old Japanese inlaid carbines, and
beneath them an array of pistols.
"Useless now," said Lord Newhaven, touching them
affectionately. "But," he added, with a shade more listlessness
than before, "Society has become accustomed to do without them, and
does ill without them, but we must conform to her." Hugh started
slightly, and then remained motionless. "You observe these two paper
lighters, Scarlett? One is an inch shorter than the other. They have been
waiting on the mantel-shelf for the last month, till I had an opportunity
of drawing your attention to them. I am sure we perfectly understand each
other. No name need be mentioned. All scandal is avoided. I feel confident
you will not hesitate to
make me the only reparation one man can make another in the somewhat hackneyed circumstances in which we find ourselves."
Lord Newhaven took the lighters out of the glass. He glanced suddenly at
Hugh's stunned face, and went on:
"I am sorry the idea is not my own. I read it in a magazine.
Though comparatively modern it promises soon to become as customary as the
much to be regretted pistols for two and coffee for four. I hold the
lighters thus, and you draw. Whoever draws or keeps the short one is
pledged to leave this world within four months, or shall we say five, on
account of the pheasant shooting? Five be it. Is it agreed? Just so! Will
you draw?"
A swift spasm passed over Hugh's face, and a tiger glint leapt into
Lord Newhaven's eyes, fixed intently upon him.
There was a brief second in which Hugh's mind wavered, as the flame
of a candle wavers in a sudden draught. Lord Newhaven's eyes
glittered. He advanced the lighters an inch nearer.
If he had not advanced them that inch Hugh thought afterwards that he
would have refused to draw.
He backed against the mantel-piece, and then put out his hand suddenly
and drew. It seemed the only way of escape.
The two men measured the lighters on the table under the electric
light.
Lord Newhaven laughed.
Hugh stood a moment, and then went out.
Is it well with thee? Is it well with thy husband?
Neither man moved within. Only one spoke. There was no other sound to
deaden her husband's distinct low voice. The silence that followed his
last word "Will you draw?" was broken by his laugh, and she had
barely time to throw herself back from the door into a dark recess under
the staircase before Hugh came out. He almost touched her as he passed. He
must have seen her if he had been capable of seeing anything, but he went
straight on unheeding. And as she stole a few steps to gaze after him, she
saw him cross the hall and go out into the night without his hat and coat,
the amazed servants staring after him.
She drew back to go upstairs, and met her husband coming slowly out of
the study. He looked steadily at her, as she clung trembling to the
banisters. There was no alteration in his glance, and she suddenly
perceived that what he knew now he had always known. She put her hand to
her head.
"You look tired," he said, in the level voice to which she
was accustomed. "You had better go to bed."
She stumbled swiftly upstairs, catching at the banisters, and went into
her own room.
Her maid was waiting for her by the dressing-table with its shaded
electric lights. And she remembered that she had given a party, and that
she had on her diamonds.
It would take a long time to unfasten them. She pulled at the diamond
sun on her breast with a shaking hand. Her husband had given it to her when
her eldest son was born. Her maid took the tiara gently out of her hair,
and cut the threads that sewed the diamonds on her breast and shoulders.
Would it never end? The lace of her gown cautiously withdrawn through its
hundred eyelet-holes knotted itself.
"Cut it," she said impatiently. "Cut it."
At last she was in her dressing-gown and alone. She flung herself face
downwards on the sofa. Her attitude had the touch of artificiality which
was natural to her.
The deluge had arrived, and unconsciously she met it as she would have
made a heroine meet it had she been a novelist, in a white dressing-gown
and pink ribbons in a stereotyped attitude of despair on a divan.
Conscience is supposed to make cowards of us all, but it is a matter of
common experience that the unimaginative are made cowards of only by being
found out.
Had David qualms of conscience when Uriah fell before the besieged city?
Surely if he had he would have winced at the obvious parallel of the
prophet's story about the ewe lamb. But apparently he remained
serenely obtuse till the indignant author's "Thou art the
man" unexpectedly nailed him to the cross of his sin.
And so it was with Lady Newhaven. She had gone through the twenty-seven
years of her life believing herself to be a religious and virtuous person.
She was so accustomed to the idea that it had become a habit, and now the
whole of her self-respect was in one wrench torn from her. The events of
the last year had not worn it down to its last shred, had not even worn the
nap off. It was dragged from her intact, and the shock left her faint and
shuddering.
The thought that her husband knew, and had thought fit to
conceal his knowledge, had never entered her mind, any more than the probability that she had been seen by some of the servants kneeling listening at a keyhole. The mistake which all unobservant people make is to assume that others are as unobservant as themselves.
By what frightful accident, she asked herself, had this catastrophe come
about. She thought of all the obvious incidents which would have revealed
the secret to herself; the dropped letter, the altered countenance, the
badly arranged lie. No. She was convinced her secret had been guarded with
minute, with scrupulous care. The only thing she had forgotten in her
calculations was her husband's character, if, indeed, she could be
said to have forgotten that which she had never known.
Lord Newhaven was in his wife's eyes a very quiet man of few words.
That his few words did not represent the whole of him had never occurred to
her. She had often told her friends that he walked through life with his
eyes shut. He had a trick of half shutting his eyes which confirmed her in
this opinion. When she came across persons who were, after a time,
discovered to have affections and interests of which they had not spoken
she described them as "cunning." She had never thought Edward
"cunning" till to-night. How had he of all men discovered
this--this.--She had no words ready to call her conduct by,
though words would not have failed her had she been denouncing the same
conduct in another wife and mother.
Gradually "the whole horror of her situation," to borrow
from her own vocabulary, forced itself upon her mind like damp through a
gay wall-paper. What did it matter how the discovery had been made! It was
made, and she was ruined. She repeated the words between little gasps for
breath. Ruined! Her reputation lost! Hers--Violet Newhaven's. It
was a sheer impossibility that such a thing could have happened to a woman
like her. It was some vile slander which Edward must see to. He was good at
that sort of thing. But no, Edward would not help her. She had
committed--. She
flung out her hands panic-stricken, as if to ward off a blow. The deed had brought with it no shame, but the word--the word wounded her like a sword.
Her feeble mind, momentarily stunned, pursued its groping way.
He would divorce her. It would be in the papers. But no. What was that
he had said to Hugh--"No names to be mentioned; all scandal
avoided."
She shivered and drew in her breath. It was to be settled some other
way. Her mind became an entire blank. Another way! What way? She remembered
now, and an inarticulate cry broke from her. They had drawn lots.
Which had drawn the short lighter?
Her husband had laughed. But then he laughed at everything. He was never
really serious, always shallow and heartless. He would have laughed if he
had drawn it himself. Perhaps he had. Yes, he certainly had drawn it. But
Hugh? She saw again the white set face as he passed her. No, it must be
Hugh who had drawn it--Hugh whom she loved. She wrung her hands and
moaned, half-aloud:
"Which? Which?"
There was a slight movement in the next room, the door was opened, and
Lord Newhaven appeared in the doorway. He was still in evening dress.
"Did you call?" he said quietly. "Are you ill?"
He came and stood beside her.
"No," she said hoarsely, and she sat up and gazed fixedly at
him. Despair and suspense were in her eyes. There was no change in his, and
she remembered that she had never seen him angry. Perhaps she had not known
when he was angry.
He was turning away, but she stopped him.
"Wait," she said, and he returned, his cold attentive eye
upon her. There was no contempt, no indignation in his bearing. If those
feelings had shaken him it must have been some time ago. If they had been
met and vanquished in secret that also must have been some time ago. He
took up an
"Imitation of Christ," bound in the peculiar shade of lilac which at that moment prevailed, and turned it in his hand.
