Then he would make stern resolutions of economy, only to be baffled by Letty's determination to have everything that other people had; above all, not to allow her own life to be stinted because he had so foolishly adopted his mother's debts. She said little; or said it with smiles and a bridal standing on her rights not to be answered. But her persistence in a particular kind of claim, and her new refusal to be taken into his confidence and made the partner of his anxieties, raised a miserable feeling in his mind as the weeks went on.
"No!" she said to herself, all the time resenting bitterly what had happened at Ferth; "if I let him talk to me about it, I shall be giving in, and letting her trample on me! If George will be so weak, he must find the money somehow. Of course he can! I am not in the least extravagant. I am only doing what everybody expects me to do."
Meanwhile this state of things did not make Lady Tressady any more welcome in Brook Street, and there were symptoms of grievances and quarrels of another sort. Lady Tressady heard that the young couple had already given one or two tiny dinner-parties, and to none of them had she been invited. One day that George had been obliged to go to Warwick Square to consult her on business, he was suddenly overwhelmed with reproaches on this point.
"I suppose Letty thinks I should spoil her parties! She is ashamed of me, perhaps"—Lady Tressady gave an angry laugh. "Oh! very well; but I should like you and her to understand, George, that I have been a good deal more admired in my time than ever Letty need expect to be!"
And George's mother, in a surprising yellow tea-gown, threw herself back on her chair, bridling with wrath and emotion. George declared, with good temper, that he and Letty were well aware of his mother's triumphs; whereupon Lady Tressady, becoming tearful, said she knew it wasn't a pretty thing to say—of course it wasn't—but if one was treated unkindly by one's only son and his wife, what could one do but assert oneself?
George soothed her as best he could, and on his return home said tentatively to Letty, that he believed it would please his mother if they were to ask her to a small impromptu dinner of Parliamentary friends which they were planning for the following Friday.
"George!" exclaimed Letty, her eyes gleaming, "we can't ask her! I don't want to say anything disagreeable, but you must see that people don't like her—her dress is so extraordinary, and her manners—it sets people against the house. I do think it's too bad that—"
She turned aside with a sudden sob. George kissed her, and sympathised with her; for he himself was never at ease now for an instant while his mother was in the room. But the widening of the breach which Letty's refusal brought about only made his own position between the two women the more disagreeable to a man whose ideal of a home was that it should be a place of perpetual soothing and amusement.
On the very morning of their departure for Castle Luton matters reached a small crisis. Letty, tired with some festivity of the night before, took her breakfast in bed; and George, going upstairs toward the middle of the morning to make some arrangement with her for the journey, found her just come down, and walking up and down the drawing-room, her pale pink dress sweeping the floor, her hands clasped behind her. She was very pale, and her small lips were tightly drawn.
He looked at her with astonishment.
"What is the matter, darling?"
"Oh! nothing," said Letty, trying to speak with sarcasm. "Nothing at all. I have only just been listening to an account of the way in which your mother speaks of me to her friends. I ought to be flattered, of course, that she notices me at all! But I think I shall have to ask you to request her to put off her visit to Ferth a little. It could hardly give either of us much enjoyment."
George first pulled his moustaches, then tried, as usual, to banter or kiss her into composure. Above all, he desired not to know what Lady Tressady had said. But Letty was determined he should know. "She was heard "—she began passionately, holding him at arm's length—"she was heard saying to a whole roomful of people yesterday, that I was 'pretty, of course—rather pretty—but so second rate—and so provincial! It was such a pity dear George had not waited till he had been a few months in London. Still, of course, one could only make the best of it!'"
Letty mimicked her mother-in-law's drawling voice, two red spots burning on either cheek the while, and her little fingers gripping George's arm.
"I don't believe she ever said such things. Who told you so?" said
George, stiffening, his arm dropping from her waist.
Letty tossed her head.
"Never mind! I ought to know, and it doesn't really matter how I know.
She did say them."
"Yes, it does matter," said George, quickly, walking away to the other side of the room. "Letty! if you would only send away that woman Grier, you can't think how much happier we should both be."
Letty stood still, opening her blue eyes wide.
"You want me—to get rid—of Grier," she said, "my own particular pet maid? And why—please?"
George had the courage to stick to his point, and the result was a heated and angry scene—their first real quarrel—which ended in Letty's rushing upstairs in tears, and declaring she would go _no_where. He might go to Castle Luton, if he pleased; she was far too agitated and exhausted to face a houseful of strangers.
The inevitable reconciliation, with its usual accompaniments of headache and eau de cologne, took time, and they only just completed their preparations and caught their appointed train.
Meanwhile the storm of the day had taken all savour from Letty's expectations, and made George feel the whole business an effort and a weariness. Letty sat pale and silent in her corner, devoured with regrets that she had not put on a thicker veil to hide the ravages of the morning; while George turned over the pages of a political biography, and could not prevent his mind from falling back again and again into dark places of dread and depression.
* * * * *
"You are my earliest guests," said Mrs. Allison, as she placed a chair for Letty beside herself, on the lawn at Castle Luton. "Except, indeed, that Lady Maxwell and her little boy are here somewhere, roaming about. But none of our other friends could get down till later. I am glad we shall have a little quiet time before they come."
"Lady Maxwell!" said Letty. "I had no idea they were coming. Oh, what a lovely day! and how beautiful it all is!" she cried, as she sat down and looked round her. The colour came back into her cheeks. She forgot her determination to keep her veil down, and raised it eagerly.
Mrs. Allison smiled.
"We never look so well as in May—the river is so full, and the swans are so white. Ah! I see Edgar has already taken Sir George to make friends with them."
And Letty, looking across the broad green lawn, saw the flash of a brimming river and a cluster of white swans, beside which stood her husband and a young man in a serge suit, who was feeding the swans with bread—Lord Ancoats, no doubt, the happy owner of all this splendour. To the left of their figures rose a stone bridge with a high, carved parapet, and beyond the river she saw green hills and woods against a radiant sky. Then, to her right was this wonderful yellowish pile of the old house. She began to admire and exclaim about it with a great energy and effusion, trying hard to say the correct and cultivated thing, and, in fact, repeating with a good deal of exactness what she had heard said of it by others.
Her hostess listened to her praises with a gentle smile. Gentleness, indeed, a rather sad gentleness, was the characteristic of Mrs. Allison. It seemed to make an atmosphere about her—her delicate blanched head and soft face, her small figure, her plain black dress, her hands in their white ruffles. Her friends called it saintliness. At any rate, it set her apart, giving her a peculiar ethereal dignity which made her formidable in society to many persons who were not liable to shyness. Letty from the beginning had felt her formidable.
Yet nothing could be kinder or simpler than her manner. In response to Letty's enthusiasms she let herself be drawn at once into speaking of her own love for the house, and on to pointing out its features.
