Red Pottage

"May I come in?" said the Bishop, tapping at Hester's door.

"Do come in."

Hester was lying propped up by many cushions on a sofa in the little sitting-room leading out of her bedroom. She looked a mere shadow in the fire-light.

She smiled at him mechanically, but her face relapsed at once into the apathetic expression which sat so ill upon it. Her lustreless eyes fixed themselves again on the fire.

"And what are you going to do this afternoon?" she said, politely. It was obvious she did not care what he did.

"I am going to Westhope on business," he said, looking narrowly at her. It was all very well for Dr. Brown to say she must be roused; but how were his instructions to be carried out?

"I am a great deal of trouble to you," said Hester. "Could not I be sent to a home, or a place where you go through a cure, where I should be out of the way till I'm well?"

"Have I deserved that, Hester?"

"No; but you know I always try to wound my best friends."

"You don't succeed, my child, because they know you are in heavy trouble."

"We will not speak of that," said Hester, quickly.

"Yes, the time has come to speak of it. Why do you shut us out of this sorrow? Don't you see that you make our burdens heavier by refusing to let us share yours?"

"You can't share it," said Hester; "no one can."

"Do you think I have not grieved over it?"

"I know you have, but it was waste of time. It's no good—no good. Please don't cheer me, and tell me I shall write better books yet, and that this trial is for my good. Dear Bishop, don't try and comfort me. I can't bear it."

"My poor child, I firmly believe you will write better books than the one which is lost, and I firmly believe that you will one day look back upon this time as a stop in your spiritual life, but I had not intended to say so. The thought was in my mind, but it was you who put the words into my mouth."

"I was so afraid that—"

"That I was going to improve the occasion?"

"Yes. Dr. Brown and the nurse are so dreadfully cheerful now, and always talking about the future, and how celebrated I shall be some day. If you and Rachel follow suit I shall—I think I shall—go out of my mind."

The Bishop did not answer.

"Dr. Brown may be right," Hester went on. "I may live to seventy, and I may become—what does he call it?—a distinguished author. I don't know and I don't care. But whatever happens in the future, nothing will bring back the book which was burned."

The Bishop did not speak. He dared not.

"If I had a child," Hester continued, in the exhausted voice with which he was becoming familiar, "and it died, I might have ten more, beautiful and clever and affectionate, but they would not replace the one I had lost. Only if it were a child," a little tremor broke the dead level of the passionless voice, "I should meet it again in heaven. There is the resurrection of the body for the children of the body, but there is no resurrection that I ever heard of for the children of the brain."

Hester held her thin right hand with its disfigured first finger to the fire.

"A great writer who had married and had children, whom she worshipped, once told me that the pang of motherhood is that even your children don't seem your very own. They are often more like some one else than their parents, perhaps the spinster sister-in-law, whom every one dislikes, or some entire alien. Look at Regie. He is just like me, which must be a great trial to Minna. And they grow up bewildering their parents at every turn by characteristics they don't understand. But she said the spiritual children, the books, are really ours.

"If you were other than you are," said Hester, after a long pause, "you would reprove me for worshipping my own work. I suppose love is worship. I loved it for itself, not for anything it was to bring me. That is what people like Dr. Brown don't understand. It was part of myself. But it was the better part. The side of me which loves success, and which he is always appealing to, had no hand in it. My one prayer was that I might be worthy to write it, that it might not suffer by contact with me. I spent myself upon it." Hester's voice sank. "I knew what I was doing. I joyfully spent my health, my eyesight, my very life upon it. I was impelled to do it by what you perhaps will call a blind instinct, what I, poor simpleton and dupe, believed at the time to be nothing less than the will of God."

"You will think so again," said the Bishop, "when you realize that the book has left its mark and influence upon your character. It has taught you a great deal. The mere fact of writing it has strengthened you. The outward and visible form is dead, but its spirit lives on in you. You will realize this presently."

"Shall I? On the contrary, the only thing I realize is that it is not God who is mocked, but His foolish children who try to do His bidding. It seems He is not above putting a lying spirit in the mouth of his prophets. Do you think I still blame poor James for his bonfire, or his jealous little wife who wanted to get rid of me? Why should I? They acted up to their lights as your beloved Jock did when he squeezed the life out of that rabbit in Westhope Park. In all those days when I did not say anything, it was because I felt I had been deceived. I had done my part. God had not done His. He should have seen to it that the book was not destroyed. You prayed by me once when you thought I was unconscious. I heard all right. I should have laughed if I could, but it was too much trouble."