"You are overwrought," he said, after a moment's pause,
"and I particularly dislike a scene."
She did not heed him.
"I listened at the door," she said in a harsh, unnatural
voice.
"I am perfectly aware of it."
A sort of horror seemed to have enveloped the familiar room. The very
furniture looked like well-known words arranged suddenly in some new and
dreadful meaning.
"You never loved me," she said.
He did not answer, but he looked gravely at her for a moment, and she
was ashamed.
"Why don't you divorce me if you think me so
wicked?"
"For the sake of the children," he said, with a slight
change of voice.
Teddy, the eldest, had been born in this room. Did either remember that
grey morning six years ago?
There was a silence that might be felt.
"Who drew the short lighter?" she whispered, before she knew
that she had spoken.
"I am not here to answer questions," he replied. "And
I have asked none. Neither, you will observe, have I blamed you. But I
desire that you will never again allude to this subject, and that you will
keep in mind that I do not intend to discuss it with you."
He laid down the "Imitation," and moved towards his own
room.
With a sudden movement she flung herself upon her knees before him and
caught his arm. The attitude suggested an amateur.
"Which drew the short lighter?" she gasped, her small
upturned face white and convulsed.
"You will know in five months' time," he said. Then he
extricated himself from her trembling clasp and left the room, closing the
door quietly behind him.
RUDYARD KIPLING.
For the sin ye do by two and two ye must pay for one by one!
His mind cleared a little. Rachel's grave face stood out against a
dark background--a background darker surely than that of the summer
night. He remembered with self-contempt the extravagant emotion which she
had aroused in him.
"Absurd," Hugh said to himself, with the distrust of all
sudden springs of pure emotion which those who have misused them rarely
escape. And then another remembrance, which only a sleeping draught had
kept at bay, darted upon him like a panther on its prey.
He had drawn the short lighter.
He started violently, and then fell back trembling.
"Oh, my God!" he said involuntarily.
He lay still, telling himself that this dreadful nightmare would pass,
would fade in the light of common day.
His servant came in noiselessly with a cup of coffee and a little sheaf
of letters.
He pretended to be asleep; but when the man had gone he put out his
shaking hand for the coffee and drank it.
The mist before his mind gradually lifted. Gradually, too, the horror on
his face whitened to despair, as a twilight meadow whitens beneath the
evening frost. He had drawn the short lighter. Nothing in heaven or earth
could alter that fact.
He did not stop to wonder how Lord Newhaven had become aware of his own
dishonour, or at the strange weapon with which he had avenged himself. He
went over every detail of his encounter with him in the study. His hand had
been forced. He had been thrust into a vile position. He ought to have
refused to draw. He did not agree to draw. Nevertheless he had drawn. And
Hugh knew that if it had to be done again, he should again have been
compelled to draw by the iron will before which his was as straw. He could
not have met the scorn of those terrible half-closed eyes if he had
refused.
"There was no help for it," said Hugh, half aloud. And yet
to die by his own hand within five months! It was incredible. It was
preposterous.
"I never agreed to it," he said, passionately.
Nevertheless he had drawn. The remembrance ever returned to
lay its cold hand upon his heart, and with it came the grim conviction that
if Lord Newhaven had drawn the short lighter he would have carried out the
agreement to the letter. Whether it was extravagant, unchristian, whatever
might have been truly said of that unholy compact, Lord Newhaven would have
stood by it.
"I suppose I must stand by it, too," said Hugh to himself,
the cold sweat breaking on his forehead. "I suppose I am bound in
honour to stand by it, too."
He suffered his mind to regard the alternative.
To wrong a man as deeply as he had wronged Lord Newhaven; to tacitly
accept.--That was where his mistake had been. Another man, that
mahogany-faced fellow with the colonial
accent, would have refused to draw, and would have knocked Lord Newhaven down and half killed him, or would have been knocked down and half killed by him. But to tacitly accept a means by which the injured man risked his life to avenge his honour, and then afterwards to shirk the fate which a perfectly even chance had thrown upon him instead of on his antagonist! It was too mean, too despicable. Hugh's pale cheek burned.
"I am bound," he said slowly to himself over and over again.
There was no way of escape.
Yesterday evening, with some intuition of coming peril, he had said
"I will get out." The way of retreat had been open behind him.
Now by one slight movement he was cut off from it for ever.
"I can't get out," said the starling, the feathers on
its breast worn away with beating against the bars.
"I can't get out," said Hugh, coming for the first time
in contact with the bars which he was to know so well, the bars of the
prison that he had made with his own hands.
He looked into the future with blank eyes. He had no future now. He
stared vacantly in front of him like a man who looks through his window at
the wide expanse of meadow and waving wood and distant hill which has met
his eye every morning of his life, and finds it--gone. It was
incredible. He turned giddy. His reeling mind, shrinking back from the
abyss, struck against a fixed point, and clutching it came violently to a
standstill.
His mother!
His mother was a widow and he was her only son. If he died by his own
hand it would break her heart. Hugh groaned and thrust the thought from
him. It was too sharp. He could not stifle it.
His sin, not worse than that of many another man, had found him out. He
had done wrong. He admitted it, but this monstrous judgment on him was out
of all proportion to his offence. And like some malignant infectious
disease
retribution would fall, not on him alone, but on those nearest him, on his innocent mother and sister. It was unjust, unjust, unjust.
A very bitter look came into his face. Hugh had never so far hated any
one, but now something very like hatred welled up in his heart against Lady
Newhaven. She had lured him to his destruction. She had tempted him. This
was undoubtedly true, though not probably the view which her guardian angel
would take of the matter.
Among the letters which the servant had brought him he suddenly
recognised that the topmost was in Lady Newhaven's handwriting. Anger
and repulsion seized him. No doubt it was the first of a series. "Why
was he so altered? What had she done to offend him?" &c. &c.
He knew the contents beforehand, or thought he knew them. He got up
deliberately, threw the unopened note into the empty fireplace, and put a
match to it. He watched it burn.
It was his first overt act of rebellion against her yoke, the first step
along the nearest of the many well-worn paths that a man takes at random to
leave a woman. It did not occur to him that Lady Newhaven might have
written to him about his encounter with her husband. He knew Lord Newhaven
well enough to be absolutely certain that he would mention the subject to
no living creature, least of all to his wife.
"Neither will I," he said to himself; "and as for her,
I will break with her from this day forward."
The little pink notes with the dashing twirly handwriting persisted for
at week or two and then ceased.
Hugh was a man of many social engagements. His first impulse, when later
in the day he remembered them, was to throw them all up and leave London.
But Lord Newhaven would hear of his departure, and would smile. He decided
to remain and to go on as if nothing had happened. When the evening came he
dressed with his usual care, verified the hour of his engagement, and went
out to dine with the Loftuses.
Maxim of the Bandar-log--RUDYARD KIPLING.
What the Bandar-log think now the jungle will think later.
London bore the process with equanimity, and presently Sybell determined
to raise the art of dinner-giving from the low estate to which she avowed
it had fallen to a higher level. She was young, she was pretty, she was
well born, she was rich. All the social doors were open to her. But one
discovery is often only the prelude to another. She soon made the further
one that in order to raise the tone of social gatherings it is absolutely
necessary to infuse into them a leaven of "clever people."
Further light on this interesting subject showed her that most of the
really "clever people" did not belong to her set. The discovery
which all who love adulation quickly make--namely, that the truly
appreciative and sympathetic and gifted are for the greater part to be
found in a class below their own--was duly made and registered by
Sybell. She avowed that class differences were nothing to her with the
enthusiasm of all those who since the world began have preferred to be first in the society which they gather round them.