"I am always telling these things to newcomers," she said, smiling. "And I am not clever enough to make variations. But I don't mind, somehow, how often I go through it. You see, this front is Tudor, and the south front is a hundred years later, and both of them, they say, are the finest of their kind. Isn't it wonderful that two men, a hundred years apart, should each have left such a noble thing behind him. One inspired the other. And then we—we poor moderns come after, and must cherish what they left us as we best can. It's a great responsibility, don't you think? to live in a beautiful house."
"I'm afraid I don't know much about it," said Letty, laughing; "we live in such a very ugly one."
Mrs. Allison looked sympathetic.
"Oh! but then, ugly ones have character; or they are pretty inside, or the people one loves have lived in them. That would make any place a House Beautiful. Aren't you near Perth?"
"Yes; and I am afraid you'll think me dreadfully discontented," said Letty, with one of her little laughing airs; "but there really isn't anything to make up in our barrack of a place. It's like a blackened brick set up on end at the top of a hill. And then the villages are so hideous."
"Ah! I know that coal-country," said Mrs. Allison, gravely—"and I know the people. Have you made friends with them yet?"
"We were only there for our honeymoon. George says that next month the whole place will be out on strike. So just now they hate us—they will hardly look at us in the street. But, of course, we shall give away things at Christmas."
Mrs. Allison's lip twitched, and she shot a glance at the bride which betrayed, for all her gentleness, the woman of a large world and much converse with mankind. What a curious, hard little face was Lady Tressady's under the outer softness of line and hue, and what an amazing costume! Mrs. Allison had no quarrel with beautiful gowns, but the elaboration, or, as one might say, the research of Letty's dress struck her unpleasantly. The time that it must have taken to think out!
Aloud she said:
"Ah! the strike. Yes, I fear it is inevitable. Ancoats has some property not very far from you, and we get reports. Poor fellows! if it weren't for the wretched agitators who mislead them—but there, we mustn't talk of these things. I see Lady Maxwell coming."
And Mrs. Allison waved her hand to a tall figure in white with a child beside it that had just emerged on the far distance of the lawn.
"Is Lord Maxwell here, too?" asked Letty.
"He is coming later. It seems strange, perhaps, that you should find them here this Sunday, for Lord Fontenoy comes to-morrow, and the great fight will be on so soon. But when I found that they were free, and that Maxwell would like to come, I was only too glad. After all, rival politicians in England can still meet each other, even at a crisis. Besides, Maxwell is a relation of ours, and he was my boy's guardian—the kindest possible guardian. Politics apart, I have the greatest respect for him. And her too. Why is it always the best people in the world that do the most mischief?"
At the mention of Lord Fontenoy it had been Letty's turn to throw a quick side look at Mrs. Allison. But the name was spoken in the quietest and most natural way; and yet, if one analysed the tone, in a way that did imply something exceptional, which, however, all the world knew, or might know.
"Is Lady Maxwell an old friend of yours, too?" asked Letty, longing to pursue the subject, and vexed to see how fast the mother and child were approaching.
"Only since her marriage. To see her and Maxwell together is really a poem. If only she wouldn't identify herself so hotly, dear woman! with everything he does and wishes in politics. There is no getting her to hear a word of reason. She is another Maxwell in petticoats. And it always seems to me so unfair. Maxwell without beauty and without petticoats is quite enough to fight! Look at that little fellow with his flowers!—such an oddity of a child!"
Then she raised her voice.
"My dear, what a ramble you must have made. Come and have a shady chair and some tea."
For answer Marcella, laughing, held up a glorious bunch of cuckoo-pint and marsh marigold, while little Hallin at her skirts waved another trophy of almost equal size. The mother's dark face was flushed with exercise and pleasure. As she moved over the grass, the long folds of a white dress falling about her, the flowers in her hand, the child beside her, she made a vision of beauty lovely in itself and lovely in all that it suggested. Frank joy and strength, happiness, purity of heart—these entered with her. One could almost see their dim heavenly shapes in the air about her.
Neither Letty nor Mrs. Allison could take their eyes from her. Perhaps she knew it. But if she did, it made no difference to her perfect ease of bearing. She greeted Letty kindly.
"You didn't expect to see me here, did you, Lady Tressady? But it is the unexpected that happens."
Then she put her hand on Mrs. Allison's shoulder, bending her height to her small hostess.
"What a day, and what a place! Hallin and I have been over hill and dale. But he is getting such a botanist, the little monkey! He will hardly forgive me because I forgot one of the flowers we found out yesterday in his botany book."
"She said it was 'Robin-run-in-the-'edge,' and it isn't—it's 'edge mustard," said Hallin, severely, holding up a little feathery stalk.
Mrs. Allison shook her head, endeavouring to suit her look to the gravity of the offence.
"Mother must learn her lessons better, mustn't she? Go and shake hands, little man, with Lady Tressady."
Hallin went gravely to do as he was told. Then he stood on one foot, and looked Letty over with a considering eye.
"Are you going to a party?" he said suddenly, putting out a small and grimy finger, and pointing to her dress.
"Hallin! come here and have your tea," said his mother, hastily. Then she turned to Letty with the smile that had so often won Maxwell a friend.
"I am sorry to say that he has a rooted objection to anything that isn't rags in the way of clothes. He entirely declined to take me across the river till I had rolled up my lace cloak and put it in a bush. And he won't really be friends with me again till we have both got back to the scarecrow garments we wear at home."
"Oh! children are so much happier when they are dirty," said Letty, graciously, pleased to feel herself on these easy terms with her two companions. "What beautiful flowers he has! and what an astonishing little botanist he seems to be!"
And she seated herself beside Hallin, using all her blandishments to make friends with him, which, however, did not prove to be an easy matter. For when she praised his flowers, Hallin only said, with his mouth full: "Oh! but mammy's bunch is hever so much bigger;" and when she offered him cake, the child would sturdily put the cake away, and hold it and her at arm's length till his mute look across the table had won his mother's nod of permission.
Letty at last thought him an odd, ill-mannered child, and gave up courting him, greatly to Hallin's satisfaction. He edged closer and closer to his mother, established himself finally in her pocket, and browsed on all the good things with which Mrs. Allison provided him, undisturbed.
"How late they are!" said Marcella, looking at her watch. "Tell me the names again, dear lady"—she bent forward, and laid her hand affectionately on Mrs. Allison's knee. "Your parties are always a work of art."
Mrs. Allison flushed a little, as though she liked the compliment, and ran laughingly through the names.
"Lord and Lady Maxwell."
"Ah!" said Marcella, "the least said about them the soonest mended. Go on."
"Lord and Lady Cathedine."
Marcella made a face.
"Poor little thing! I always think of the remark about the Queen in 'Alice in Wonderland.' 'A little kindness, and putting her hair in curl-papers, would do wonders for her.' She is so limp and thin and melancholy. As for him—isn't there a race or a prize-fight we can send him to?"
Mrs. Allison tapped her lightly on the lips.
"I won't go on unless my guests are taken prettily."
