Red Pottage Part 26

"I will walk up to Beaumere this afternoon," said Doll, stretching a leg outside the open end of the pew. "I wish Gresley would not call the Dissenters worms. They are some of my best tenants, and they won't like it when they hear of it. And I'll go round the young pheasants. (Doll did this, or something similar, every Sunday afternoon of his life, but he always rehea.r.s.ed it comfortably in thought on Sunday mornings.) And if Withers is about I'll go out in the boat--the big one, the little one leaks--and set a trimmer or two for to-morrow. I'm not sure I'll set one under the south bank, for there was the devil to pay last time, when that beast of an eel got among the roots. I'll ask Withers what he thinks. I wish Gresley would not call the Dissenters blind leaders of the blind. It's such bad form, and I don't suppose the text meant that to start with, and what's the use of ill-feeling in a parish? And I'll take Scarlett with me. We'll slip off after luncheon, and leave that bounder to bound by himself. And poor old Crack shall come too. Uncle George always took him."

"James is simply surpa.s.sing himself," said Mrs. Gresley to herself, her arm round her little daughter. "Worms what a splendid comparison! The Churchman, the full-grown man after the stature of Christ, and the Dissenter invertebrate (I think dear James means inebriate), like a worm cleaving to the earth. But possibly G.o.d in His mercy may let them slip in by a back-door to heaven! How like him to say that, so generous, so wide-minded, taking the hopeful view of everything! How n.o.ble he looks!

These are days in which we should stick to our colors. I wonder how he can think of such beautiful things. For my part, I think the duty of the true priest is not to grovel to the crowd and call wrong right and right wrong for the sake of a fleeting popularity. How striking! What a lesson to the Bishop, if he were only here. He is so lax about Dissent, as if right and wrong were mere matters of opinion! What a gift he has! I know he will eat nothing for luncheon. If only we were somewhere else where the best joints were a little cheaper, and his talents more appreciated." And Mrs. Gresley closed her eyes and prayed earnestly, a tear sliding down her cheek on to Mary's floss-silk mane, that she might become less unworthy to be the wife of one so far above her, that the children might all grow up like him, and that she might be given patience to bear with Hester even when she vexed him.

Captain Pratt's critical eye travelled over the congregation. It absolutely ignored Mrs. Gresley and Fraulein. It lingered momentarily on Hester. He knew what he called "breeding" when he saw it, and he was aware that Hester possessed it, though his sisters would have laughed at the idea. He had seen many well-bred women on social pinnacles look like that, whose houses were at present barred against him. The Pratt sisters were fixed into their smartness as some faces are fixed into a grin. It was not spontaneous, fugitive, evanescent as a smile, gracefully worn, or lightly laid aside, as in Hester's case. He had known Hester slightly in London for several years. He had seen her on terms of intimacy, such as she never showed to his sisters, with inaccessible men and women with whom he had achieved a bare acquaintance, but whom, in spite of many carefully concealed advances, he had found it impossible to know better.

Captain Pratt had reached that stage in his profession of raising himself when he had become a social barometer. He was excessively careful whom he knew, what women he danced with, what houses he visited; and any of his acquaintances who cared to ascertain their own social status to a hair's-breadth had only to apply to it the touchstone of Captain Pratt's manner towards them.

Hester, who grasped many facts of that kind, was always amused by the cold consideration with which he treated her on his rare visits to the parental Towers; and which his sisters could only construe as a sign that "Algy was gone on Hessie."

"But he will never marry her," they told each other. "Algy looks higher."

It was true. If Hester had been Lady Hester, it is possible that the surname of Pratt, if frequently refused by stouter women, might eventually have been offered to her. But Captain Pratt was determined to marry rank, and nothing short of a Lady Something was of any use to him. An Honorable was better than nothing, but it did not count for much with him. It had a way of absenting itself when wanted. No one was announced as an Honorable. It did not even appear on cards. It might he overlooked. Rank, to be of any practical value, must be apparent, obvious. Lady Georgiana Pratt, Lady Evelina Pratt! Any name would do with that prefix. His eye travelled as far as Sybell and stopped again.