Fortunately for Sybell she was not troubled by doubts respecting the
clearness of her own judgment. Eccentricity was in her eyes originality; a
wholesale contradiction of established facts was a new view. She had not
the horrid perception of difference between the real and the imitation
which spoils the lives of many. She was equally delighted with both, and
remained in blissful ignorance of the fact that her "deep"
conversation was felt to be exhaustingly superficial if by chance she came
across the real artist or thinker instead of his counterfeit.
Consequently to her house came the
raté in all his most virulent
developments; the "new woman" with stupendous lopsided opinions
on difficult Old Testament subjects; the "lady authoress" with
a mission to show up the vices of a society which she knew only by hearsay.
Hither came unwittingly simple-minded Church dignitaries, who, Sybell
hoped, might influence for his good the young agnostic poet who had written
a sonnet on her muff-chain, a very daring sonnet, which Doll, who did not
care for poetry, had not been shown. Hither, by mistake, thinking it was an
ordinary dinner-party, came Hugh, whom Sybell said she had discovered, and
who was not aware that he was in need of discovery. And hither also on this
particular evening came Rachel West, whom Sybell had pronounced to be very
intelligent a few days before, and who was serenely unconscious that she
was present on her probation, and that if she did not say something
striking she would never be asked again.
Doll Loftus, Sybell's husband, was standing by Rachel when Hugh
came in. He felt drawn towards her because she was not "clever"
as far as her appearance went. At any rate, she had not the touzled,
ill-groomed hair which he had learned to associate with female genius.
"This sort of thing is beyond me," he said mournfully to
Rachel, his eyes travelling over the assembly gathered round his wife, whose remarks were calling forth admiring laughter. "I don't understand half they say, and when I do I sometimes wish I didn't. But I suppose," tentatively, "you go in for all this sort of thing?"
"I!" said Rachel astonished. "I don't go in for
anything. But what sort of thing do you mean?"
"There is Scarlett," said Doll with relief, who hated
definitions, and felt the conversation was on the slippery verge of
becoming deep. "Do you know him? Looks as if he'd seen a ghost,
doesn't he?"
Rachel's interest, never a heavy sleeper, was instantly awakened as
she saw Sybell piloting Hugh towards her. She recognised him--the man
she had seen last night in the hansom and afterwards at the Newhavens. A
glance showed her that his trouble, whatever it might be, had pierced
beyond the surface feelings of anger and impatience, and had reached the
quick of his heart. The young man, pallid and heavy-eyed, bore himself
well, and Rachel respected him for his quiet demeanour and a certain
dignity, which, for the moment, obliterated the slight indecision of his
face, and gave his mouth the firmness which it lacked. It seemed to Rachel
as if he had but now stood by a deathbed, and had brought with him into the
crowded room the shadow of an inexorable fate.
The others only perceived that he had a headache. Hugh did not deny it.
He complained of the great heat to Sybell, but not to Rachel. Something in
her clear eyes told him, as they told many others, that small lies and
petty deceits might be laid aside with impunity in dealing with her. He
felt no surprise at seeing her, no return of the sudden violent emotion of
the night before. He had never spoken to her till this moment, but yet he
felt that her eyes were old friends, tried to the uttermost and found
faithful in some forgotten past. Rachel's eyes had a certain calm
fixity in them that comes not of natural temperament but of past conflict,
long waged, and barely but irrevocably won. A faint ray of comfort stole
across the desolation of his mind as he looked at her. He did not notice whether she was handsome or ugly, any more than we do when we look at the dear familiar faces which were with us in their childhood and ours, which have grown up beside us under the same roof, which have rejoiced with us and wept with us, and without which heaven itself could never be a home.
In a few minutes he was taking her in to dinner. He had imagined that
she was a woman of few words, but after a faint attempt at conversation he
found that he had relapsed into silence, and that it was she who was
talking. Presently the heavy cloud upon his brain lifted. His strained face
relaxed. She glanced at him, and continued her little monologue. Her face
had brightened.
He had dreaded this dinner party, this first essay to preserve his
balance in public with his frightful invisible burden, but he was getting
through it better than he had expected.
"I have come back to what is called society," Rachel was
saying, "after nearly seven years of an exile something like
Nebuchadnezzar's, and there are two things which I find as difficult
as Kipling's 'silly sailors' found their harps
'which they twanged unhandily.'"
"Is small talk one of them?" asked Hugh. "It has
always been a difficulty to me."
"On the contrary," said Rachel. "I plume myself on
that. Surely my present sample is not so much below the average that you
need ask me that."
"I did not recognise that it was small talk,"
said Hugh with a faint smile. "If it really is I can only say I shall
have brain fever if you pass on to what you might call
conversation."
It was to him as if a miniature wavelet of a great ocean somewhere in
the distance had crept up to laugh and break at his feet. He did not
recognise that this tiniest runlet which fell back at once was of the same
element as the tidal wave which had swept over him yesternight.
"But are you aware," said Rachel, dropping her voice a
little, "it is beginning to dawn upon me, that this evening's
gathering is met together for exalted conversation, and perhaps we ought to
be practising a little. I feel certain that after dinner you will be
'drawn through the clefts of confession' by Miss Barker, the
woman in the high dinner gown with orange velvet sleeves. Mrs. Loftus
introduced her to me when I arrived as the 'apostle of
humanity.'"
"Why should you fix on that particular apostle for me?" said
Hugh, looking resentfully at a large-faced woman, who was talking in an
"intense" manner to a slightly bewildered Bishop.
"It is a prophetic instinct, nothing more."
"I will have a prophetic instinct, too, then," said Hugh,
helping himself at last to the dish which was presented to him, to
Rachel's relief. "I shall give you the--" looking
slowly down the table.
"The Bishop?"
"Certainly not, after your disposal of me."
"Well, then, the poet? I am sure he is a poet because his tie is
uneven and his hair is so long. Why do literary men wear their hair long,
and literary women wear it short? I should like the
poet."
"You shall not have him," said Hugh with decision. "I
am hesitating between the bald young man with the fat hand and the immense
ring, and the old professor who is drawing plans on the
tablecloth."
"The apostle told me with bated breath that the young man with the
ring is Mr. Harvey, the author of 'Unashamed.'"
Hugh looked at his plate to conceal his disgust.
There was a pause in the buzz of conversation, and into it fell
straightway the voice of the apostle like a brick through a skylight.
"The need of the present age is the realisation of our brotherhood
with sin and suffering and poverty. West
London in satin and diamonds does not hear her sister East London in rags calling to her to deliver her. The voice of East London has been drowned in the dance-music of the West End."
Sybell gazed with awed admiration at the apostle.
"What a beautiful thought," she said.
"Miss Gresley's 'Idyll of East London,'"
said Hugh, "is a voice which, at any rate, has been fully
heard."
The apostle put up a pince-nez on a bone leg and looked at Hugh.
"I entirely disapprove of that little book," she said.
"It is misleading and wilfully one-sided."
"Hester Gresley is a dear friend of mine," said Sybell,
"and I must stand up for her. She is the sister of our clergyman, who
is a very clever man. In fact, I am not sure he isn't the cleverest of
the two. She and I have great talks. We have so much in common. How strange
it seems that she who lives in the depths of the country should have
written a story of the East End."
"That is always so," said the author of
"Unashamed," in a sonorous voice. "The novel has of late
been dwarfed to the scope of the young English girl (he pronounced it gurl)
who writes from her imagination and not from her experience. What true art
requires of us is a faithful rendering of a great experience."