"These thoughts will pass away with your illness," said the Bishop. "You are like a man who has had a blow, who staggers about giddy and dazed, and sees the pavement rising up to strike him. The pavement is firm under his feet all the time."

"Half of me knows in a dim blind way that God is the same always," said Hester, "while the other half says, 'Curse God and die.'"

"That is the giddiness, the vertigo after the shock."

"Is it? I dare say you are right. But I don't care either way."

"Why trouble your mind about it, or about anything?"

"Because I have a feeling, indeed, it would be extraordinary if I had not, for Dr. Brown is always rubbing it in, that I ought to meet my trouble bravely, and not sink down under it, as he thinks I am doing now. He says others have suffered more than I have. I know that, for I have been with them. It seems," said Hester, with the ghost of a smile, "that there is an etiquette about these things, just as the blinds are drawn up after a funeral. The moment has come for me, but I have not drawn up my blinds."

"You will draw them up presently."

"I would draw them up now," said Hester, looking at him steadily, "if I could. I owe it to you and Rachel to try, and I have tried, but I can't."

The Bishop's cheek paled a little.

"Take your own time," he said, but his heart sank.

He saw a little boat with torn sail and broken rudder, drifting on to a lee shore.

"I seem to have been living at a great strain for the last year," said Hester. "I don't know one word from another now, but I think I mean concentration. That means holding your mind to one place, doesn't it? Well, now, something seems to have broken, and I can't fix it to anything any more. I can talk to you and Rachel for a few minutes if I hold my mind tight, but I can't really attend, and directly I am alone, or you leave off speaking, my mind gets loose from my body and wanders away to an immense distance, to long, dreary, desert places. And then if you come in I make a great effort to bring it back, and to open my eyes, because if I don't you think I'm ill. You don't mind if I shut them now, do you?—because I've explained about them, and holding them open does tire me so. I wish they could be propped open. And—my mind gets farther and further away every day. I hope you and Rachel won't think I am giving way if—sometime—I really can't bring it back any longer."

"Dear Hester, no."

"I will not talk any more then. If you and Rachel understand, that is all that matters. I used to think so many things mattered, but I don't now. And don't think I'm grieving about the book while I'm lying still. I have grieved, but it is over. I'm too tired to be glad or sorry about anything any more."

Hester lay back spent and gray among her pillows.

The Bishop roused her to take the stimulant put ready near at hand, and then sat a long time watching her. She seemed unconscious of his presence. At last the nurse came in, and he went out silently, and returned to his study. Rachel was waiting there to hear the result of the interview.

"I can do nothing," he said. "I have no power to help her. After forty years ministry I have not a word to say to her. She is beyond human aid—at least, she is beyond mine."

"You think she will die?"

"I do not see what is going to happen to prevent it, but I am certain it might be prevented."

"You could not rouse her?"

"No, she discounted anything I could have said, by asking me not to say it. That is the worst of Hester. The partition between her mind and that of other people is so thin that she sees what they are thinking about. Thank God, Rachel, that you are not cursed with the artistic temperament! That is why she has never married. She sees too much. I am not a match-maker, but if I had had to take the responsibility, I should have married her at seventeen to Lord Newhaven."

"You know he asked her?"

"No, I did not know it."

"It was a long time ago, when first she came out. Lady Susan was anxious for it, and pressed her. I sometimes think if she had been given time, and if her aunt had let her alone—but he married within the year. But what are we to do about Hester? Dr. Brown says something must be done, or she will sink in a decline. I would give my life for her, but I can do nothing. I have tried."

"So have I," said the Bishop. "But it has come to this. We have got to trust the one person whom we always show we tacitly distrust by trying to take matters out of His hands. We must trust God. So far we have strained ourselves to keep Hester alive, but she is past our help now. She is in none the worse case for that. We are her two best friends save one. We must leave her to the best Friend of all. God has her in His hand. For the moment the greater love holds her away from the less, like the mother who takes her sick child into her arms, apart from the other children who are playing round her. Hester is in God's keeping, and that is enough for us. And now take a turn in the garden, Rachel. You are too much in-doors. I am going out on business."

