Red Pottage | Page 9

"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 recognized 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 demeanor 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 death-bed, 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 recognize 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
recognize 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