"Come along!" said George, impatiently, hurrying his charge into the four-wheeler the other policeman had just stopped for them.
In a few more seconds he, the girl, and the policeman were pursuing Lady Maxwell's hansom at the best speed of an indifferent horse. George tried to say a few consoling things to his neighbour; and the girl, reassured by his kind manner, found her tongue, and began to chatter in a tearful voice about the how and when of the accident: about the elder sister in a lodging in Crawford Street, Tottenham Court Road, whom she and the little one had been visiting; the grandmother in Westminster with whom they lived; poor Lizzie's place in a laundry, which now she must lose; how the lady had begged handkerchiefs and umbrellas from the crowd to tie up Lizzie's leg with—and so on through a number of other details incoherent or plaintive.
George heard her absently. His mind all the time was absorbed in the dramatic or ironic aspects of what he had just seen. For dramatic they were—though perhaps a little cheap. Could he, could anyone, have made acquaintance with this particular woman in more characteristic fashion? He laughed to think how he would tell the story to Fontenoy. The beautiful creature in her diamonds, kneeling on her satin dress in the mud, to bind up a little laundrymaid's leg—it was so extravagantly in keeping with Marcella Maxwell that it amused one like an overdone coincidence in a clumsy play.
What made her so beautiful? The face had marked defects; but in colour, expression, subtlety of line incomparable! On the other hand, the manner—no!—he shrugged his shoulders. The remembrance of its mannish—or should it be, rather, boyish?—energy and assurance somehow set him on edge.
In the end, they were not much behind the hansom; for the hospital porter was only just in the act of taking the injured child from Lady Maxwell as Tressady dismounted and went forward again to see what he could do.
But, somewhat to his chagrin, he was not wanted. Lady Maxwell and the porter did everything. As they went into the hospital, George caught a few of the things she was saying to the porter as she supported the child's leg. She spoke in a rapid, professional way, and the man answered, as the policeman had done, with a deference and understanding which were clearly not due only to her "grand air" and her evening dress. George was puzzled.
He and the elder sister followed her into the waiting-room. The house-surgeon and a nurse were summoned, and the injured leg was put into a splint there and then. The patient moaned and cried most of the time, and Tressady had hard work to keep the sister quiet. Then nurse and doctor lifted the child.
"They are going to put her to bed," said Lady Maxwell, turning to George. "I am going up with them. Would you kindly wait? The sister"—she dropped her business tone, and, smiling, touched the elder girl on the arm—"can come up when the little one is undressed."
The little procession swept away, and George was left with his charge. As soon as the small sister was out of sight, the elder one began to chatter again out of sheer excitement, crying at intervals. George did not heed her much. He walked up and down, with his hands in his pockets, conscious of a curious irritability. He did not think a woman should take a strange man's service quite so coolly.
At the end of another quarter of an hour a nurse appeared to summon the sister. Tressady was told he might come too if he would, and his charge threw him a quick, timid look, as though asking him not to desert her in this unknown and formidable place. So they followed the nurse up white stone stairs, and through half-lit corridors, where all was silent, save that once a sound of delirious shrieking and talking reached them through a closed door, and made the sister's consumptive little face turn whiter still.
At last the nurse, putting her finger on her lip, turned a handle, and
George was conscious of a sudden feeling of pleasure.
They were standing on the threshold of a children's ward. On either hand was a range of beds, bluish-white between the yellow picture-covered walls and the middle-way of spotless floor. Far away, at the other end, a great fire glowed. On a bare table in the centre, laden with bottles and various surgical necessaries, stood a shaded lamp, and beside it the chair where the night-nurse had been sitting. In the beds were sleeping children of various ages, some burrowing, face downward, animal-like, into their pillows; others lying on their backs, painfully straight and still. The air was warm, yet light, and there was the inevitable smell of antiseptics. Something in the fire-lit space and comfort of the great room, its ordered lines and colours, the gentleness of the shaded light as contrasted with the dim figures in the beds, seemed to make a poem of it—a poem of human tenderness.