He looked round, as if challenging the world to say that
"Unashamed" was not a lurid personal reminiscence.
Sybell was charmed. She felt that none of her previous dinner-parties
had reached such a high level as this one.
"A faithful rendering of a great experience," she repeated.
"How I wish Hester were here to hear that. I often tell her she ought
to see life, and cultivated society would do so much for her. I found her
out a year ago, and I'm always begging people to read her book, and I
simply long to introduce her to clever people and oblige the world to
recognise her talent."
"I agree with you it is not yet fully recognised," said Hugh
in a level voice; "but if 'The Idyll' received only partial recognition, it was at any rate enthusiastic. And it is not forgotten."
Sybell felt vaguely uncomfortable, and conceived a faint dislike of Hugh
as an uncongenial person.
The apostle and the poet began to speak simultaneously, but the female
key was the highest and prevailed.
"We all agree in admiring Miss Gresley's delicate piece of
workmanship," said the apostle, both elbows on the table after the
manner of her kind, "but it is a misfortune to the cause of suffering
humanity--to our cause--when the books which pretend
to set forth certain phases of its existence are written by persons
entirely ignorant of the life they describe."
"How true," said Sybell. "I have often thought it, but
I never could put it into words as you do. Oh! how I agree with you and Mr.
Harvey. As I often say to Hester, 'How can you describe anything if
you don't go anywhere or see anything; I can't give you my
experience. No one can.' I said that to her only a month ago, when
she refused to come up to London with me."
Rachel's white face and neck had taken on them the pink transparent
colour that generally dwelt only in the curves of her small ears.
"Why do you think Miss Gresley is ignorant of the life she
describes?" she said, addressing the apostle.
The author and the apostle both opened their mouths at the same moment,
only to register a second triumph of the female tongue.
Miss Barker was in her element. The whole table was listening. She
shrugged her orange-velvet shoulders.
"Those who have cast in their lot with the poor," she said,
sententiously, "would recognise at once the impossibility of Miss
Gresley's characters and situations."
"To me they seem real," said Rachel.
"Ah, my dear Miss West, you will excuse me, but a young lady like
yourself, nursed in the lap of luxury, can hardly be
expected to look at life with the same eyes as a poor waif like myself, who has penetrated to the very core of the city, and who has heard the stifled sigh of a vast perishing humanity."
"I lived in the midst of it for six years," said Rachel.
"I did not cast in my lot with the poor, for I was one of them, and
earned my bread among them. Miss Gresley's book may not be palatable
in some respects, the district visitor and the woman missionary are
certainly treated with harshness, but as far as my experience goes, the
'Idyll' is a true word from first to last."
There was in Rachel's voice a restrained force that vaguely stirred
all the occupants of the room. Every one looked at her, and for a moment no
one spoke. She became quite colourless.
"Very striking. Just what I should have said in her place,"
said Sybell to herself. "I will ask her again."
"I can hear it raining," said Doll's voice from the
head of the table to the company in general. "If it will only go on
for a week without stopping there may be some hope for the crops
yet."
The conversation buzzed up again, and Rachel turned instantly to Hugh,
before Mr. Harvey, leaning forward with his ring, had time to address
her.
Hugh alone saw what a superhuman effort it had been to her to overcome
her shrinking from mentioning, not her previous poverty, but her personal
experience. She had sacrificed her natural reserve, which he could see was
great; she had even set good taste at defiance to defend Hester
Gresley's book. Hugh had shuddered as he heard her speak. He felt that
he could not have obtruded himself on so mixed an assembly. Yet he saw that
it had cost her more to do so than it would have cost him.
He began to remember having heard people speak of an ironmaster's
daughter, whose father had failed and died, and who, after several years of
dire poverty, had lately inherited a vast fortune from her father's
partner. It had
been talked about at the time, a few months ago. This must be she.
"You have a great affection for Miss Gresley," he said in a
low voice.
"I have," said Rachel, her lip still quivering. "But
if I disliked her I hope I should have said the same. Surely it is not
necessary to love the writer in order to defend the book."
Hugh was silent. He looked at her, and wished that she might always be
on his side.
"About two courses ago I was going to tell you," said
Rachael smiling, "of one of my chief difficulties on my return to the
civilised world and 'Society.' But now you have had an example
of it. I am trying to cure myself of the trick of becoming interested in
conversation. I must learn to use words as counters, not as coins. I need
not disbelieve what I say, but I must not speak of anything to which I
attach value. I perceive that to do this is an art and a means of defence
from invasion. But I, on the contrary, become interested, as you have just
seen. I forget that I am only playing a game, and I rush into a subject
like a bull into a china shop, and knock about all the crockery
until--as I am not opposed by my native pitchfork--I suddenly
return to my senses, and discover that I have mistaken a game for real
earnest."
"We were all in earnest five minutes ago," said Hugh,
"at least, I was. I could not bear to hear Miss Gresley patronised by
all these failures and amateurs. But unless I am very much mistaken you
will find several pitchforks laid up for you in the
drawing-room."
"I don't mean to smash any more china," said
Rachel.
Another wavelet skimmed in and broke a little further up the sand. A
sense of freshness, of expectation was in the air. The great gathered ocean
was stirring itself in the distance. Hugh had forgotten his trouble.
He turned the conversation back to Hester Gresley and her writing. He
spoke of her with sympathy and appreciation,
and presently detected a softness in Rachel's eyes which made him jealous of Hester.
By the time the evening was over the imperceptible travelling of the
summer sea had reached as far as the tidal wave.
Hugh left when Rachel did, accompanying her to her carriage. At the door
were the darkness and the rain. At the door with them the horror and
despair of the morning were in wait for him, and laid hold upon him. Hugh
shuddered, and turned instinctively to Rachel.
She was holding out her hand to him. He took it and held it tightly in
his sudden fear and desolation.
"When shall I meet you again?" he said hoarsely.
A long look passed between them. Hugh's tortured soul full of
passionate entreaty leaped to his eyes. Hers, sad and steadfast, met the
appeal in his, and recognised it as a claim. There was no surprise in her
quiet face.
"I ride early in the Row," she said. "You can join me
there if you wish. Good-night."
She took her hand with great gentleness out of his, and drove away.
And the darkness shut down again on Hugh's heart.
BOURGET.
Içi bas tous les hommes pleurent
Leurs amitiés et leurs amours.
But nevertheless here and there among its numberless counterfeits a
friendship rises up between two women which sustains the life of both,
which is still young when life is waning, which man's love and
motherhood cannot displace nor death annihilate; a friendship which is not
the solitary affection of an empty heart nor the deepest affection of a
full one, but which nevertheless lightens the burdens of this world and
lays its pure hand upon the next.
Such a friendship, very deep, very tender, existed between Rachel West
and Hester Gresley. It dated back from the nursery days, when Hester and
Rachel solemnly eyed each other, and then made acquaintance in the dark
gardens of Portman Square, into which Hester introduced a fortified castle
with a captive princess in it and a rescuing prince and a dragon, and
several other ingredients of romance, to the awed amazement of
Rachel--stolid, solid, silent Rachel--who loved all two- and
four-legged creatures, but who never made
them talk to each other as Hester did. And Hester, in blue serge, told Rachel, in crimson velvet, as they walked hand in hand in front of their nursery-maids, what the London sparrows said to each other in the gutters, and how they considered the gravel-path in the square was a deep river suitable to bathe in. And when the spring was coming, and the prince had rescued the princess so often from the dungeon in the laurel-bushes that Hester was tired of it, she told Rachel how the elms were always sighing because they were shut up in town, and how they went out every night with their roots into the green country to see their friends, and came back oh! so early in the morning, before any one was awake to miss them. And Rachel's heart yearned after Hester, and she gave her her red horse and the tin duck and magnet, and Hester made stories about them all.
