Red Pottage

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.