When Rachel had left him the Bishop opened his despatch-box and took out a letter.

It was directed to Lady Newhaven.

"I promised to give it into her own hand a month after his death, whenever that might happen to be," he said to himself. "There was some trouble between them. I hope she won't confide it to me. Anyhow, I must go and get it over. I wish I did not dislike her so much. I shall advise her not to read it till I am gone."

That help should come through such a recognized channel as a Bishop could surprise no one, least of all Lady Newhaven, who had had the greatest faith in the clergy all her life, but, nevertheless, so overwhelmed was she by despair and its physical sensations, that she very nearly refused to see the Bishop when he called. Her faith even in lawn sleeves momentarily tottered. Who would show her any good? Poor Lady Newhaven was crushed into a state of prostration so frightful that we must not blame her if she felt that even an Archbishop would have been powerless to help her.

She had thought, after the engagement was announced, of rushing up to London and insisting on seeing Hugh; but always, after she had looked out the trains, her courage had shrunk back at the last moment. There had been a look on Hugh's face during that last momentary meeting which she could not nerve herself to see again. She had been to London already once to see him, without success.

She knew Rachel was at the Palace at Southminster nursing Hester, and twice she had ordered the carriage to drive over to see her, and make a desperate appeal to her to give up Hugh. But she knew that she should fail. And Rachel would triumph over her. Women always did over a defeated rival. Lady Newhaven had not gone. The frightful injustice of it all wrung Lady Newhaven's heart to the point of agony. To see her own property deliberately stolen from her in the light of day, as it were, in the very market-place, before everybody, without being able to raise a finger to regain him! It was intolerable. For she loved Hugh as far as she was capable of loving anything. And her mind had grown round the idea that he was hers as entirely as a tree will grow round a nail fastened into it.

And now he was to marry Rachel, and soon. Let no one think they know pain until they know jealousy.

But when the Bishop sent up a second time, asking to see her on business, she consented.

It was too soon to see callers, of course. But a Bishop was different. And how could she refuse to admit him when she had admitted that odious Captain Pratt only four days before. She hoped no one would become aware of that fact. It was as well for her that she could not hear the remarks of Selina and Ada Pratt, as they skated on the frozen meadows with half, not the better-half, of Middleshire.

"Poor Vi Newhaven. Yes, she won't see a creature. She saw Algy for a few minutes last week, but then he is an old friend, and does not count. He said she was quite heart-broken. He was quite upset himself. He was so fond of Ted Newhaven."

The Bishop would not even sit down. He said he was on the way to a confirmation, and added that he had been entrusted with a letter for her, and held it towards her.

"It is my husband's handwriting," she said, drawing back, with instinctive fear.

"It is from your husband," said the Bishop, gently, softening somewhat at the sight of the ravages which despair had made in the lovely face since he had last seen it. "He asked me to give it into your own hand a month after his death."

"Then he told you that—"

"He told me nothing, and I wish to hear nothing."

"I should like to confess all to you, to feel myself absolved," said Lady Newhaven in a low voice, the letter in her trembling hand.

He looked at her, and he saw that she would not say all. She would arrange details to suit herself, and would omit the main point altogether, whatever it might be, if, as it was more than probable, it told against herself. He would at least save her from the hypocrisy of a half-confession.

"If in a month's time you wish to make a full confession to me," he said, "I will hear it. But I solemnly charge you in the meanwhile to speak to no one of this difficulty between you and your husband. Whatever it may have been, it is past. If he sinned against you, he is dead, and the least you can do is to keep silence. If you wronged him"—Lady Newhaven shook her head vehemently—"if you wronged him," repeated the Bishop, his face hardening, "be silent for the sake of the children. It is the only miserable reparation you can make him."

"You don't understand," she said, feebly.

"I know that he was a kindly, gentle-natured man, and that he died a hard and bitter one," said the Bishop. "God knows what is in that letter, but your husband said it would be of the greatest comfort and assistance to you in a difficulty which he foresaw for you. I will leave you to read it."

And he left the room.

The early December twilight was creeping over everything. Lady Newhaven took the letter to the window, and after several futile attempts succeeded in opening it.

It ran as follows:

Lady Newhaven put the letter in her pocket, and then fainted away, with her fair head on the window-ledge.

