Title:  Red Pottage

Author:  Mary Cholmondeley

Release Date:  February 2, 2005 [EBook #14885]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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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 p>

       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.