She was "the right sort" herself, and she dressed in the right way. Why could not Ada and Selina imitate her? But he had never forgiven her the fact that he had met "a crew of cads" at her house, whom he had been obliged to cut afterwards in the Row. No, Sybell would not have done for him. She surrounded herself with vulgar people.

Captain Pratt was far too well-mannered to be guilty of staring, except at pretty maid-servants or shop-girls, and his eye was moved on by the rigid police of etiquette which ruled his every movement. It paused momentarily on Rachel. He knew about her, as did every bachelor in London. A colossal heiress. She was neither plain nor handsome. She had a good figure, but not good enough to counterbalance her nondescript face. She had not the air of distinction which he was so quick to detect and appraise. She was a social nonent.i.ty. He did not care to look at her a second time. "I would not marry her with twice her fortune," he said to himself.

Regie's hand had stolen into Hester's. His even breathing, felt rather than heard, as he dropped asleep against her shoulder, surrounded Hester with the atmosphere of peace and comfort which his father had broken earlier in the day. Regie often brought back to her what his father wrested from her.

She listened to the sermon as from a warm nest safely raised above the quaggy ground of personal feeling.

"Dear James! How good he is! how much in earnest! But worms don't go in at back-doors. Why are not clergymen taught a few elementary rules of composition before they are ordained? But perhaps no one will notice it except myself. James is certainly a saint. He has the courage of his opinions. I believe he loves G.o.d and the Church with his whole heart, and would go to the stake for them, or send me there if he thought it was for the good of my soul. Why has he no power? Why is he so much disliked in the parish and neighborhood? I am sure it is not because he has small abilities, and makes puns, and says cut-and-dried things. How many excellent clergymen who do the same are beloved? Is it because he deals with every one as he deals with me? What dreadful things he thinks of me. I don't wonder he is anxious about me. What unworthy motives of wilful blindness and arrogance he is attributing to the Nonconformists!

Oh, James, James! will you never see that it is disbelief in the sincerity of the religion of others, because it is not in the same narrow form as your own, which makes all your zeal and earnestness of none effect! You think the opposition you meet with everywhere is the opposition of evil to good, of indifference to piety. When will you learn that it is the good in your hearers which opposes you, the love of G.o.d in them which is offended by your representation of Him?"

Hugh's eyes were fixed on the same pillar as Mr. Tristram's, but if he had been aware of that fact he would have chosen another pillar. His thin, handsome face was beginning to show the marks of mental strain.

His eyes had the set, impa.s.sive look of one who, hedged in on both sides, sees a sharp turn ahead of him on an unknown road.

"Rachel! Rachel! Rachel! Don't you hear me calling to you? Don't you hear me telling you that I can't live without you? The hymn was right--'Other refuge have I none, Hangs my helpless soul on Thee'--only it was written of you, not of that far, far away G.o.d who does not care.

Only care for me. Only love me. Only give me those cool hands that I may lean my forehead against them. No help can come to me except through you. Stoop down to me and raise me up, for I love you."

The sun went in suddenly, and a cold shadow fell on the pillar and on Hugh's heart.

Love and marriage were not for him. That far-away G.o.d, that Judge in the black cap, had p.r.o.nounced sentence against him, had doomed that he should die in his sins. When he had sat in his own village church only last Sunday between his mother and sister, he had seen the empty place on his chancel wall where the tablet to his memory would be put up. When he walked through the church-yard, his mother leaning on his arm, his step regulated by her feeble one, he had seen the vacant s.p.a.ce by his father's grave already filled by the mound of raw earth which would shortly cover him. His heart had ached for his mother, for the gentle, feeble-minded sister, who had transferred the interest in life, which keeps body and soul together, from her colorless existence to that of her brother. Hughie was the romance of her gray life: what Hughie said, what Hughie thought, Hughie's wife--oh, jealous thought, only to be met by prayer! But later on--joy of joys--Hughie's children! He realized it, now and then, vaguely, momentarily, but never as fully as last Sunday.