The Bishop's sister, Miss Keane, whose life was a perpetual orgy of mothers' meetings and G.F.S. gatherings, was holding a district visitors' working party in the drawing-room at the Palace. The ladies knitted and stitched, while one of their number heaped fuel on the flame of their enthusiasm by reading aloud the "History of the Diocese of Southminster."

Miss Keane took but little heed of the presence of Rachel and Hester in her brother's house. Those who work mechanically on fixed lines seem, as a rule, to miss the pith of life. She was kind when she remembered them, but her heart was where her treasure was—namely, in her escritoire, with her list of Bible-classes, and servants' choral unions, and the long roll of contributors to the guild of work which she herself had started.

When she had been up to Hester's room, invariably at hours when Hester could not see her, and when she had entered Rachel's sledge-hammer subscriptions in her various account-books, her attention left her visitors. She considered them superficial, and wondered how it was that her brother could find time to spend hours talking to both of them, while he had rarely a moment in which to address her chosen band in the drawing-room. She was one of those persons who find life a very prosaic affair, quite unlike the fiction she occasionally read.

She often remarked that nothing except the commonplace happened. Certainly she never observed anything else.

So Hester lay in the room above, halting feebly between two opinions, whether to live or to die, and Rachel sat in the Bishop's study beneath, waiting to make tea for him on his return from the confirmation.

If she did not make it, no one else did. Instead of ringing for it he went without it.

Rachel watched the sun set—a red ball dropping down a frosty sky. It was the last day of the year. The new year was bringing her everything.

"Good-bye, good-bye," she said, looking at the last rim of the sun as he sank. And she remembered other years when she had watched the sun set on the last day of December, when life had been difficult—how difficult!

"If Hester could only get better I should have nothing left to wish for," she said, and she prayed the more fervently for her friend, because she knew that even if Hester died, life would still remain beautiful; the future without her would still be flooded with happiness.

"A year ago if Hester had died I should have had nothing left to live for," she said to herself. "Now this newcomer, this man whom I have known barely six months, fills my whole life. Are other women as narrow as I am? Can they care only for one person at a time like me? Ah, Hester! forgive me, I can't help it."

Hugh was coming in presently. He had been in that morning, and the Bishop had met him, and had asked him to come in again to tea. Rachel did not know what the Bishop thought of him, but he had managed to see a good deal of Hugh.

Rachel waited as impatiently as most of us, when our happiness lingers by us, loth to depart.

At last she heard the footman bringing some one across the hall.

Would Hugh's coming ever become a common thing? Would she ever be able to greet him without this tumult of emotion, ever be able to take his hand without turning giddy on the sheer verge of bliss?

The servant announced, "Lady Newhaven."

The two women stood looking at each other. Rachel saw the marks of suffering on the white face, and her own became as white. Her eyes fell guiltily before Lady Newhaven's.

"Forgive me," she said.

"Forgive you?" said Lady Newhaven, in a hoarse voice. "It is no use asking me for forgiveness."

"You are right," said Rachel, recovering herself, and meeting Lady Newhaven's eyes fully. "But what is the use of coming here to abuse me? You might have spared yourself and me this at least. It will only exhaust you and—wound me."

"You must give him up," said Lady Newhaven, her hands fumbling under her crape cloak. "I've come to tell you that you must let him go."

The fact that Hugh had drawn the short lighter, and had not taken the consequences, did not affect Lady Newhaven's feelings towards him in the least, but she was vaguely aware that somehow it would affect Rachel's, and now it would be Rachel's turn to suffer.

Rachel paused a moment, and then said, slowly:

"He does not wish to be let go."

"He is mine."

"He was yours once," said Rachel, her face turning from white to gray. That wound was long in healing. "But he is mine now."

"Rachel, you cannot be bad all through." Lady Newhaven was putting the constraint upon herself which that tightly clutched paper, that poisoned weapon in reserve, enabled her to assume. For Hugh's sake she would only use it if other means failed. "You must know that you ought to look upon him as a married man. Don't you see"—wildly—"that we must marry, to put right what was wrong? He owes it to me. People always do."

"Yes, they generally do," said Rachel; "but I don't see how it makes the wrong right."

"I look upon Hugh as my husband," said Lady Newhaven.

"So do I."

"Rachel, he loves me. He is only marrying you for your money."

"I will risk that."

"I implore you on my knees to give him back to me."