Marcella kissed the delicate wrinkled hand.
"I'll be good. What do you keep such an air here for? It gets into one's head."
Letty Tressady, indeed, was looking on with a feeling of astonishment.
These merry, childlike airs had absolutely no place in her conception of
Lady Maxwell. Nor could she know that Mrs. Allison was one of the very
few people in the world to whom Marcella was ever drawn to show them.
"Sir Philip Wentworth," pursued Mrs. Allison, smiling. "Say anything malicious about him, if you can!"
"Don't provoke me. What a mercy I brought a volume of 'Indian Studies' in my bag! I will go up early, before dinner, and finish them."
"Then there is Madeleine Penley, and Elizabeth Kent."
A quick involuntary expression crossed Marcella's face. Then she drew herself up with dignity, and crossed her hands primly on her lap.
"Let me understand. Are you going to protect me from Lady Kent this time?
Because, last time you threw me to the wolves in the most dastardly way."
Mrs. Allison laughed out.
"On the contrary, we all enjoyed your skirmish with her in November so much, we shall do our best to provoke another in May."
Marcella shook her head.
"I haven't the energy to quarrel with a fly. And as for Aldous—please warn his lady at dinner that he may go to sleep upon her shoulder!"
"You poor thing!"—Mrs. Allison put out a sympathetic hand. "Are you so tired? Why will you turn the world upside down?"
Marcella took the hand lightly in both hers.
"Why will you fight reform?"
And the eyes of the two women met, not without a sudden grave passion.
Then Marcella dropped the hand, and said, smiling:
"Castle Luton isn't full yet. Who else?"
"Oh! some young folk—Charlie Naseby."
"A nice boy—a very nice boy—not half such a coxcomb as he looks. Then the Levens—I know the Levens are coming, for Betty told me that she got out of two other engagements as soon as you asked her."
"Oh! and, by the way, Mr. Watton—Harding Watton," said Mrs. Allison, turning slightly towards Lady Tressady.
The exclamation on Lady Maxwell's lips was checked by something she saw on her hostess's face, and Letty eagerly struck in:
"Harding coming?—my cousin? I am so glad. I suppose I oughtn't to say it, but he is such a clever, such an agreeable, creature. But you know the Wattons, don't you, Lady Maxwell?"
Marcella was busying herself with Hallin's tea.
"I know Edward Watton," she said, turning her beautiful clear look on
Letty. "He is a real friend of mine."
"Oh! but Harding is much the cleverer," said Letty. And pleased both to find the ball of talk in her hands, and to have the chance of glorifying a relation in this world of people so much bigger than herself, she plunged into an extravagant account—all adjectives and superlatives—of Harding Watton's charms and abilities, to which Lady Maxwell listened in silence.
"Tactless!" thought Mrs. Allison, with vexation, but she did not know how to stop the stream. In truth, since she had given Lord Fontenoy leave to invite Harding Watton she had had time to forget the invitation, and she was sorry now to think of his housing with the Maxwells. For Watton had been recently Lord Fontenoy's henchman and agent in a newspaper attack upon the Bill, and upon Maxwell personally, that even Mrs. Allison had thought violent and unfair. Well, it was not her fault. But Lady Tressady ought to have better information and better sense than to be chattering like this. She was just about to interpose, when Marcella held up her hand.
"I hear the carriages!"
The hostess hastened towards the house, and Marcella followed her, with Hallin at her skirts. Letty looked after Lady Maxwell with the same mixture of admiration and jealous envy she had felt several times before. "I don't feel that I shall get on with her," she said to herself, impatiently. "But I don't think I want to. George took her measure at once."
Part of this reflection, however, was not true. Letty's ambition would have been very glad to "get on" with Marcella Maxwell.
* * * * *
Just as his wife was ready for dinner, and Grier had disappeared, George entered Letty's room. She was standing before a tall glass, putting the last touches to her dress—smoothing here, pinning there, turning to this side and to that. George, unseen himself, stood and watched her—her alternate looks of anxiety and satisfaction, her grace, the shimmering folds of the magnificent wedding-dress in which she had adorned herself.
He, however, was neither happy nor gay. But he had come in feeling that he must make an effort—many efforts, if their young married life was to be brought back to that level of ease and pleasure which he had once taken for granted, and which now seemed so hard to maintain. If that ease and pleasure were ultimately to fail him, what should he do? He shrank impatiently from the idea. Then he would scoff at himself. How often had he read and heard that the first year of marriage is the most difficult. Of course it must be so. Two individualities cannot fuse without turmoil, without heat. Let him only make his effort.
So he walked up to her and caught her in his arms.
"Oh, George!—my hair!—and my flowers!"
"Never mind," he said, almost with roughness. "Put your head there. Say you hate the thought of our day, as I do! Say there shall never be one like it again! Promise me!"
She felt the beating of his heart beneath her cheek. But she stood silent. His appeal, his unwonted agitation, revived in her all the anger and irritation that had begun to prey upon her thoughts. It was all very well, but why were they so pinched and uncomfortable? Why must everybody—Mrs. Allison, Lady Maxwell, a hundred others—have more wealth, more scope, more consideration than she? It was partly his fault.
So she gradually drew herself away, pushing him softly with her small gloved hand.
"I am sure I hate quarrelling," she said. "But there! Oh, George! don't let's talk of it any more! And look what you have done to my poor hair. You dear, naughty boy!"
But though she called him "Dear," she frowned as she took off her gloves that she might mend what he had done.
George thrust his hands into his pockets, walked to the window, and waited. As he descended the great stairs in her wake he wished Castle Luton and its guests at the deuce. What pleasure was to be got out of grimacing and posing at these country-house parties? And now, according to Letty, the Maxwells were here. A great gêne for everybody!
CHAPTER XI
"That lady sitting by Sir George? What! Lady Maxwell? No—the other side?
Oh! that's Lady Leven. Don't you know her? She's tremendous fun!"
And the dark-eyed, rosy-cheeked young man who was sitting beside Letty nodded and smiled across the table to Betty Leven, merely by way of reminding her of his existence. They had greeted before dinner—a greeting of comrades.
Then he turned back, with sudden decorum, to this Lady Tressady, whom he had been commissioned to take in to dinner. "Quite pretty, but rather—well, ordinary!" he said to himself, with a critical coolness bred of much familiarity with the best things of Vanity Fair. He had been Ancoats's friend at Cambridge, and was now disporting himself in the Guards, but still more—as Letty of course assumed—in the heart of the English well-born world. She knew that he was Lord Naseby, and that some day he would be a marquis. A halo, therefore, shone about him. At the same time, she had a long experience of young men, and, if she flattered him, it was only indirectly, by a sort of teasing aggression that did not allow him to take his attention from her.
"I declare you are better than any peerage!" she said to him presently, when he had given her a short biography, first of Lord Cathedine, who was sitting opposite, then of various other members of the company. "I should like to tie you to my fan when I go out to dinner."