At last the day came when Rachel's mother, who had long viewed the
intimacy with complacency, presented her compliments, in a note-sheet with
two immense gilt crests on it, to Hester's aunt, and requested that
her little niece might be allowed to come to tea with her little daughter.
And Lady Susan Gresley, who had never met the rich ironmaster's wife
in this world, and would probably be equally exclusive in the next, was
about to refuse, when Hester, who up to that moment had apparently taken no
interest in the matter, suddenly cast herself on the floor in a paroxysm of
despair and beat her head against the carpet. The tearful entreaties of her
aunt gradually elicited the explanation, riddled by sobs, that Hester could
never take an interest in life again, could never raise herself even to a
sitting position, nor dry her eyes on her aunt's handkerchief, unless
she were allowed to go to tea with Rachel and see her dormouse.
Lady Susan, much upset herself, and convinced that these outbursts were
prejudicial to Hester's health, gave way at once, and a few days later
Hester, pale, shy, in a white muffler, escorted by Mademoiselle, went to
tea in the magnificent house on the other side of the square, and saw
Rachel's
round head without a feathered hat on it, and both children were consumed by shyness until the two Mademoiselles withdrew into another room, and Rachel showed Hester the dormouse which she had found in the woods in the country, and which ate out of her hand. And Hester made a little poem on it, beginning:
And so, with many breaks, the friendship attained a surer footing, and the intimacy grew with their growth, in spite of the fact that Lady Susan had felt unable (notwithstanding the marked advances of Mrs. West, possibly because of them) to enlarge her visiting list, in spite of many other difficulties which were only in the end surmounted by the simplicity of character which Rachel had not inherited from her parents.
There was a mouse in Portman Square.
And then, after both girls had danced through one London season in
different ball-rooms, Rachel's parents died, her mother first, and
then--by accident--her father, leaving behind him an avalanche of
unsuspected money difficulties, in which even his vast fortune was
engulphed.
Hard years followed for Rachel. She ate the bread of carefulness in the
houses of poor relations not of high degree, with whom her parents had
quarrelled when they had made their money and began to entertain social
ambitions. She learned what it was to be the person of least importance in
families of no importance. She essayed to teach and failed. She had no real
education. She made desperate struggles for independence, and learned how
others failed besides herself. She left her relations and their bitter
bread and came to London, and struggled with those who struggled, and saw
how Temptation spreads her net for bleeding feet. Because she loved Hester
she accepted from her half her slender pin-money. Hester had said,
"If I were poor, Rachel, how would you bear it if I would not let you
help me?" And Rachel had wept slow difficult tears, and had given
Hester the comfort of helping
her. The greater generosity was with Rachel, and Hester knew it.
And as Rachel's fortunes sank, Hester's rose. Lady Susan
Gresley had one talent, and she did not lay it up in a napkin. She had the
art of attracting people to her house, that house to which Mrs. West had
never forced an entrance. Hester was thrown from the first into a society
which her clergyman brother, who had never seen it, pronounced to be
frivolous, worldly, profane, but which no one has called dull. There were
many facets in Hester's character, and Lady Susan had managed to place
her where they caught the light. Was she witty? Was she attractive? Who
shall say. Man is wisely averse to "cleverness" in a woman, but
if he possesses any armour wherewith to steel himself against wit it is
certain that he seldom puts it on. She refused several offers, one so
brilliant that no woman ever believed that it was really made.
Lady Susan saw that her niece, without a fortune, with little beauty
save that of high breeding, with weak health, was becoming a personage.
"What will she become?" people said. And in the meanwhile
Hester did nothing beyond dressing extremely well. And everything she saw
and every person she met added fuel to an unlit fire in her soul.
At last Rachel was able to earn a meagre living by typewriting, and for
four years, happy by contrast with those when despair and failure had
confronted her, she lived by the work of her hands among those poor as
herself. Gradually she had lost sight of all her acquaintances. She had
been out of the schoolroom for too short a time to make friends. And alas!
in the set in which she had been launched poverty was a crime; no, perhaps
not quite that, but as much a bar to intercourse as in another class a want
of the letter H is found to be.
It was while Rachel was still struggling for a livelihood that the event
happened which changed the bias of her character, as a geranium
transplanted from the garden changes its attitude in a cottage window.
On one of the early days of her despair she met on the
dreary stairs of the great rabbit warren in which she had a room, a man with whom she had been acquainted in the short year of her social life before the collapse of her fortunes. He had paid her considerable attention, and she had thought once or twice with momentary bitterness that, like the rest, he had not cared to find out what had become of her. She greeted him with shy but evident pleasure. She took for granted he had come to see her, and he allowed her to remain under that delusion. In reality he had been hunting up an old model whom he wanted for his next picture, and who had silently left Museum Buildings some months before without leaving his address. He had genuinely admired her though he had forgotten her, and he was unaffectedly delighted to see her again.
That one chance meeting was the first of many. Flowers came to
Rachel's little room, and romance came with them. Rachel's proud
tender heart struggled and then gave way before this radiant first love
blossoming in the midst of her loneliness. At last on a March afternoon
when the low sun caught the daffodils he had brought her he told her he
loved her.
Days followed, exquisite days, which have none like them in later life
whatever later life may bring. That year the spring came early, and they
went often together into the country. And that year when all the world was
white with blossom the snow came, and laid upon earth's bridal veil a
white shroud. Every cup of May blossom, every petal of hawthorn bent
beneath its burden of snow. And so it was in the full springtide of
Rachel's heart. The snow came down upon it. She discovered at last
that though he loved her he did not wish to marry her; that even from the
time of that first meeting he had never intended to marry her. That
discovery was a shroud. She wrapped her dead love in it, and would fain
have buried it out of her sight.
But only after a year of conflict was she suffered to bury it; after a
year during which the ghost of her dead ever came
back and came back to importune her vainly with its love.
Rachel's poor neighbours grew accustomed to see the tall handsome
waiting figure which always returned and returned, but which at last after
one dreadful day was seen no more in Museum Buildings. Rachel had laid the
ghost at last. But the conflict remained graven in her face.
On a certain cold winter morning Hester darted across the wet pavement
from the brougham to the untidy entrance of Museum Buildings where Rachel
still lived. It was a miserable day. The streets and bare trees looked as
if they had been drawn in in ink, and the whole carelessly blotted before
it was dry. All the outlines were confused, blurred. The cold penetrated to
the very bones of the shivering city.
Rachel had just come in wet and tired, bringing with her a roll of
manuscript to be transcribed. A woman waiting for her on the endless stone
stairs had cursed her for taking the bread out of her mouth.
"He always employed me till you came," she shrieked, shaking
her fist at her, "and now he gives it all to you because you're
younger and better looking."
She gave the woman as much as she dared spare, the calculation did not
take long, and went on climbing the stairs.
Something in the poor creature's words, something vague but
repulsive in her remembrance of the man who paid her for the work by which
she could barely live, fell like lead into Rachel's heart. She looked
out dumbly over the wilderness of roofs. The suffering of the world was
eating into her soul, the suffering of this vast travailing East London,
where people trod each other down to live.