And Lady Newhaven knelt down with bare, white outstretched hands. (Tableau number one. New Series.)

Rachel shrank back involuntarily.

"Listen, Violet," she said, "and get up. I will not speak until you get up." Lady Newhaven obeyed. "If I gave back Hugh to you a hundred times it would not make him love you any more, or make him marry you. I am not keeping him from you. This marriage is his own doing. Oh! Violet, I'm not young and pretty. I've no illusions about myself; but I believe he really does love me, in spite of that, and I know I love him."

"I don't believe it," said Lady Newhaven. "I mean about him. Not about you, of course."

"Here he is. Let him decide," said Rachel.

Hugh came in unannounced. Upon his grave face there was that concentrated look of happiness which has settled in the very deep of the heart and gleams up into the eyes.

His face changed painfully. He glanced from one woman to the other. Rachel was sorry for him. She would fain have spared him, but she could not.

"Hugh," she said, gently, her steadfast eyes resting on him, "Lady Newhaven and I were talking of you. I think it would be best if she heard from your own lips what she, naturally, will not believe from mine."

"I will never believe," said Lady Newhaven, "that you will desert me now, that all the past is nothing to you, and that you will cast me aside for another woman."

Hugh looked at her steadily. Then he went up to Rachel, and taking her hand, raised it to his lips. There was in his manner a boundless reverent adoration that was to Lady Newhaven's jealousy as a match to gunpowder.

Rachel kept his hand.

"Are you sure you want him, Rachel?" gasped Lady Newhaven, holding convulsively to a chair for support. "He has cast me aside. He will cast you aside next, for he is a coward and a traitor. Are you sure you want to marry him? His hands are red with blood. He murdered my husband."

Rachel's hand tightened on Hugh's.

"It was an even chance," she said. "Those who draw lots must abide by the drawing."

"It was an even chance," shrieked Lady Newhaven. "But who drew the short lighter, tell me that? Who refused to fulfil his part when the time was up? Tell me that."

"You are mad," said Rachel.

"I can prove it," said Lady Newhaven, holding out the letter in her shaking hands. "You may read it, Rachel. I can trust you. Not him, he would burn it. It is from Edward; look, you know his writing, written to tell me that he," pointing at Hugh, "had drawn the short lighter, but that, as he had not killed himself when the time came, he, Edward, did so instead. That was why he was late. We always wondered, Rachel, why he was two days late. Read it! Read it!"

"I will not read it," said Rachel, pushing away the paper. "I do not believe a word of it."

"You shall believe it. Ask him to deny it, if he can."

"You need not trouble to deny it," said Rachel, looking full at Hugh.

The world held only her and him. And as Hugh looked into her eyes his soul rose up and scaled the heights above it till it stood beside hers.

There is a sacred place where, if we follow close in Love's footsteps, we see him lay aside his earthly quiver and his bitter arrows, and turn to us as he is, with the light of God upon him, one with us as one with God. In that pure light lies cease to be. We know them no more, neither remember them, for love and truth are one.

Hugh strode across to Lady Newhaven, took the letter from her, and threw it into the heart of the fire. Then he turned to Rachel.

"I drew the short lighter," he said. "I meant to take the consequences at first, but when the time came—I did not. Partly I was afraid, and partly I could not leave you."

If Lady Newhaven yearned for revenge she had it then. They had both forgotten her. But she saw Rachel's eyes change as the eyes of a man at the stake might change when the fire reached him. She shrank back from the agony in them. Hugh's face became pinched and thin as a dead man's. A moment ago he saw no consequences. He saw only that he could not lie to her. His mind fell headlong from its momentary foothold. What mad impulse had betrayed him to his ruin?

"You drew the short lighter, and you let me think all the time he had," said Rachel, her voice almost inaudible in its fierce passion. "You drew it, and you let him die instead of you, as any one who knew him would know he would. And when he was dead you came to me, and kept me in ignorance even—that time—when I said I trusted you."

The remembrance of that meeting was too much.

Rachel turned her eyes on Lady Newhaven, who was watching her terror-stricken.

"I said I would not give him up, but I will," she said, violently. "You can take him if you want him. What was it you said to me, Hugh? That if you had drawn the short lighter you would have had to abide by it. Yes, that was it. Your whole intercourse with me has been one lie from first to last. You were right, Violet, when you said he ought to marry you. It will be another lie on the top of all the others."