Two or three beds away to the right, Lady Maxwell was standing with the night-nurse of the ward. The little girl had been undressed, and was lying quiet, with a drawn, piteous face that turned eagerly as her sister came in. The whole scene was new and touching to Tressady. Yet, after the first impression, his attention was perforce held by Lady Maxwell, and he saw the rest only in relation to her. She had slipped off her heavy cloak, in order, perhaps, that she might help in the undressing of the child. Beneath, she wore a little shawl or cape of some delicate lace over her low dress. The dress itself was of a pale shade of green; the mire and mud with which it was bedabbled no longer showed in the half light; and the satin folds glistened dimly as she moved. The poetic dignity of the head, so finely wreathed with its black hair, of the full throat and falling shoulders, received a sort of special emphasis from the wide spaces, the pale colours and level lines of the ward. Tressady was conscious again of the dramatic significant note as he watched her, yet without any softening of his nascent feeling of antagonism.
She turned and beckoned to the sister as they entered:
"Come and see how comfortable she is! And then you must give this lady your name and address."
The girl timidly approached. Whilst she was occupied with her sister and with the nurse, Lady Maxwell suddenly looked round, and saw Tressady standing by the table a yard or two from her.
A momentary expression of astonishment crossed her face. He saw that, in her absorption with the case and the two sisters, she had clean forgotten all about him. But in a flash she remembered, and smiled.
"So you are really going to take her home? That is very kind of you. It will make all the difference to the grandmother that somebody should go and explain. You see, they leave her in the splint for the night, and to-morrow they will put the leg in plaster. Probably they won't keep her in hospital more than about three weeks, for they are very full."
"You seem to know all about it!"
"I was a nurse myself once, for a time," she said, but with a certain stiffness which seemed to mark the transition from the professional to the great lady.
"Ah! I should have remembered that. I had heard it from Edward Watton."
She looked up quickly. He felt that for the first time she took notice of him as an individual.
"You know Mr. Watton? I think you are Sir George Tressady, are you not? You got in for Market Malford in November? I recollect. I didn't like your speeches."
She laughed. So did he.
"Yes, I got in just in time for a fighting session."
Her laugh disappeared.
"An odious fight!" she said gravely.
"I am not so sure. That depends on whether you like fighting, and how certain you are of your cause!"
She hesitated a moment; then she said:
"How can Lord Fontenoy be certain of his cause!"
The slight note of scorn roused him.
"Isn't that what all parties say of their opponents?"
She glanced at him again, curiously. He was evidently quite young—younger than herself, she guessed. But his careless ease and experience of bearing, contrasted with his thin boy's figure, attracted her. Her lip softened reluctantly into a smile.
"Perhaps," she said. "Only sometimes, you know, it must be true! Well, evidently we can't discuss it here at one o'clock in the morning—and there is the nurse making signs to me. It is really very good of you. If you are in our neighbourhood on Sunday, will you report?"
"Certainly—with the greatest pleasure. I will come and give you a full account of my mission."
She held out a slim hand. The sister, red-eyed with crying, was handed over to him, and he and she were soon in a cab, speeding towards the Westminster mews whither she directed him.
Well, was Maxwell to be so greatly envied? Tressady was not sure. Such a woman, he thought, for all her beauty, would not have greatly stirred his own pulses.
CHAPTER V
The week which had opened thus for Tressady promised to be one of lively interest for such persons as were either concerned in or took notice of the House of Commons and its doings. Fontenoy's onslaught upon the administration of the Home Office, and, through the Home Secretary, on the Maxwell group and influence, had been long expected, and was known to have been ably prepared. Its possible results were already keenly discussed. Even if it were a damaging attack, it was not supposed that it could have any immediate effect on the state of parties or the strength of the Government. But after Easter Maxwell's factory Bill—a special Factory Act for East London, touching the grown man for the first time, and absolutely prohibiting home-work in certain specified industries—was to be brought forward, and could not fail to provide Maxwell's adversaries with many chances of red and glorious battle. It was disputable from end to end; it had already broken up one Government; it was strongly pressed and fiercely opposed; and on the fate of each clause in Committee might hang the life or death of the Ministry—not so much because of the intrinsic importance of the matter, as because Maxwell was indispensable to the Cabinet, and it was known that neither Maxwell nor his close friend and henchman, Dowson, the Home Secretary, would accept defeat on any of the really vital points of the Bill.
The general situation was a curious one. Some two years before this time a strong and long-lived Tory Government had come to an end. Since then all had been confusion in English politics. A weak Liberal Government, undermined by Socialist rebellion, had lasted but a short time, to be followed by an equally precarious Tory Ministry, in which Lord Maxwell—after an absence from politics of some four years or so—returned to his party, only to break it up. For he succeeded in imposing upon them a measure in which his own deepest convictions and feelings were concerned, and which had behind it the support of all the more important trade unions. Upon that measure the Ministry fell; but during their short administration Maxwell had made so great an impression upon his own side that when they returned, as they did return, with an enlarged majority, the Maxwell Bill retained one of the foremost places in their programme, and might be said, indeed, at the present moment to hold the centre of the political field.