"Would you?" said the young man, drily. "Oh! you will soon know all you want to know."
"How are poor little people from Yorkshire to find their way about in this big world? You are all so dreadfully absorbed in each other. In the first place, you all marry each other."
"Do we?—though I don't quite understand who 'we' means. Well, one must marry somebody, I suppose, and cousins are less trouble than other people."
Involuntarily, the young man's eyes travelled along the table to a fair girl on the opposite side, dazzlingly dressed in black. She was wielding a large fan of black feathers, which threw both hair and complexion into amazing relief; and she seemed to be amusing herself in a nervous, spasmodic way with Sir Frank Leven. Letty noticed his glance.
"Oh! you have not earned your testimonial yet, not by any manner of means," she said. "That is Lady Madeleine Penley, isn't it? Is she a relation of Mrs. Allison's?"
"She is a cousin. That is her mother, Lady Kent, sitting beside poor Ancoats. Such an old character! By the end of dinner she will have got to the bottom of Ancoats, or know the reason why."
"Is Lord Ancoats such a mystery?" said Letty, running an inquisitive eye over the black front, sharp nose, and gorgeously bejewelled neck of a somewhat noisy and forbidding old lady sitting on the right hand of the host.
Young Naseby's expression in answer rather piqued her. There was a quick flash of something that was instantly suppressed, and the youth said composedly,
"Oh! we are all mysteries for Lady Kent."
But Letty noticed that his eyes strayed back to Lord Ancoats, and then again to Lady Madeleine. He seemed to be observing them, and Letty's sharpness at once took the hint. No doubt the handsome, large-featured girl was here to be "looked at." Probably a good many maidens would be passed in review before this young Sultan made his choice! By the way he must be a good deal older than George had imagined. Clearly he left college some time ago. What a curious face he had—a small, crumpled face, with very prominent blue eyes; curly hair of a reddish colour, piled high, as though for effect, above his white brow; together with a sharp chin and pointed moustache, which gave him the air of an old French portrait. He was short in stature, but at the same time agile and strongly built. He wore one or two fine old rings, which drew attention to the delicacy of his hands; and his manner struck her as at once morose and excitable. Letty regarded him with involuntary respect as the son of Mrs. Allison—much more as the master of Castle Luton and fifty thousand a year. But if he had not been the master of Castle Luton she would have probably thought, and said, that he had a disagreeable Bohemian air.
"Haven't you really made acquaintance with Lady Kent?" said Lord Naseby, returning to the charge his laziness was somewhat at a loss for conversation. "I should have thought she was the person one could least escape knowing in the three kingdoms."
"I have seen her, of course," said Letty, lightly, though, alas! untruly.
"But I am afraid you can hardly realise that I have only been three short
seasons in London—two with an old aunt, who never goes out, in Cavendish
Square, poor dull old dear! and another with Mrs. Watton, of Malford."
"Oh! with Mrs. Watton, of Malford," said Lord Naseby, vaguely. Then he became suddenly aware that Lady Leven, on the other side of the table, was beckoning to him. He leant across, and they exchanged a merry war of words about something of which Letty knew nothing.
Letty, rather incensed, thought him a puppy, drew herself up, and looked round at the ex-Governor beside her. She saw a fine head, the worn yellow face and whitened hair of a man who has suffered under a hot climate, and an agreeable, though somewhat courtly, smile. Sir Philip Wentworth was not troubled with the boyish fastidiousness of Lord Naseby. He perceived merely that a pretty young woman wished to make friends with him, and met her wish at once. Moreover, he identified her as the wife of that "promising and well-informed fellow, Tressady," with whom he had first made friends in India, and had now—just before dinner—renewed acquaintance in the most cordial fashion.
He talked graciously to the wife, then, of Tressady's abilities and Tressady's career. Letty at first liked it. Then she was seized with a curious sense of discomfort.
Her eyes wandered towards the head of the table, where George was talking—why! actually talking earnestly, and as though he were enjoying himself, to Lady Maxwell, whose noble head and neck, rising from a silver white dress, challenged a great Genoese Vandyck of a Marehesa Balbi which was hanging just behind her, and challenged it victoriously.
So other people thought and said these things of George? Letty was for a moment sharply conscious that they had not occupied much place in her mind since her marriage, or, for the matter of that, since her engagement. She had taken it for granted that he was "distinguished"—that was part of the bargain. Only, she never seemed as yet to have had either time or thought to give to those parts and elements in his life which led people to talk of him as this old Indian was doing.
Curtains, carpets, gowns, cabinets; additions to Ferth; her own effect in society; how to keep Lady Tressady in her place—of all these things she had thought, and thought much. But George's honourable ambitions, the esteem in which he was held, the place he was to make for himself in the world of men—in thinking of these her mind was all stiff and unpractised. She was conscious first of a moral prick, then of a certain irritation with other people.
Yet she could not help watching George wistfully. He looked tired and pale, in spite of the animation of his talk. Well! no doubt she looked pale too. Some of the words and phrases of their quarrel flashed across her. In this beautiful room, with its famous pictures and its historical associations, amid this accumulated art and wealth, the whole thing was peculiarly odious to remember. Under the eyes of Vandyck's Marchesa one would have liked to think of oneself as always dignified and refined, always elegant and calm.
Then Letty had a revulsion, and laughed at herself.
"As if these people didn't have tempers, and quarrel about money! Of course they do! And if they don't—well, we all know how easy it is to be amiable on fifty thousand a year."
* * * * *
After dinner Mrs. Allison led the way to the "Green Drawing-room." This room, hung with Gainsborough portraits, was one of the sights of the house, and tonight Marcella Maxwell especially looked round her on entering it, with enchantment.
"You happy people!" she said to Mrs. Allison. "I never come into this room without anxiously asking myself whether I am fit to make one of the company. I look at my dress, or I am doubtful about my manners, or I wish someone had taught me to dance the minuet!"
"Yes," said Betty Leven, running up to a vast picture, a life-size family group, which covered the greater part of the farther wall of the room. "What a vulgar, insignificant chit one feels oneself without cap or powder!—without those ruffles, or those tippets, or those quilted petticoats! Mrs. Allison, may my maid come down to-morrow while we are at dinner and take the pattern of those ruffles? No—no! she sha'n't! Sacrilege! You pretty thing!" she said, addressing a figure—the figure of a girl in white with thin virginal arms and bust, who seemed to be coming out of the picture, almost to be already out of it and in the room. "Come and talk to me. Don't think any more of your father and mother there. You have been curtsying to them for a hundred years; and they are rather dull, stupid people, after all. Come and tell us secrets. Tell us what you have seen in this room—all the foolish people making love, and the sad people saying good-bye."
Betty was kneeling on a carved chair, her pretty arms leaning on the back of it, her eyes fixed half-in laughter, half in sentiment, on the figure in the picture.
