Pottage
By Mary Cholmondeley



Red Pottage

By

Mary Cholmondeley

AUTHOR OF

"THE DANVERS JEWELS"

"After the Red Pottage comes the exceeding bitter cry"

NEW YORK AND LONDON

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

1900




TO

VICTORIA

Good things have not kept aloof,

* * * * *

I have not lack'd thy mild reproof,
Nor golden largesse of thy praise.




RED POTTAGE




CHAPTER I

In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:
We are betray'd by what is false within.
--GEORGE MEREDITH.


"I can't get out," said Sterne's starling, looking through the bars of
his cage.

"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, out-distancing 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 commonplace 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 stand-still.

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 blond 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