The Project Gutenberg EBook of Red Pottage, by Mary Cholmondeley

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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

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