Lady Maxwell suddenly moved closer to her, and Letty heard her say in a low voice, as she put her hand on Lady Leven's arm:
"Don't, Betty! don't! It was in this room he proposed to her, and it was in this room he said goodbye. Maxwell has often told me. I believe she never comes in here alone—only for ceremony and when there is a crowd."
A look of consternation crossed Lady Leven's lively little face. She glanced shyly towards Mrs. Allison. That lady had moved hastily away from the group in front of the picture. She was sitting by herself, looking straight before her, with a certain stiffness, her thin hands crossed on her knee. Betty impetuously went towards her, and was soon sitting on a stool beside her, chattering to her and amusing her.
Meanwhile Marcella invited Lady Tressady to come and sit with her on a sofa beneath the great picture.
Letty followed her, settled her satin skirts in their most graceful folds, put one little foot on a Louis Quinze footstool which seemed to invite it, and then began to inform herself about the house and the family.
At the beginning of their talk it was clear that Lady Maxwell wished to ingratiate herself. A friendly observer would have thought that she was trying to make a stranger feel more at ease in this house and circle, where she herself was a familiar guest. Betty Leven, catching sight of the pair from the other side of the room, said to herself, with inward amusement, that Marcella was "realising the wife."
At any rate, for some time Lady Maxwell talked with sympathy, with effusion even, to her companion. In the first place she told her the story of their hostess.
Thirty years before, Mrs. Allison, the daughter and heiress of a Leicestershire squire, had married Henry Allison, old Lord Ancoats's second son, a young captain in the Guards. They enjoyed three years of life together; then the chances of a soldier's career, as interpreted by two high-minded people, took Henry Allison out to an obscure African coast, to fight one of the innumerable "little wars" of his country. He fell, struck by a spear, in a single-file march through some nameless swamp; and a few days afterwards the words of a Foreign Office telegram broke a pining woman's heart.
Old Lord Ancoats's death, which followed within a month or two, was hastened by the shock of his son's loss; and before the year was out the eldest son, who was sickly and unmarried, also died, and Mrs. Allison's boy, a child of two, became the owner of Castle Luton. The mother saw herself called upon to fight down her grief, to relinquish the quasi-religious life she had entered upon, and instead to take her boy to the kingdom he was to rule, and bring him up there.
"And for twenty-two years she has lived a wonderful life here," said Marcella; "she has been practically the queen of a whole countryside, doing whatever she pleased, the mother and friend and saint of everybody. It has been all very paternal and beautiful, and—abominably Tory and tyrannous! Many people, I suppose, think it perfect. Perhaps I don't. But then, I know very well I can't possibly disagree with her a tenth part as strongly as she disagrees with me."
"Oh! but she admires you so much," cried Letty, with effusion; "she thinks you mean so nobly!"
Marcella opened her eyes, involuntarily wondering a little what Lady
Tressady might know about it.
"Oh! we don't hate each other," she said, rather drily, "in spite of politics. And my husband was Ancoats's guardian."
"Dear me!" said Letty. "I should think it wasn't easy to be guardian to fifty thousand a year."
Marcella did not answer—did not, indeed, hear. Her look had stolen across to Mrs. Allison—a sad, affectionate look, in no way meant for Lady Tressady. But Letty noticed it.
"I suppose she adores him," she said.
Marcella sighed.
"There was never anything like it. It frightens one to see."
"And that, of course, is why she won't marry Lord Fontenoy?"
Marcella started, and drew away from her companion.
"I don't know," she said stiffly; "and I am sure that no one ever dared to ask her."
"Oh! but of course it's what everyone says," said Letty, gay and unabashed. "That's what makes it so exciting to come here, when one knows Lord Fontenoy so very well."
Marcella met this remark with a discouraging silence.
Letty, however, was determined this time to make her impression. She plunged into a lively and often audacious gossip about every person in the room in turn, asking a number of intimate or impertinent questions, and yet very seldom waiting for Marcella's reply, so anxious was she to show off her own information and make her own comments. She let Marcella understand that she suspected a great deal, in the matter of that handsome Lady Madeleine. It was immensely interesting, of course; but wasn't Lord Ancoats a trifle wild?—she bent over and whispered in Marcella's ears; was it likely that he would settle himself so soon?—didn't one hear sad tales of his theatrical friends and the rest? And what could one expect! As if a young man in such a position was not certain to have his fling! And his mother would have to put up with it. After all, men quieted down at last. Look at Lord Cathedine!
And with an air of boundless knowledge she touched upon the incidents of Lord Cathedine's career, hashing up, with skilful deductions of her own, all that Lord Naseby had said or hinted to her at dinner. Poor Lady Cathedine! didn't she look a walking skeleton, with her strange, melancholy face, and every bone showing? Well, who could wonder! And when one thought of their money difficulties, too!
Lady Tressady lifted her white shoulders in compassion.
By this time Marcella's black eyes were wandering insistently round the room, searching for means of escape. Betty, far away, noticed her air, and concluded that the "realisation" was making rapid, too rapid, progress. Presently, with a smiling shake of her little head, she left her own seat and went to her friend's assistance.
At the same moment Mrs. Allison, driven by her conscience as a hostess, got up for the purpose of introducing Lady Tressady to a lady in grey who had been sitting quiet, and, as Mrs. Allison feared, lonely, in a corner, looking over some photographs. Marcella, who had also risen, put out a hand to Betty, and the two moved away together.
* * * * *
They stopped on the threshold of a large window at the side of the room, which stood wide open to the night. Outside, beyond a broad flight of steps, stretched a formal Dutch garden. Its numberless small beds, forming stiff scrolls and circles on a ground of white gravel, lay in bright moonlight. Even the colours of the hyacinths and tulips with which they were planted could be seen, and the strong scent from them filled the still air. At the far end of this flat-patterned place a group of tall cypress and ilex, black against the sky, struck a note of Italy and the South; while, through the yew hedges which closed in the little garden, broad archways pierced at intervals revealed far breadths of silvery English lawn and the distant gleam of the river.
"Well, my dear," said Betty, laughing, and slipping her arm through Marcella's as they stood in the opening of the window, "I see you have been doing your duty for once. Let me pat you on the back. All the more that I gather you are not exactly enchanted with Lady Tressady. You really should keep your face in order. From the other end of the room I know exactly what you think of the person you are talking to."
"Do you?" said Marcella, penitently. "I wish you didn't."
"Well you may wish it, for it doesn't help the political lady to get what she wants. However, I don't think that Lady Tressady has found out yet that you don't like her. She isn't thin-skinned. If you had looked like that when you were talking to me, I would have paid you out somehow. What is the matter with her?"
"Oh! I don't know," said Marcella, impatiently, raising her shoulders. "But she jarred. I pined to get away—I don't think I ever want to talk to her again."
"No," said Betty, ruminating; "I'll tell you what it is—she isn't a gentleman! Don't interrupt me! I mean exactly what I say—she isn't a gentleman. She would do and say all the things that a nice man squirms at. I always have the oddest fancy about that kind of person. I see them as they must be at night—all the fine clothes gone—just a little black soul scrawled between the bedclothes!"