"It was what Edward wished," faltered his widow. "He says so in the letter that has just been burned."

"Lord Newhaven wished it," said Rachel, looking at the miserable man between them. "Poor Lord Newhaven! First his honor. Then his life. You have taken everything he had. But there are still his shoes."

"Rachel!" said Hugh, suddenly, and he fell on his knees before her, clasping the hem of her gown.

She pushed him violently from her, tearing her gown in releasing it from his frenzied grasp.

"Leave me," she whispered. Her voice was almost gone. "Coward and liar, I will have nothing more to do with you."

He got upon his feet somehow. The two gray desperate faces spent with passion faced each other. They were past speech.

He read his death-warrant in her merciless eyes. She looked at the despair in his without flinching.

He stood a moment, and then feeling his way, like one half blind, left the room, unconsciously pushing aside Lady Newhaven, whom both had forgotten.

She gave one terrified glance at Rachel, and slipped out after him.

"Has Lady Newhaven been here?" said the Bishop, coming into the study, his hands full of papers. "I thought I saw her carriage driving away as I came up."

"She has been here."

The Bishop looked up suddenly, his attention arrested by Rachel's voice. There is a white heat of anger that mimics the pallor of a fainting fit. The Bishop thought she was about to swoon, until he saw her eyes. Those gentle faithful eyes were burning. He shrank as one who sees the glare of fire raging inside familiar windows.

"My poor child," he said, and he sat down heavily in his leather arm-chair.

Rachel still stood. She looked at him, and her lips moved, but no sound came forth.

The Bishop looked intently at her.

"Where is Scarlett?" he said.

"Hugh is gone," she said, stammering. "I have broken off my engagement with him. He will never come back."

And she fell suddenly on her knees, and hid her convulsed face against the arm of a chair.

The Bishop did not move. He waited for this paroxysm of anger to subside. He had never seen Rachel angry before in all the years he had known her, but he watched her without surprise. Only stupid people think that coal cannot burn as fiercely as tow.

She remained a long time on her knees, her face hidden. The Bishop did not hurry her. At last she began to sob silently, shuddering from head to foot.

Then he came and sat down near her, and took the cold clinched hands in his.

"Rachel, tell me," he said, gently.

She tried to pull her hands away, but he held them firmly. He obliged her to look up at him. She raised her fierce, disfigured face for a moment, and then let it fall on his hands and hers.

"I am a wicked woman," she said. "Don't trouble about me. I'm not worth it. I thought I would have kept all suffering from him, but now—if I could make him suffer—I would."

"I have no doubt he is suffering."

"Not enough. Not like me. And I loved him and trusted him. And he is false, too, like that other man I loved; like you, only I have not found you out yet; like Hester; like all the rest. I will never trust any one again. I will never be deceived again. This is—the—second time."

And Rachel broke into a passion of tears.

The Bishop released her hands and felt for his own handkerchief.

Then he waited, praying silently. The clock had made a long circuit before she raised herself.

"I am very selfish," she said, looking with compunction at the kind, tired face. "I ought to have gone to my room instead of breaking down here. Dear Bishop, forgive me. It is past now. I shall not give way again."

"Will you make me some tea?" he said.

She made the tea with shaking hands and awkward, half-blind movements. It was close on dinner-time, but she did not notice it. He obliged her to drink some, and then he settled himself in his leather arm-chair. He went over his engagements for the evening. In half an hour he ought to be dining with Canon Glynn to meet an old college friend. At eleven he had arranged to see a young clergyman whose conscience was harrying him. He wrote a note on his knee without moving, saying he could not come, and touched the bell at his elbow. When the servant had taken the note he relapsed into the depths of his arm-chair and sipped his tea.

"I think, Rachel," he said at last, "that I ought to tell you that I partly guess at your reason for breaking off your engagement. I have known for some time that there was trouble between the Newhavens. From what Lady Newhaven said to me to-day, and from the fact that she has been here, and that immediately after seeing her you broke your engagement with Scarlett, I must come to the conclusion that Scarlett had been the cause of this trouble."

Rachel had regained her composure. Her face was white and hard.

"You are right," she said. "He was at one time—her lover."

"And you consider, in consequence, that he is unfit to become your husband?"

"No. He told me about it before he asked me to marry him. I accepted him, knowing it."