That field, in the eyes of any middle-aged observer, was in strange disarray. The old Liberal party had been almost swept away; only a few waifs and strays remained, the exponents of a programme that nobody wanted, and of cries that stirred nobody's blood. A large Independent Labour and Socialist party filled the empty benches of the Liberals—a revolutionary, enthusiastic crew, of whom the country was a little frightened, and who were, if the truth were known, a little frightened at themselves. They had a coherent programme, and represented a formidable "domination" in English life. And that English life itself, in all that concerned the advance and transformation of labour, was in a singularly tossed and troubled state. After a long period of stagnation and comparative industrial peace, storms at home, answering to storms on the Continent, had been let loose, and forces both of reaction and of revolution were making themselves felt in new forms and under the command of new masters.
At the head of the party of reaction stood Fontenoy. Some four years before the present session the circumstances of a great strike in the Midlands—together, no doubt, with some other influence—had first drawn him into public life, had cut him off from racing and all his natural pleasures. The strike affected his father's vast domain in North Mercia; it was marked by an unusual violence on the part of the men and their leaders; and Fontenoy, driven, sorely against his will, to take a part by the fact that his father, the hard and competent administrator of an enormous fortune, happened at the moment to be struck down by illness, found himself before many weeks were over taking it with passion, and emerged from the struggle a changed man. Property must be upheld; low-born disorder and greed must be put down. He sold his race-horses, and proceeded forthwith to throw into the formation of a new party all the doggedness, the astuteness, and the audacity he had been accustomed to lavish upon the intrigues and the triumphs of the Turf.
And now in this new Parliament his immense labour was beginning to tell. The men who followed him had grown in number and improved in quality. They abhorred equally a temporising conservatism and a plundering democracy. They stood frankly for birth and wealth, the Church and the expert. They were the apostles of resistance and negation; they were sworn to oppose any further meddling with trade and the personal liberty of master and workman, and to undo, if they could, some of the meddling that had been already carried through. A certain academic quality prevailed among them, which made them peculiarly sensitive to the absurdities of men who had not been to Oxford or Cambridge; while some, like Tressady, had been travellers, and wore an Imperialist heart upon their sleeve. The group possessed an unusual share of debating and oratorical ability, and they had never attracted so much attention as now that they were about to make the Maxwell Bill their prey.
Meanwhile, for the initiated, the situation possessed one or two points of special interest. Lady Maxwell, indeed, was by this time scarcely less of a political force than her husband. Was her position an illustration of some new power in women's hands, or was it merely an example of something as well known to the Pharaohs as to the nineteenth century—the ability of any woman with a certain physique to get her way? That this particular woman's way happened to be also her husband's way made the case less interesting for some observers. On the other hand, her obvious wifely devotion attracted simple souls to whom the meddling of women in politics would have been nothing but repellent had it not been recommended to them by the facts that Marcella Maxwell was held to be good as well as beautiful; that she loved her husband; and was the excellent mother of a fine son.
Of her devotion, in the case of this particular Bill, there was neither concealment nor doubt. She was known to have given her husband every assistance in the final drafting of the measure: she had seen for herself the working of every trade that it affected; she had innumerable friends among wage-earners of all sorts, to whom she gave half her social life; and both among them and in the drawing-rooms of the rich she fought her husband's cause unceasingly, by the help of beauty, wits, and something else—a broad impulsiveness and charm—which might be vilified or scorned, but could hardly be matched, by the enemy.
Meanwhile Lord Maxwell was a comparatively ineffective speaker, and passed in social life for a reserved and difficult personality. His friends put no one else beside him; and his colleagues in the Cabinet were well aware that he represented the keystone in their arch. But the man in the street, whether of the aristocratic or plebeian sort, knew comparatively little about him. All of which, combined with the special knowledge of an inner circle, helped still more to concentrate public attention on the convictions, the temperament, and the beauty of his wife.
Amid a situation charged with these personal or dramatic elements the
Friday so keenly awaited by Fontenoy and his party arrived.