"You to call me censorious!" said Marcella, laughing, and pinching her friend's arm.
"My dear, as I have often before remarked to you, I am not a great lady, with a political campaign to tight. If you knew your business, you would make friends with the mammon of unrighteousness in the shape of Lady Tressadys. I may do what I please—I have only a husband to manage!" and Betty's light voice dropped into a sigh.
"Poor Betty!" said Marcella, patting her hand. "Is Frank as discontented as ever?"
"He told me yesterday he hated his existence, and thought he would try whether the Serpentine would drown him. I said I was agreeable, only he would never achieve it without me. I should have to 'tice away the police while he looked for the right spot. So he has promised to take me into partnership, and it's all right so far."
Then Betty fell to sighing in earnest.
"It's all very well 'chaffing,' but I am a miserable woman. Frank says I have ruined his life; that it's all my ambition; that he might have made a decent country gentleman if I hadn't sown the seed of every vice in him by driving him into politics. Pleasant, isn't it, for a model wife like me?"
"You'll have to let him give it up," said Marcella, smiling; "I don't believe he'll ever reconcile himself to the grind and the town life."
Betty clenched her small hands.
"My dear! I never promised to marry a sporting boor, and I can't yet make up my mind to sink to it. Don't let's talk of it! I only hope he'll vote straight in the next few months. But the thought of being kept through August drives him desperate already. Ah! here they are—plagues of the human race!—" and she waved an accusing hand towards the incoming stream of gentlemen. "Now, I'll prophesy, and you watch. Lady Tressady will make two friends here—Harding Watton—oh! I forgot, he's her cousin!—and Lord Cathedine. Mark my words. By the way—" Betty caught Marcella's arm and spoke eagerly into her friend's ear. Her eyes meanwhile glanced over her shoulder towards Lady Madeleine and her mother, who were seated on the further side of the room.
Marcella's look followed Betty's, but she showed no readiness to answer Betty's questions. When Letty had made her astonishing remarks on the subject of Madeleine Penley, Lady Maxwell had tried to stop her with a hauteur which would have abashed most women, though it had but small effect on the bride. And now, even to Betty, who was Madeleine Penley's friend, Marcella was not communicative; although when Betty was carried off by Lord Naseby who came in search of her as soon as he entered the drawing-room, the elder woman stood for a moment by the window, watching the girl they had been talking of with a soft serious look.
But the softness passed. A slight incident disturbed it. For the spectator saw Lady Kent, who was sitting beside her daughter, raise a gigantic fan and beckon to Lord Ancoats. He came unwillingly, and she made some bantering remark. Lady Madeleine meanwhile was bending over a book of photographs, with a flushed cheek and a look of constraint. Ancoats stood near her for a moment uneasily, frowning and pulling at his moustache. Then with an abrupt word to Lady Kent, he turned away and threw himself on a sofa beside Lord Cathedine. Lady Madeleine bent lower over her book, her beautiful hair making a spot of fire in the room. Marcella caught the expression of her profile, and her own face took a look of pain. She would have liked to go instantly to the girl's side, with some tenderness, some caress. But that gorgon Lady Kent, now looking extremely fierce, was in the way, and moreover other young men had arrived to take the place Ancoats had apparently refused.
Meanwhile Letty saw the arrival of the gentlemen with delight. She had found but small entertainment in the lady to whom Mrs. Allison had introduced her. Miss Paston, the sister of Lord Ancoats's agent, was a pleasant-looking spinster of thirty-five in a Quakerish dress of grey silk. Her face bore witness that she was capable and refined. But Letty felt no desire whatever to explore capability and refinement. She had not come to Castle Luton to make herself agreeable to Miss Paston.
So the conversation languished. Letty yawned a little, and flourished her fan a great deal, till the appearance of the men brought back the flush to her cheek and animation to her eye. She drew herself up at once, hungry for notice and success. Mrs. Hawkins, the vicar's wife at Malford, would have been avenged could she have watched her old tyrant under these chastening circumstances.
Harding Watton crossed the room when he saw his cousin, and took the corner of the sofa beside her. Letty received him graciously, though she was perhaps disappointed that it was not Lord Ancoats or Lord Cathedine. Looking round before she gave herself to conversation with him, she saw that George was standing near the open window with Lord Maxwell and Sir Philip Wentworth, the ex-Governor. They were talking of India, and Sir Philip had his hand on George's arm.
"Yes, I saw Dalliousie go," he said eagerly. "I was only a lad of twenty, but I can't think of it now without a lump in my throat. When he limped on to the Hooghly landing-stage on his crutches we couldn't cheer him—I shall never forget that sudden silence! In eight years he had made a new India, and there we saw him,—our little hero,—dying of his work at forty-six before our eyes! … Well, I couldn't have imagined that a young man like you would have known or cared so much about that time. What a talk we have had! Thank you!"
And the veteran tightened his grip cordially for a moment on Tressady's arm, then dropped it and walked away.
Tressady threw his wife a bright glance, as though to ask her how she fared. Letty smiled graciously in reply, feeling a sudden softening pleasure in being so thought of. As her eyes met her husband's she saw Marcella Maxwell, who was still standing by the window, turn towards George and call to him. George moved forward with alacrity. Then he and Lady Maxwell slowly walked down the steps to the garden, and disappeared through one of the archways to the left.
"That great lady and George seem at last to have made friends," said Harding Watton to Letty, in a laughing undertone. "I have no doubt she is trying to win him over. Well she may! Before the next few weeks are over the Government will be in a fix with this Bill; and not even their 'beautiful lady' will help them out. Maxwell looks as glum as an owl to-night."
Letty laughed. The situation pleased her vanity a good deal. The thought of Lady Maxwell humiliated and defeated—partly by George's means—was decidedly agreeable to her. Which would seem to show that she was, after all, more sensitive or more quick-eyed than Betty Leven had been ready to allow.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Marcella and George Tressady were strolling slowly towards the river, along a path that crossed the great lawns. In front of them the stretches of grass, bathed in silvery light and air, ran into far distances of shade under majestic trees just thickening to a June wealth of foliage. Below, these distant tree-masses made sharp capes and promontories on the white grass; above, their rounded tops rose dark against a blue, light-breathing sky. At one point the river pierced the blackness of the wood, and in the space thus made the spire of a noble church shot heavenward. Swans floated dimly along the stream and under the bridge. The air was fresh, but the rawness of spring was gone. It was the last week of May; the "high midsummer pomps" were near—a heavenly prophecy in wood and field.
And not even Tressady's prejudice—which, indeed, was already vanishing—could fail to see in the beautiful woman beside him the fitting voice and spirit of such a scene.