"If any one had told me," she said to herself, "when I
was rich, that I lived on the flesh and blood of my fellow creatures, that
my virtue and ease and pleasure were bought by their degradation, and toil
and pain, I should not have believed it, and I should have been angry. If I
had been told that the clothes I wore, the food I ate, the pen I wrote
with, the ink I
used, the paper I wrote on--all these, and everything I touched, from my soap to my matchbox, especially my matchbox, was the result of sweated labour, I should not have believed it, I should have laughed. But yet it is so. If I had not been rich once myself I should think as all these people do, that the rich are devils incarnate to let such things go on. They have the power to help us. We have none to help ourselves. But they never use it. The rich grind the poor for their luxuries with their eyes shut, and we grind each other for our daily bread with our eyes open. I have got that woman's work. I have struggled hard enough to get it, but though I did not realise it, I might have known that I had only got on to the raft by pushing some one else off it."
Rachel looked out across the miles of roofs which lay below her garret
window. The sound was in her ears of that great whirlpool wherein youth and
beauty and innocence go down quick day by day. The wilderness of leaden
roofs turned suddenly before her eyes into a sullen furrowed sea of shame
and crime which, awaiting no future day of judgment, daily gave up its
awful dead.
Presently Hester came in, panting a little after the long ascent of worn
stairs, and dragging with her a large parcel. It was a fur-lined cloak.
Hester spread it mutely before her friend, and looked beseechingly at her.
Then she kissed her, and the two girls clung together for a moment in
silence.
"Dearest," said Rachel, "don't give me new
things. It isn't that--you know I did take it when I was in need.
But oh, Hester, I know you can't afford it. I should not mind if you
were rich, at least, I would try not, but--if you would only give me
some of your old clothes instead. I should like them all the better because
you had worn them." And Rachel kissed the lapel of Hester's
coat.
"I can't," whispered Hester into Rachel's hair.
"The best is only just good enough."
"Wouldn't it be kinder to me?"
Hester trembled, and then burst into tears.
"I will wear it, I will wear it," said Rachel hurriedly.
"Look, Hester! I have got it on. How deliciously warm, and--do
look; it has two little pockets in the fur lining."
But Hester wept passionately, and Rachel sat down by her on the floor in
the new cloak till the paroxysm was over.
How does a subtle affinity find a foothold between natures which present
an obvious, a violent contrast to each other? Why do the obvious and the
subtle forget their life-long feud at intervals, and suddenly appear for a
moment in each other's society?
Rachel was physically strong. Hester was weak. The one was calm,
patient, practical, equable, the other imaginative, unbalanced,
excitable.
Life had not spoilt Rachel. Lady Susan Gresley had done her best to
spoil Hester. The one had lived the unprotected life, and showed it in her
bearing. The other had lived the sheltered life, and bore its mark upon her
pure forehead and youthful face.
"I cannot bear it," said Hester at last. "I think and
think, and I can't think of anything. I would give my life for you,
and you will hardly let me give you £3 10s.
6d. That is all it cost. It is only frieze, that common red
frieze, and the lining is only rabbit." A last tear fell at the word
rabbit. "I wanted to get you a velvet one, just the same as my new
one, lined with chinchilla, but I knew it would only make you miserable. I
wish," looking vindictively at the cloak, "I wish rabbits had
never been born."
Rachel laughed. Hester was evidently recovering.
"Mr. Scarlett was saying last night that no one can help any
one," continued Hester, turning her white exhausted face to her
friend. "He said that we are always so placed that we can only look
on. And I told him that could not be true, but oh, in my heart, Rachel, I
have felt it was true all these long, long five years since you have lived
here."
Rachel came and stood beside her at the little window.
There was just room for them between the typewriter 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 coarse handkerchiefs, and put them in the washband-stand
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 learnt 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 neighbour," she said.
"There's a many as 'ull miss you. Good-bye, and good luck
to ye. I shan't say as you've left."
"I shall come back," said Rachel hoarsely, and she slipped
downstairs 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.
EMERSON.
Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilise the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment?
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 honour 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 ennobled 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 passed, 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 coloured 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 passenger
in a railway carriage.
Rachel rose and held out her hand.
"Don't go," whispered Lady Newhaven, taking her
outstretched hand and holding it.
"I think if I stay," said Rachel, "that you may say
things you will regret later on when you are feeling stronger. You are
evidently tired out now. Everything looks exaggerated when we are
exhausted, as I see you are."
"I am worn out with misery," said Lady Newhaven. "I
have not slept for a fortnight. I feel I must tell some one." And she
burst into violent weeping.
Rachel sat down again, and waited patiently for the hysterical weeping
to cease. Those in whom others confide early learn that their own
engagements, their own pleasures and troubles are liable to be set aside at
any moment. Rachel was a punctual, exact person, but she missed many
trains. Those who sought her seldom realised that her day was as full as,
possibly fuller, than their own. Perhaps it was only a very small pleasure
to which she had been on her way on this particular morning, and for which
she had put on that ethereal grey gown for the first time. At any rate, she
relinquished it without a second thought.
Presently Lady Newhaven dried her eyes, and turned impulsively towards
her.
The strata of impulsiveness and conventional feeling were always so
mixed up after one of these emotional upheavals that it was difficult to
guess which would come uppermost. Sometimes fragments of both appeared on
the surface together.
"I loved you from the first moment I saw you," she said.
"I don't take fancies to people, you know. I am not that kind of
person. I am very difficult to please, and I never speak of what concerns
myself. I am most reserved. I daresay you have noticed how
reserved I am. I live in my shell. But directly I saw you I felt I could
talk to you. I said to myself, 'I will make a friend of that
girl.' Although I always feel a married woman is so differently
placed from a girl. A girl only thinks of herself. I am not saying this the
least un-
kindly, but of course it is so. Now a married woman has to consider her husband and family in all she says and does. How will it affect them? That is what I so often say to myself, and then my lips are sealed. But, of course, being unmarried, you would not understand that feeling."
Rachel did not answer. She was inured to this time-honoured
conversational opening.
"And the temptations of married life," continued Lady
Newhaven, "a girl cannot enter into them."
"Then do not tell me about them," said Rachel smiling,
wondering if she might still escape. But Lady Newhaven had no intention of
letting her go. She only wished to indicate to her her true position. And
gradually, not without renewed outbursts of tears, not without traversing
many layers of prepared conventional feelings in which a few thin streaks
of genuine emotion were embedded, she told her story--the story of a
young, high-minded, and neglected wife, and of a husband callous,
indifferent, a scorner of religion, unsoftened even by the advent of the
children--"such sweet children, such little
darlings"--and the gradual estrangement. Then came the
persistent siege to the lonely heart of one not pretty perhaps, but fatally
attractive to men; the lonely heart's unparalleled influence for good
over the besieger.
"He would do anything," said Lady Newhaven, looking
earnestly at Rachel. "My influence over him is simply boundless. If I
said, as I sometimes did at balls, how sorry I was to see some plain girl
standing out, he would go and dance with her. I have seen him do
it."
"I suppose he did it to please you."
"That was just it, simply to please me."
Rachel was not so astonished as Lady Newhaven expected. She certainly
was rather wooden, the latter reflected. The story went on. It became
difficult to tell, and, according to the teller, more and more liable to
misconstruction. Rachel's heart ached as bit by bit the inevitable
development was finally reached in floods of tears.
"And you remember that night you were at an evening party
here," sobbed Lady Newhaven, casting away all her mental notes and
speaking extempore. "It is just a fortnight ago, and I have not slept
since, and he was here, looking so miserable (Rachel started
slightly); he sometimes did, if he thought I was hard upon him. And
afterwards, when every one had gone, Edward took him to his study and told
him he had found us out, and they drew lots which should kill himself
within five months--and I listened at the door."
Lady Newhaven's voice rose half strangled, hardly human in a shrill
grotesque whimper above the sobs which were shaking her. There was no
affectation about her now.