"Then he was trying to retrieve himself. He acted towards you, at any rate, like an honorable man."

Rachel laughed. "So I thought at the time."

"If you accepted him, knowing about his past, I don't see why you should have thrown him over. One dishonorable action sincerely repented does not make a dishonorable man."

"I did not know all," said Rachel. "I do now."

The Bishop looked into the fire.

Her next words surprised him.

"You really cared for Lord Newhaven, did you not?"

"I did."

"Then as you know the one thing he risked his life to conceal for the sake of his children—namely, his wife's misconduct—I think I had better tell you the rest."

So Rachel told him in harsh, bald language the story of the drawing of lots, and how she and Lady Newhaven had remained ignorant as to which had drawn the short lighter. How Hugh had drawn it; how when the time came he had failed to fulfil the agreement; how two days later Lord Newhaven had killed himself; and how she and Lady Newhaven had both, of course, concluded that Lord Newhaven must have drawn the short lighter.

Rachel went on, her hard voice shaking a little.

"Hugh had told me that he had had an entanglement with a married woman. I knew it long before he spoke of it, but just because he risked losing me by owning it I loved and trusted him all the more. I thought he was, at any rate, an upright man. After Lord Newhaven's death he asked me to marry him, and I accepted him. And when we were talking quietly one day"—Rachel's face became, if possible, whiter than before—"I told him that I knew of the drawing of lots. (He thought no one knew of it except the dead man and himself.) And I told him that he must not blame himself for Lord Newhaven's death. He had brought it on himself. I said to him"—Rachel's voice trembled more and more-"'It was an even chance. You might have drawn the short lighter yourself.' And—he—said that if he had, he should have had to abide by it."

The Bishop shaded his eyes with his hand. It seemed cruel to look at Rachel, as it is cruel to watch a man drown.

"And how do you know he did draw it?" he said.

"It seems Lord Newhaven left his wife a letter, which she has only just received, telling her so. She brought it here to-day to show me."

"Ah! A letter! And you read it?"

"No," said Rachel, scornfully, "I did not read it. I did not believe a word she said about it. Hugh was there, and I told him I trusted him; and he took the letter from her, and put it in the fire."

"And did he not contradict it?"

"No. He said it was true. He has lied to me over and over again; but I saw he was speaking the truth for once."

There was a long silence.

"I don't know how other people regard those things," said Rachel at last, less harshly—she was gradually recovering herself—"but I know to me it was much worse that he could deceive me than that he should have been Lady Newhaven's lover. I did feel that dreadfully. I had to choke down my jealousy when he kissed me. He had kissed her first. He had made that side of his love common and profane; but the other side remained. I clung to that. I believed he really loved me, and that supported me and enabled me to forgive him, though men don't know what that forgiveness costs us. Only the walls of our rooms know that. But it seems to me much worse to have failed me on that other side as well—to have deceived me—to have told me a lie—just when—just when we were talking intimately."

"It was infinitely worse," said the Bishop.

"And it was the action of a coward to draw lots in the first instance if he did not mean to abide by the drawing, and the action of a traitor, once they were drawn, not to abide by them. But yet, if he had told me—if he had only told me the whole truth—I loved him so entirely that I would have forgiven—even that. But whenever I alluded to it, he lied."

"He was afraid of losing you."

"He has lost me by his deceit. He would not have lost me if he had told me the truth. I think—I know—that I could have got over anything, forgiven anything, even his cowardice, if he had only admitted it and been straightforward with me. A little plain dealing was all I asked, but—I did not get it."

The Bishop looked sadly at her. Straightforwardness is so seldom the first requirement a woman makes of the man she loves. Women, as a rule, regard men and their conduct only from the point of view of their relation to women—as sons, as husbands, as fathers. Yet Rachel, it seemed, could forgive Hugh's sin against her as a woman, but not his further sin against her as a friend.

"Yet it seems he did speak the truth at last," he said.

"Yes."

"And after he had destroyed the letter, which was the only proof against him."

"Yes."

Another silence.

"I am glad you have thrown him over," said the Bishop, slowly, "for you never loved him."

"I deceived myself in that case," said Rachel, bitterly. "My only fear was that I loved him too much."

The Bishop's face had become fixed and stern.