To-night he said to himself that one must needs believe her simple, in spite of report. During their companionship this evening she had shown him more and more plainly that she liked his society; her manner towards him, indeed, had by now a soft surrender and friendliness that no man could possibly have met with roughness, least of all a man young and ambitious. But at the same time he noticed again, as he had once noticed with anger, that she was curiously free from the usual feminine arts and wiles. After their long talk at dinner, indeed, he began, in spite of himself, to feel her not merely an intellectual comrade,—that he had been conscious of from the first,—but rather a most winning and attaching companion. It was a sentiment of friendly ease, that seemed to bring with it a great relief from tension. The sordid cares and frictions of the last few weeks, and the degrading memories of the day itself, alike ceased to wear him.
Yet all the time he said to himself, with inward amusement, that he must take care! They had not talked directly of the Bill at dinner, but they had talked round and about it incessantly. It was clear that the Maxwells were personally very anxious; and George knew well that the public position of the Ministry was daily becoming more difficult. There had been a marked cooling on the subject of the Bill among their own supporters; one or two London members originally pledged to it were even believed to be wavering; and this campaign lately started by Fontenoy and Watton against two of the leading clauses of the measure, in a London "daily," bought for the purpose, had been so far extremely damaging. The situation was threatening indeed, and Maxwell might well look harassed.
Yet Tressady had detected no bitterness in Lady Maxwell's mood. Her temper rather seemed to him very strenuous, very eager, and a little sad. Altogether, he had been touched, he knew not exactly why, by his conversation with her. "We are going to win," he said to himself, "and she knows it." Yet to think thus gave him, for the first time, no particular pleasure.
As they strolled along they talked a little of some of the topics that had been started at dinner, topics semi-political and semi-social, till suddenly Lady Maxwell said, with a change of voice:
"I heard some of your conversation with Sir Philip just now. How differently you talk when you talk of India!"
"I wonder what that means," said George, smiling. "It means, at any rate, that when I am not talking of India, but of English labour, or the poor, you think I talk like a brute."
"I shouldn't put it like that," she said quietly. "But when you talk of India, and people like the Lawrences or Lord Dalhousie, then it is that one sees what you really admire—what stirs you—what makes you feel."
"Well, ought I not to feel? Is there to be no gratitude towards the people that have made one's country?"
He looked down, upon her gaily, perfectly conscious of his own tickled vanity. To be observed and analysed by such a critic was in itself flattery.
"That have made one's country?" she repeated, not without a touch of irony. Then suddenly she became silent.
George thrust his hands into his pockets and waited a little.
"Well?" he said presently. "Well? I am waiting to hear you prove that the Dalhousies and the Lawrences have done nothing for the country, compared to—what shall we say?—some trade-union secretary whom you particularly admire."
She laughed, but he did not immediately draw his answer. They had reached the river-bank and the steps of the little bridge. Marcella mounted the bridge and paused midway across it, hanging over the parapet. He followed her, and both stood gazing at the house. It rose from the grass like some fabric of yellowish ivory cut and scrolled and fretted by its Tudor architect, who had been also a goldsmith. There were lights like jewels in its latticed windows; the dark fulness of the trees, disposed by an artist-hand, enwrapped or fell away from it as the eye required; and on the dazzling lawns, crossed by soft bands of shadow, scattered forms moved up and down—women in trailing dresses, and black-coated men. There were occasional sallies of talk and laughter, and from the open window of the drawing-room came the notes of a violin.
"Brahms!" said Marcella, with delight. "Nothing but music and he could express this night—or the river—or the rising glow and bloom of everything."
As she spoke George felt a quick gust of pleasure and romance sweep across him. It was as though senses that had been for long on the defensive, tired, or teased merely by the world, gave way in a moment to joy and poetry. He looked from the face beside him to the pictured scene in which they stood—the soft air filled his lungs—what ailed him?—he only knew that after many weeks he was, somehow, happy and buoyant again!
Lady Maxwell, however, soon forgot the music and the moonlight.
"That have made one's country?" she repeated, pausing on the words. "And of course that house appeals to you in the same way? Famous people have lived in it—people who belong to history. But for me, the real making of one's country is done out of sight, in garrets and workshops and coalpits, by people who die every minute—forgotten—swept into heaps like autumn leaves, their lives mere soil and foothold for the generation that comes after them. All yesterday morning, for instance, I spent trying to feed a woman I know. She is a shirtmaker; she has four children, and her husband is a docker out of work. She had sewed herself sick and blind. She couldn't eat, and she couldn't sleep. But she had kept the children alive—and the man. Her life will flicker out in a month or two; but the children's lives will have taken root, and the man will be eating and earning again. What use would your Dalhousies and Lawrences be to England without her and the hundreds of thousands like her?"
"And yet it is you," cried George, unable to forbear the chance she gave him, "who would take away from this very woman the power of feeding her children and saving her husband—who would spoil all the lives in the clumsy attempt to mend one of them. How can you quote me such an instance! It amazes me."
"Not at all. I have only to use my instance for another purpose, in another way. You are thinking of the Bill, of course? But all we do is to say to some of these victims, 'Your sacrifice, as it stands, is too costly; the State in its own interest cannot go on exacting or allowing it. We will help you to serve the community in ways that shall exhaust and wound it less.'"
"And as a first step, drive you all comfortably into the workhouse!" said
George. "Don't omit that."
"Many individuals must suffer," she said steadily. "But there will be friends to help—friends that will strain every nerve to help."
All her heart showed itself in voice and emphasis. Almost for the first time in their evening's talk her natural passionateness came to sight—the Southern, impulsive temper, that so often made people laugh at or dislike her. Under the lace shawl she had thrown round her on coming out he saw the quick rise and fall of the breast, the nervous clasp of the hands lying on the stonework of the bridge. These were her prophetess airs again. To-night they still amused him, but in a gentler and more friendly way.
"And so, according to your own account, you will protect your tailoress and unmake your country. I am sorry for your dilemma," he said, laughing.
"Ah! well,"—she shrugged her shoulders with a sigh,—"don't let's talk of it. It's all too pressing—and sore—and hot. And to think of the weeks that are just coming on!"
George, hanging over the parapet beside her, felt reply a little awkward, and said nothing. For a minute or two the night made itself heard, the gentle slipping of the river, the fitful breathings from the trees. A swan passed and repassed below them, and an owl called from the distant woods.
Presently Marcella lifted a white finger and pointed to the house.
"One wouldn't want a better parable," she said. "It's like the State as you see it—magnificent, inspiring, a thing of pomp and dignity. But we women, who have to drive and keep going a house like that—we know what it all rests upon. It rests upon a few tired kitchen-maids and boot-boys and scullery-girls, hurrying, panting creatures, whom a guest never sees, who really run it all. I know, for I have tried to unearth them, to organise them, to make sure that no one was fainting while we were feasting. But it is incredibly hard; half the human race believes itself born to make things easy for the other half. It comes natural to them to ache and toil while we sit in easy chairs. What they resent is that we should try to change it."
"Goodness!" said George, pulling at his moustaches. "I don't recognise my own experience of the ordinary domestic polity in that summary."