Rachel's heart went out to her the moment she was natural. She
knelt down and put her strong arms round her. The poor thing clung to her,
and leaning her elaborate head against her, wept tears of real anguish upon
her breast.
"And which drew the short lighter?" said Rachel at last.
"I don't know," almost shrieked Lady Newhaven.
"It is that which is killing me. Sometimes I think it is Edward, and
sometimes I think it is Hugh."
At the name of Hugh Rachel winced. Lady Newhaven had mentioned no name
in the earlier stages of her story while she had some vestige of
self-command; but now at last the Christian name slipped out unawares.
Rachel strove to speak calmly. She told herself there were many Hughs in
the world.
"Is Mr. Hugh Scarlett the man you mean?" she asked. If she
had died for it, she must have asked that question.
"Yes," said Lady Newhaven.
A shadow fell on Rachel's face, as on the face of one who suddenly
discovers, not for the first time, an old enemy advancing upon him under
the flag of a new ally.
"I shall always love him," gasped Lady Newhaven, recovering
herself sufficiently to recall a phrase which she had made up the night
before. "I look upon it as a spiritual marriage."
TENNYSON.
A square-set man and honest.
"I lay low till I got my clothes," said Dick, "and
then I went to the Duke of --. I've just been looking at a hack
for him. He says he does not want one that takes a lot of sitting on. I met
him the first night I landed. In fact, I stepped out of the train on to his
royal toe travelling incog. I was just going to advise him to
draw in his feelers a bit, and give the Colonies a chance, when he turned
round and I saw who it was. I knew him when I was A.D.C. at Melbourne
before I took to the drink. He said he thought he'd know my foot
anywhere, and asked me down for -- races.
"And you enjoyed it? "
"Rather. I did not know what to call the family at first, so I
asked him if he had any preference and what was the right thing, and he
told me how I must hop up whenever he came in, and all that sort of
child's play. There was a large party and some uncommonly pretty
women. And I won a tenner off his Royal Highness, and here I am."
"And what are you going to do now? "
"Go down to the city and see what Darnell's cellars are like
before I store my wine in them. It won't take long. Er!--I Say,
Cack--Newhaven?"
"Well?"
"Ought I to--how about my calling on Miss --. I never
caught her name?"
"Miss West, the heiress?"
"Yes. Little attention on my part."
"Did she ask you to call?"
"No, but I think it was an oversight. I expect she would like
it."
"Well, then, go and be--snubbed."
"I don't want snubbing. A little thing like me wants
encouragement."
"A good many other people are on the look out for encouragement in
that quarter."
"That settles it," said Dick, "I'll go at once.
I've got to call on Lady Susan Gresley, and I'll take
Miss--"
"West. West. West."
"Miss West on the way."
"My dear fellow, Miss West does not live on the way to Woking.
Lady Susan Gresley died six months ago."
"Great Scot! I never heard of it. And what has become of Hester?
She is a kind of cousin of mine."
"Miss Gresley has gone to live in the country a few miles from us,
with her clergyman brother."
"James Gresley. I remember him. He's a bad egg."
"Now, Dick, are you in earnest, or are you talking nonsense about
Miss West?"
"I'm in earnest." He looked it.
"Then, for heaven's sake, don't put your foot in it by
calling. My wife has taken a violent fancy to Miss West. I don't think
it is returned, but that is a detail. If you want to give her a chance
leave it to me."
"I know what that means. You married men are mere sieves.
You'll run straight home with your tongue out and tell Lady Newhaven
that I want to marry Miss --, I can't clinch her name, and then
she'll tell her when they are combing their back hair. And then if I
find, later on, I don't like her and step off the grass I shall have
behaved like a perfect brute,
and all that sort of thing. A man I knew out in Melbourne told me that by the time he'd taken a little notice of a likely girl he'd gone too far to go back and he had to marry her."
"You need not be so coy. I don't intend to mention the
subject to my wife. Besides, I don't suppose Miss West will look at
you. You're a wretched match for her. With her money she might marry a
brewery or a peerage."
"I'll put myself in focus anyhow," said Dick.
"Hang it all. If you could get a woman to marry you, there is hope
for everybody. I don't expect it will be as easy as falling off a log.
But if she is what I take her to be I shall go for all I'm
worth."
Some one else was going for all he was worth. Lord Newhaven rode early,
and he had frequently seen Rachel and Hugh riding together at foot's
pace. Possibly his offer to help Dick was partly prompted by an unconscious
desire to put a spoke in Hugh's wheel.
Dick, whose worst enemy could not accuse him of diffidence, proved a
solid spoke but for a few days only. Rachel suddenly broke all her
engagements and left London.
Pour vivre tranquille il faut vivre loin des gens d'église.
Through this favoured locality the Drone winds, and turns and turns
again as if loth to leave the rich low meadow lands and clustering villages
upon its way. After skirting the little town of Westhope and the gardens of
Westhope Abbey, the Drone lays itself out in comfortable curves and twists
innumerable through the length and breadth of the green country till it
reaches Warpington, whose church is so near the stream that in time of
flood the water hitches all kinds of things it has no further use for among
the gravestones of the little churchyard. On one occasion, after repeated
prayers for
rain, it even overflowed the lower part of the vicar's garden, and vindictively carried away his beehives. But that was before he built the little wall at the bottom of the garden.
Slightly raised above the church, on ground held together by old elms,
the white vicarage of Warpington stands, blinking ever through its trees at
the church like a fond wife at her husband. Indeed, so like had she become
to him that she had even developed a tiny bell-tower near the kitchen
chimney, with a single bell in it, feebly rung by a female servant on
saints days and G.F.S. gatherings.
About eight o'clock on this particular morning in July the Drone
could hear if it wanted to hear, which apparently no one else did, the high
unmodulated voice in which Mr. Gresley was reading the morning service to
Mrs. Gresley, and to a young thrush which was hurling its person like an
inexperienced bicyclist, now against Lazarus and his graveclothes, now
against the legs of John the Baptist, with one foot on a river's edge,
and the other firmly planted in a distant desert, and against all the other
scripture characters in turn which adorned the windows.
The service ended at last, and after releasing his unwilling
congregation by catching and carrying it beak agape into the open air, Mr.
Gresley and his wife walked through the churchyard--with its one
melancholy Scotch fir embarrassed by its trouser of ivy--to the little
gate which led into their garden.
They were a pleasing couple, seen at a little distance. He at least
evidently belonged to a social status rather above that of the average
clergyman, though his wife may not have done so. Mr. Gresley, with his long
thin nose and his short upper lip and tall, well-set up figure, bore on his
whole personality the stamp of that for which it is difficult to find the
right name, so unmeaning has the right name become by dint of putting it to
low uses--the maltreated, the travestied name of
"gentleman."
None of those moral qualities, priggish or otherwise, are assumed for
Mr. Gresley which we are told distinguish the
true, the perfect gentleman, and some of which, thank heaven! the "gentleman born" frequently lacks. Whether he had them or not was a matter of opinion, but he had that which some who have it not strenuously affirm to be of no value--the right outside.
To any one who looked beyond the first impression of good breeding and a
well-cut coat, a second closer glance was discouraging. Mr. Gresley's
suspicious eye and thin compressed lips hinted that both fanatic and saint
were fighting for predominance in the kingdom of that pinched brain, the
narrowness of which the sloping forehead betokened with such cruel
plainness. He looked as if he would fling himself as hard against a truth
without perceiving it, as a hunted hare against a stone wall. He was
unmistakably of those who who only see side issues.