He shrank from the remembrance, and his mind wandered anew in the labyrinth of broken, twisted thought, from which he could find no way out.

_There must be some way out!_ He had stumbled callously through one day after another of these weeks in which he had not seen Rachel towards his next meeting with her, as a half-blind man stumbles towards the light.

But the presence of Rachel afforded no clew to the labyrinth. What vain hope was this that he had cherished unconsciously that she could help him. There was no help for him. There was no way out. He was in a trap.

He must die, and soon, by his own hand. Incredible, preposterous fate!

He shuddered, and looked around him involuntarily.

His glance, reverent, full of timid longing, fell on Rachel, and his heart cried aloud, suddenly, "If she loves me, I shall not be able to leave her."

CHAPTER XXV

Look in my face! my name is Might-have-been; I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell.

--DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.

It was Sunday afternoon. Mr. Tristram leaned on the stone bal.u.s.trade that bounded the long terrace at Wilderleigh. He was watching two distant figures, followed by a black dot, stroll away across the park.

One of them seemed to drag himself unwillingly. Mr. Tristram congratulated himself on the ac.u.men which had led him to keep himself concealed until Doll and Hugh had started for Beaumere.

Sybell had announced at luncheon, in the tone of one who observes a religious rite, that she should rest till four o'clock, and would be ready to sit for the portrait of her upper lip at that hour.

It was only half-past two now. Mr. Tristram had planted himself exactly in front of Rachel's windows, with his back to the house. "She will keep me waiting, but she will come out in time," he said to himself, nervous and self-confident by turns, resting his head rather gracefully on his hand. His knowledge of womankind supported him like a life-belt, but it has been said that life-belts occasionally support their wearers upsidedown. Theories have been known to exhibit the same spiteful tendency towards those who place their trust in them.

"Of course, she has got to show me that she is offended with me," he reflected, gazing steadily at the Welsh hills. "She would not have come out if I had asked her, but she will certainly come as I did not. I will give her half an hour."

Rachel, meanwhile, was looking fixedly at Mr. Tristram from her bedroom window with that dispa.s.sionate scrutiny to avoid which the vainest would do well to take refuge in noisome caves.

"I wonder," she said to herself, "whether Hester always saw him as I see him now. I believe she did."

Rachel put on her hat and took up her gloves. "If this is really I, and that is really he, I had better go down and get it over," she said to herself.

Mr. Tristram had given her half an hour. She appeared in the low stone doorway before the first five minutes of the allotted time had elapsed, and he gave a genuine start of surprise as he heard her step on the gravel. His respect for her fell somewhat at this alacrity.

"I have been waiting in the hope of seeing you," he said, after a moment's hesitation. "I am anxious to have a serious conversation with you."

"Certainly," she said.

They walked along the terrace, and presently found themselves in the little coppice adjoining it. They sat down together on a wooden seat round an old cedar, in the heart of the golden afternoon.

It was an afternoon the secret of which Autumn and Spring will never tell to Winter and Summer, when the wildest dreams of love might come true, when even the dead might come down and put warm lips to ours, and we should feel no surprise.

A kingfisher flashed across the open on his way back to the brook near at hand, fleeing from the still splendor of the sun-fired woods, where he was but a courtier, to the little winding world of gray stones and water, where he was a jewelled king.

When the kingfisher had left them _tete-a-tete_, Mr. Tristram found himself extremely awkwardly placed on the green bench. He felt that he had not sufficiently considered beforehand the peculiar difficulties which, in the language of the law, "had been imported into his case."

Rachel sat beside him in silence. If it could be chronicled that sympathetic sorrow for her companion's predicament was the princ.i.p.al feeling in her mind, she would have been an angel.

Mr. Tristram halted long between two opinions. At last he said, brokenly:

"Can you forgive me?"

What woman, even with her white hair, even after a lifetime spent out of ear-shot, ever forgets the tone her lover's voice takes when he is in trouble? Rachel softened instantly.

"I forgave you long ago," she said, gently.