"I daresay. You have to do with the upper servant, who is always a greater tyrant than his master," she retorted, her voice expressing a curious medley of laughter and feeling. "I am speaking of the people that are not seen, like the tailoress and shirtmaker, in your drum-and-trumpet State."
"Well, you may be right," said George, drily. "But I confess—if I may be quite frank—that I don't altogether trust you to judge. I want at least, before I strike the balance between my Dalhousie and your tailoress, to hear what those people have to say who have not crippled their minds—by pity!"
"Pity!" she said, her lip trembling in spite of herself. "Pity!—you count pity a disease?"
"As you—and others—practise it," he replied coolly, turning round upon her. "It is no good; the world can't be run by pity. At least, living always seems to me a great brutal, rushing, rough-and-tumble business, which has to be carried on whether we like it or no. To be too careful, too gingerly over the separate life, brings it all to a standstill. Meddle too much, and the Demiurge who set the machine going turns sulky and stops working. Then the nation goes to pieces—till some strong ruffian without a scruple puts it together again."
"What do you mean by the Demiurge?"
He laughed.
"Why do you make me explain my flights? Well, I suppose, the natural daimonic power in things, which keeps them going and set them off; which is not us, or like us, and cares nothing for us."
His light voice developed a sudden energy during his little speech.
"Ah!" said Marcella, wistfully. "Yes, if one thought that, I could understand. But, even so, if the power behind things cares nothing for us, I should only regard it as challenging us to care more for each other. Do you mind my asking you a few plain questions? Do you know anything personally of the London poor? I mean, have you any real friends among them, whose lives you know?"
"Well, I sit with Fontenoy while he receives deputations from all those tailoresses and shirtmakers and fur-sewers that you want to put in order. The harassed widow streams through his room perpetually—wailing to be let alone!"
Marcella made a sound of amused scorn.
"Oh! you think that nothing," said George, indignant. "I vow I could draw every type of widow that London contains—I know them intimately."
She shook her head.
"I give up London. Then, in the North, aren't you a coal-owner? Do you know your miners?"
"Yes, and I detest them!" said George, shortly; "pig-headed brutes! They will be on strike next month, and I shall be defrauded of my lawful income till their lordships choose to go back. Pity me, if you please—not them!"
"So I do," she said with spirit—"if you hate the men by whom you live!"
There was silence. Then suddenly George said, in another tone:
"But sometimes, I don't deny, the beggars wring it out of one—your pity. I saw a mother last week—Suppose we stroll on a little. I want to see how the river gets out of the wood."
They descended the bridge, and turned again into the river-path. George told the story of Mary Batchelor in his half-ironic way, yet so that here and there Marcella shivered. Then gradually, as though it were a relief to him to talk, he slipped into a half-humorous, half-serious discussion of his mine-owner's position and its difficulties. Incidentally and unconsciously a good deal of his history betrayed itself in his talk: his bringing-up, his mother; the various problems started in his mind since his return from India; even his relations to his wife. Once or twice it flashed across him that he was confessing himself with an extraordinary frankness to a woman he had made up his mind to dislike. But the reflection did not stop him. The balmy night, the solitude, this loveliness that walked beside him so willingly and kindly—with every step they struck his defences from him; they drew; they penetrated.
With her, too, everything was simple and natural. She had felt his attraction at their first meeting; she had determined to make a friend of him; and she was succeeding. As he disclosed himself she felt a strange compassion for him. It was plain to her woman's instinct that he was at heart lonely and uncompanioned. Well, what wonder with that hard, mean little being for a wife! Had she captured him, or had he thrown himself away upon her in mere wantonness, out of that defiance of sentiment which appeared to be his favourite parti-pris? In any case, it seemed to this happy wife that he had done the one fatal and irreparable thing; and she was genuinely sorry for him. She felt him very young, too. As far as she could gather, he was about two years her junior; but her feeling made the gap much greater.
Yet, of course, the situation,—Maxwell, Fontenoy,—all that those names implied to him and her, made a thrilling under-note in both their minds. She never forgot her husband and his straits; and in George's mind Fontenoy's rugged figure stood sentinel. Given the circumstances, both her temperament and her affections drove her inevitably into trying, first to attract, then to move and influence her companion. And given the circumstances, he could but yield himself bit by bit to her woman's charm; while full all the time of a confident scorn for her politics.
Insensibly, the stress upon them drew them back to London and to current affairs, and at last she said to him, with vehemence:
"You must see these people in the flesh—and not in your house, but in theirs. Or, first come and meet them in mine?"
"Why, please, should you think St. James's Square a palace of truth compared to Carlton House Terrace?" he asked her, with amusement. Fontenoy lived in Carlton House Terrace.
"I am not inviting you to St. James's Square," she said quietly. "That house is only my home for one set of purposes. Just now my true home is not there at all. It is in the Mile End Road."
George asked to be informed, and opened his eyes at her account of the way in which she still divided her time between the West End and the East, spending always one or two nights a week among the trades and the work-people she had come to know so intimately, whose cause she was fighting with such persistence.
"Maxwell doesn't come now," she said. "He is too busy, and his work there is done. But I go because I love the people, and to talk with them and live with them part of every week keeps one's mind clear as to what one wants, and why. Well,"—her voice showed that she smiled,—"will you come? My old maid shall give you coffee, and you shall meet a roomful of tailors and shirtmakers. You shall see what people look like in the flesh—not on paper—after working fourteen hours at a stretch, in a room where you and I could not breathe!"
"Charming!"—he bowed ironically. "Of course I will come."
They had paused under the shadow of a grove of beech-trees, and were looking back towards the moonlit garden and the house. Suddenly George said, in an odd voice:
"Do you mind my saying it? You know, nobody is ever converted—politically—nowadays."
In the darkness her flush could not be seen. But he felt the mingled pride and soreness in her voice, under its forced brightness.
"I know. How long is it since a speech turned a vote in the House of Commons! One wonders why people take the trouble to speak. Shall we go back? Ah! there is someone pursuing us—my husband and Ancoats!"
And two figures, dark for an instant against the brightness of the lawns, plunged into the shadow of the wood.
"You wanderers!" said Maxwell, as he distinguished his wife's white dress. "Is this path quite safe in this darkness? Suppose we get out of it."
The river, indeed, beneath a steep bank, ran close beside them, and the trees meeting overhead all but shut out the moon. Maxwell, in some anxiety, caught his wife's arm, and made her pause till his eye should be once more certain of the path. Meanwhile Ancoats and Tressady walked quickly back to the lawn, Ancoats talking and laughing with unusual vigour.
* * * * *
The Maxwells did not hurry themselves. As they emerged from the wood Marcella slipped her hand into her husband's. It was her characteristic caress. The slim, strong hand loved to feel itself in the shelter of his; while to him that seeking touch was the symbol of all that she brought him—the inventive, inexhaustible arts of a passion which was a kind of genius.