Mrs. Gresley took her husband's arm as he closed the gate. She was
still young and still pretty, in spite of the arduous duties of a
clergyman's wife, and the depressing fact that she seemed always
wearing out old finery. Perhaps her devotion to her husband had served to
prolong her youth, for as the ivy is to the oak, and as the moon is to the
sun, and as the river is to the sea, so was Mrs. Gresley to Mr.
Gresley.
The fortunate couple were advancing through the garden looking fondly at
their own vicarage, with their own sponges hanging out of their upper
windows, and their offspring waving to them from a third, when a small
slight figure appeared on the terrace.
"James!" said Mrs. Gresley with decision. "It is your
duty to speak to Hester about attending early service. If she can go out in
the garden she can come to church."
"I have spoken to her once," said Mr. Gresley, frowning,
"and though I put it before her very plainly she showed great
obstinacy. Fond as I am of Hester, I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that
she has an arrogant and callous nature. But we must remember, my love, that
Aunt Susan was most lax in all her views, and we must make allowance for
Hester, who
lived with her till last year. It is only natural that Hester, bred up from childhood in that worldly circle--dinner parties all through Lent, and Sunday luncheons--should have fallen through want of solid church teaching into freethinking, and ideas of her own upon religion."
Mr. Gresley's voice was of that peculiar metallic note which
carries further than the owner is aware. It rose, if contradicted, into a
sort of continuous trumpet-blast which drowned all other lesser voices.
Hester's little garret was two stories above Mr. Gresley's study
on the ground floor, but nevertheless she often heard confused anxious
parochial buzzings overwhelmed by that sustained high note which knew no
cessation until objection or opposition ceased. As she came towards them,
she heard with perfect distinctness what he was saying, but it did not
trouble her. Hester was gifted with imagination, and imagination does not
find it difficult to read by the short hand of the expressions and habitual
opinions and repressions of others what they occasionally say at full
length, and to which they fondly believe they are giving utterance for the
first time. Mr. Gresley had said all this many times already by his manner,
and it had by its vain repetitions lost its novelty. Mr. Gresley was
fortunately not aware of this, for unimaginative persons believe themselves
to be sealed books, as hermetically sealed as the characters of others are
to themselves.
Hester was very like her brother. She had the same nose, slightly too
long for her small face, the same short upper lip and light hair, only her
brother's was straight and hers was crimped, as wet sand is crimped by
a placid outgoing sea. That she had an equally strong will was obvious. But
there the likeness ended. Hester's figure was slight, and she stooped
a little. Hester's eyes were very gentle, very appealing under their
long curled lashes. They were sad, too, as Mr. Gresley's never were,
gay as his never were. An infinite patience looked out of them sometimes,
that patience of enthusiasm which will cast away its very soul and all its
best years for the sake of an ideal. Hester showed her age in her eyes. She
was seven
and twenty and appeared many years younger, until she looked at you.
Mrs. Gresley looked with veiled irritation at her sister-in-law in her
clean holland gown, held in at the waist with a broad lilac ribbon,
adroitly drawn in picturesque folds through a little silver buckle.
Mrs. Gresley, who had a waist which the Southminster dressmaker informed
her had "to be kept down," made a mental note for the hundredth
time that Hester "laced in."
Hester gave that impression of "finish" and sharpness of
edge so rarely found among the blurred vague outlines of Englishwomen.
There was nothing vague about her. Lord Newhaven said she had been cut out
body and mind with a sharp pair of scissors. Her irregular profile, her
delicate pointed speech and fingers, her manner of picking up her slender
feet as she walked, her quick alert movements, everything about her was
neat, adjusted, perfect in its way, yet without more apparent effort than
the succés fou in black and white of
the water wagtail, which she so closely resembled.
"Good morning," she said, turning back with them to the
house. "Abel says it is going to be the hottest day we have had yet.
And the letter-bag is so fat that I could hardly refrain from opening it.
Really, James, you ought to hide the key, or I shall succumb to
temptation."
Once in the days of her ignorance, when she first came to live at
Warpington, Hester had actually turned the key in the lock of the sacred
letter-bag when the Gresleys were both late, and had extracted her own
letters. She never did it a second time. On the contrary, she begged pardon
in real regret at having given such deep offence to her brother and his
wife, and in astonishment that so simple an action could offend. She had
made an equally distressing blunder in the early days of her life with the
Gresleys by taking up the daily paper on its arrival in the afternoon.
"My dear Hester," Mrs. Gresley said, really scandalised,
"I
am sure you won't mind my saying so, but James has not seen his paper yet."
"I have noticed he never by any chance looks at it till the
evening, and you always say you never read it," said Hester, deep in
a political crisis.
"That is his rule, and a very good rule it is, but he naturally
likes to be the first to look at it," said Mrs. Gresley
with a great exercise of patience. She had heard Hester was clever, but she
found her very stupid. Everything had to be explained to her.
Her tone recalled Hester from the Indian tribal rising, and the speech
of the Prime Minister, to the realities of life. It was fortunate for her
that she was quick-witted. These two flagrant blunders were sufficient for
her. She grasped the principle that those who have a great love of power
and little scope for it must necessarily exercise it in trivial matters.
She extended the principle of the newspaper and the letter-bag over her
entire intercourse with the Gresleys, and never offended in that manner
again.
On this particular morning she waited decorously beside her brother as
he opened the bag, and dealt out the contents into three heaps. Hester
pounced on hers, and subsided into her chair at the breakfast-table.
"I wonder," said Mrs. Gresley, looking at Hester's pile
of letters over the top of her share of the morning's
correspondence--namely, a list of Pryce Jones, "that you care to
write so many letters, Hester. I am sure I never did such a thing when I
was a girl. I should have regarded it as a waste of time."
"Ha!" said Mr. Gresley, in a gratified tone, opening a
little roll. "What have we here? Proofs! My paper upon 'Modern
Dissent.' I told Edwards I would not allow him to put it in his next
number of the Southminster Advertiser until I had glanced at
it in print. I don't know when I shall find time to correct it. I
shall be out all the afternoon at the Chapter meeting."
He looked at Hester. She had laid down her letters and was taking a cup
of coffee from Mrs. Gresley. She evidently had not heard her brother's
remark.
"You and I must lay our heads together over this, Hester,"
he said, holding up with some pride a long slip of proof. "It will be
just in your line. You might run it over after breakfast," he
continued, in high good humour, "and put in the stops and grammar and
spelling--you're more up in that sort of thing than I
am--and then we will go through it together."
Hester was quite accustomed, when her help was asked as to a
composition, to receive as a reason for the request the extremely
gratifying assurance that she was "good" at punctuation and
spelling. It gave the would-be author a comfortable feeling that after all
he was only asking advice on the crudest technical matters on which
Hester's superiority could be admitted without a loss of masculine
self-respect.
"I would rather not tamper with punctuation and spelling,"
said Hester, drily. "I am so shaky on both myself. You had better ask
the schoolmaster. He knows all that sort of A B C better than I
do."
Mr. Gresley frowned and looked suspiciously at her. He wanted
Hester's opinion, of which she was perfectly aware. But she intended
that he should ask for it.
Mrs. Gresley, behind the coffee-pot, felt that she was overlooked. She
had helped Mr. Gresley with his numerous literary efforts until Hester
came.
"I saw you correcting some one's manuscript last week,"
he said. "You were at it all day in the hay-field."
"That was different. I was asked to criticise the style and
composition."
"Oh well!" said Mr. Gresley, "don't let us split
hairs. I don't want an argument about it. If you'll come into my
study at ten o'clock I'll get it off my hands at once."
"With pleasure," said Hester, looking at him with rueful
admiration. She had tried a hundred times to get the better of him in
conversation, but she had not yet succeeded.
"I have a