Red Pottage Part 38

"She came down last night to be with Lady Newhaven who is not well. Miss West is a great friend of yours, isn't she?"

"Yes."

"Well, she has one fault, and it is one I can't put up with. She won't look at me."

"Don't put up with it," said Hester, softly. "We women all have our faults, dear d.i.c.k. But if men point them out to us in a nice way we can sometimes cure them."

CHAPTER x.x.xV

When the sun sets, who doth not look for night?

SHAKESPEARE.

Two nights had pa.s.sed since Lord Newhaven had left the Abbey. And now the second day, the first day of December, was waning to its close. How Rachel had lived through them she knew not. The twenty-ninth had been the appointed day. Both women had endured till then, feeling that that day would make an end. Neither had contemplated the possibility of hearing nothing for two days more. Long afterwards, in quiet years, Rachel tried to recall those two days and nights. But memory only gave lurid glimpses, as of lightning across darkness. In one of those glimpses she recalled that Lady Newhaven had become ill, that the doctor had been sent for, that she had been stupefied with narcotics. In another she was walking in the desolate frost-nipped gardens, and the two boys were running towards her across the gra.s.s.

As the sun sank on the afternoon of the second day it peered in at her sitting alone by her window. Lady Newhaven, after making the whole day frightful, was mercifully asleep. Rachel sat looking out into the distance beyond the narrow confines of her agony. Has not every man and woman who has suffered sat thus by the window, looking out, seeing nothing, but still gazing blindly out hour after hour?

Perhaps the quiet mother earth watches us, and whispers to our deaf ears:

Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch.

Little pulse of life writhing in your s.h.i.+rt of fire, the s.h.i.+rt is but of clay of your mother's weaving, and she will take it from you presently when you lay back your head on her breast.

There had been wind all day, a high, dreadful wind, which had accompanied all the nightmare of the day as a wail accompanies pain. But now it had dropped with the sun, who was setting with little pageant across the level land. The whole sky, from north to south, from east to west, was covered with a wind-threshed floor of thin wan clouds, and shreds of clouds, through which, as through a veil, the steadfast face of the heaven beyond looked down.

And suddenly, from east to west, from north to south, as far as the trees and wolds in the dim, forgotten east, the exhausted livid clouds blushed wave on wave, league on league, red as the heart of a rose. The wind-whipped earth was still. The trees held their breath. Very black against the glow the carved cross on the adjoining gable stood out. And in another moment the mighty tide of color went as it had come, swiftly ebbing across its infinite sh.o.r.es of sky. And the waiting night came down suddenly.

"Oh, my G.o.d!" said Rachel, stretching out her hands to ward off the darkness. "Not another night. I cannot bear another night."

A slow step came along the gravel; it pa.s.sed below the window and stopped at the door. Some one knocked. Rachel tore open the throat of her gown. She was suffocating. Her long-drawn breathing seemed to deaden all other sounds. Nevertheless she heard it--the faint footfall of some one in the hall, a distant opening and shutting of doors. A vague, indescribable tremor seemed to run through the house.

She stole out of her room and down the pa.s.sage. At Lady Newhaven's door her French maid was hesitating, her hand on the handle.

Below, on the stairs, stood a clergyman and the butler.

"I am the bearer of sad tidings," said the clergyman. Rachel recognized him as the Archdeacon at whom Lord Newhaven had so often laughed.

"Perhaps you would prepare Lady Newhaven before I break them to her."

The door was suddenly opened, and Lady Newhaven stood in the doorway.

One small clinched hand held together the long white dressing-gown, which she had hastily flung round her, while the other was outstretched against the door-post. She swayed as she stood. Morphia and terror burned in her gla.s.sy eyes fixed in agony upon the clergyman. The light in the hall below struck upward at her colorless face. In later days this was the picture which Lady Newhaven recalled to mind as the most striking of the whole series.

"Tell her," said Rachel, sharply.

The Archdeacon advanced.

"Prepare yourself, dear Lady Newhaven," he said, sonorously. "Our dear friend, Lord Newhaven, has met with a serious accident. Er--the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord."

"Is he dead?" whispered Lady Newhaven.

The Archdeacon bowed his head.

Every one except the children heard the scream which rang through the house.

Rachel put her arms round the tottering, distraught figure, drew it gently back into the room, and closed the door behind her.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

And Nicanor lay dead in his harness.

--1 MACABEES, xv. 28.

Rachel laid down the papers which were full of Lord Newhaven's death.

"He has managed it well," she said to herself. "No one could suspect that it was not an accident. He has played his losing game to the bitter end, weighing each move. None of the papers even hint that his death was not an accident. He has provided against that."

The butler received a note from Lord Newhaven the morning after his death, mentioning the train by which he should return to Westhope that day, and ordering a carriage to meet him. A great doctor made public the fact that Lord Newhaven had consulted him the day before about the attacks of vertigo from which it appeared he had suffered of late. A similar attack seemed to have seized upon him while waiting at Clapham Junction when the down express thundered past. The few who saw him said that, as he was pacing the empty platform, he staggered suddenly as the train was sweeping up behind him, put his hand to his head, and stumbled over the edge on to the line. Death was instantaneous. Only his wife and one other woman knew that it was premeditated.

"The only thing I cannot understand about it," said Rachel to herself, "is why a man, who from first to last could act with such caution, and with such deliberate determination, should have been two days late. The twenty-ninth of November was the last day of the five months, and he died on the afternoon of December the first. Why did he wait two days after he left Westhope? I should have thought he would have been the last man in the world to overstep the allotted time by so much as an hour. Yet, nevertheless, he waited two whole days. I don't understand it."

After an interminable interval Lord Newhaven's luggage returned, the familiar portmanteau and dressing-bag, and even the novel which he was reading when he left Westhope, with the mark still in it. All came back.

And a coffin came back, too, and was laid before the little altar in the disused chapel.

"I will go and pray for him in the chapel as soon as the lid is fastened down," said Lady Newhaven to Rachel, "but I dare not before. I can't believe he is really dead. And they say somebody ought to look, just to verify. I know it is always done. Dear Rachel, would you mind?"

So Rachel, familiar with death, as all are who have known poverty or who have loved their fellows, went alone into the chapel, and stood a long time looking down upon the m.u.f.fled figure, the garment of flesh which the soul had so deliberately rent and flung aside.

The face was fixed in a grave attention, as of one who sees that which he awaits. The sarcasm, the weariness, the indifference, the impatient patience, these were gone, these were indeed dead. The sharp, thin face knew them no more. It looked intently, unflinchingly through its half-closed eyes into the beyond which some call death, which some call life.

"Forgive him," said Rachel, kneeling beside the coffin. "My friend, forgive him. He has injured you, I know. And your just revenge--for you thought it just--has failed to reach him. But the time for vengeance has pa.s.sed. The time for forgiveness has come. Forgive my poor Hugh, who will never forgive himself. Do you not see now, you who see so much, that it was harder for him than for you; that it would have been the easier part for him if he had been the one to draw death, to have atoned to you for his sin against you by his death, instead of feeling, as he always must, that your stroke failed, and that he has taken your life from you as well as your honor. Forgive him," said Rachel, over and over again.

But the unheeding face looked earnestly into the future. It had done with the past.

"Ah!" said Rachel, "if I who love him can forgive him, cannot you, who only hated him, forgive him, too? For love is greater than hate."

She covered the face and went out.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

Le nombre des etres qui veulent voir vrai est extraordinairement pet.i.t. Ce qui domineles hommes, c'est la peur de la verite, a moins que la verite ne leur soit utile.--AMIEL.