"Listen to me, Rachel," he said. "You fell desperately in love with an inferior man. He is charming, refined, well-bred, and with a picturesque mind, but that is all. He is inferior. He is by nature shallow and hard (the two generally go together), without moral backbone, the kind of man who never faces a difficulty, who always flinches when it comes to the point, the stuff out of which liars and cowards are made. His one redeeming quality is his love for you. I have seen men in love before. I have never seen a man care more for a woman than he cares for you. His love for you has taken entire possession of him, and by it he will sink or swim."

The Bishop paused. Rachel's face worked.

"He deceived you," said the Bishop, "not because he wished to deceive you, but because he was in a horrible position, and because his first impulse of love was to keep you at any price. But his love for you was raising him even while he deceived you. Did he spend sleepless nights because for months he vilely deceived Lord Newhaven? No. Rectitude was not in him. His conscience was not awake. But I tell you, Rachel, he has suffered like a man on the rack from deceiving you. I knew by his face as soon as I saw him that he was undergoing some great mental strain. I did not understand it, but I do now."

Rachel's mind, always slow, moved, stumbled to its bleeding feet.

"It was remorse," she said, turning her face away.

"It was not remorse. It was repentance. Remorse is bitter. Repentance is humble. His love for you has led him to it. Not your love for him, Rachel, which breaks down at the critical moment; his love for you which has brought him for the first time to the perception of the higher life, to the need of God's forgiveness, which I know from things he has said, has made him long to lead a better life, one worthier of you."

"Don't," said Rachel. "I can't bear it."

The Bishop rose, and stood facing her.

"And at last," he went on—"at last, in a moment, when you showed your full trust and confidence in him, he shook off for an instant the clogs of the nature which he brought into the world, and rose to what he had never been before—your equal. And his love transcended the lies that love itself on its lower plane had prompted. He reached the place where he could no longer lie to you. And then, though his whole future happiness depended on one more lie, he spoke the truth."

Rachel put out her hand as if to ward off what was coming.

"And how did you meet him the first time he spoke the truth to you?" continued the Bishop, inexorably. "You say you loved him, and yet—you spurned him from you, you thrust him down into hell. You stooped to him in the beginning. He was nothing until your fancied love fell upon him. And then you break him. It is women like you who do more harm in the world than the bad ones. The harm that poor fool Lady Newhaven did him is as nothing compared to the harm you have done him. You were his god, and you have deserted him. And you say you loved him. May God preserve men from the love of women if that is all that a good woman's love is capable of."

"I can do nothing," said Rachel, hoarsely.

"Do nothing!" said the Bishop, fiercely. "You can do nothing when you are responsible for a man's soul God will require his soul at your hands. Scarlett gave it into your keeping, and you took it. You had no business to take it if you meant to throw it away. And now you say you can do nothing!"

"What can I do?" said Rachel, faintly.

"Forgive him."

"Forgiveness won't help him. The only forgiveness he would care for is to marry me."

"Of course. It is the only way you can forgive him."

Rachel turned away. Her stubborn, quivering face showed a frightful conflict.

The Bishop watched her.

"My child," he said, gently, "we all say we follow Christ, but most of us only follow him and his cross—part of the way. When we are told that our Lord bore our sins, and was wounded for our transgressions, I suppose that meant that He felt as if they were His own in His great love for us. But when you shrink from bearing your fellow-creature's transgressions, it shows that your love is small."

Rachel was silent.

"If you really love him you will forgive him."

Rachel clinched and unclinched her hands.

"You are appealing to a nobility and goodness which are not in me," she said, stubbornly.

"I appeal to nothing but your love. If you really love him you will forgive him."

"He has broken my heart."

"I thought that was it. It is yourself you are thinking of. But what is he suffering at this moment? You do not know or care. Where is he now, that poor man who loves you? Rachel, if you had ever known despair, you would not thrust a fellow creature down into it."

"I have known it," said Rachel, hoarsely.

"Were not you deserted once? You were deserted to very little purpose, if after that you can desert another. Go back in your mind, and—remember. Where you stood once he stands now. You and his sin have put him there. You and his sin have tied him to his stake. Will you range yourself for ever on the side of his sin? Will you stand by and see him perish?"

Silence; like the silence round a death-bed.

"He is in a great strait. Only love can save him."

Rachel flung out her arms with an inarticulate cry.

"I will forgive him," she said. "I will forgive him."