Immediately after question-time Fontenoy made his speech. In reply, the Home Secretary, suave, statistical, and conciliatory, poured a stream of facts and reports upon the House. The more repulsive they were, the softer and more mincing grew his voice in dealing with them. Fontenoy had excited his audience, Dowson succeeded in making it shudder. Nevertheless, the effect of the evening lay with Fontenoy.
George stayed to hear the official defence to its end. Then he hurried upstairs in search of Letty, who, with Miss Tulloch, was in the Speaker's private gallery. As he went he thought of Fontenoy's speech, its halting opening, the savage force of its peroration. His pulses tingled: "Magnificent!" he said to himself; "magnificent! We have found a man!"
Letty was eagerly waiting for him, and they walked down the corridor together. "Well?" he said, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets, and looking down upon her with a smile. "Well?"
Letty saw that she was expected to praise, and she did her best, his smile still bent upon her. He was perfectly aware all the time of the fatuity of what she was saying. She had caught up since her engagement a certain number of political phrases, and it amused him to note the cheap and tinkling use she made of them. Nevertheless she was chatting, smiling, gesticulating, for his pleasure. She was posing for him, using her grey eyes in these expressive ways, all for him. He thought her the most entertaining plaything; though it did occur to him sometimes that when they were married he would give her instruction.
"Ah, well, you liked it—that's good!" he said at last, interrupting her. "We've begun well, any way. It'll be rather hard, though, to have to speak after that on Monday!"
"As if you need be afraid! You're not, you know—it's only mock modesty.
Do you know that Lady Maxwell was sitting two from me?"
"No! Well, how did she like Fontenoy?"
"She never moved after he got up. She pressed her face against that horrid grating, and stared at him all the time. I thought she was very flushed—but that may have been the heat—and in a very bad temper," added Letty, maliciously. "I talked to her a little about your adventure."
"Did she remember my existence?"
"Oh dear, yes! She said she expected you on Sunday. She never asked me to come." Letty looked arch. "But then one doesn't expect her to have pretty manners. People say she is shy. But, of course, that is only your friends' way of saying that you're rude."
"She wasn't rude to you?" said George, outwardly eager, inwardly sceptical. "Shall I not go on Sunday?"
"But of course you must go. We shall have to know them. She's not a woman's woman—that's all. Now, are we going to get some dinner, for Tully and I are famishing?"
"Come along, then, and I'll collect the party."
George had asked a few of his acquaintance in the House to meet his betrothed, together with an old General Tressady and his wife who were his distant cousins. The party were to assemble in the room of an under-secretary much given to such hospitable functions; and thither accordingly George led the way.
The room, when they reached it, was already fairly full of people, and alive with talk.
"Another party!" said George, looking round him. "Benson is great at this sort of thing."
"Do you see Lady Maxwell?" said Letty, in his ear.
George looked to his right, and perceived the lady in question. She also recognised him at once, and bowed, but without rising. She was the centre of a group of people, who were gathered round her and the small table on which she was leaning, and they were so deeply absorbed in the conversation that had been going on that they hardly noticed the entrance of Tressady and his companion.
"Leven has a party, you see," said the under-secretary. "Blaythwaite was to have taken them in—couldn't at the last moment; so they had to come in here. This is your side of the room! But none of your guests have come yet. Dinner at the House in the winter is a poor sort of business, Miss Sewell. We want the Terrace for these occasions."
He led the young girl to a sofa at the further end of the room, and made himself agreeable, to him the easiest process in the world. He was a fashionable and charming person, in the most irreproachable of frock-coats, and Letty was soon at her ease with him, and mistress of all her usual arts and graces.
"You know Lady Maxwell?" he said to her, with a slight motion of the head towards the distant group.
Letty replied; and while she and her companion chattered, George, who was standing behind them, watched the other party.
They were apparently in the thick of an argument, and Lady Maxwell, whose hands were lightly clasped on the table in front of her, was leaning forward with the look of one who had just shot her bolt, and was waiting to see how it would strike.
It struck apparently in the direction of her vis-à-vis, Sir Frank Leven, for he bent over to her, making a quick reply in a half-petulant boy's voice. He had been three years in the House, but had still the air of an Eton "swell" in his last half.
Lady Maxwell listened to what he had to say, a sort of silent passion in her face all the time—a noble passion nobly restrained.
When he stopped, George caught her reply.
"He has neither seen nor felt—every sentence showed it—that is all one can say. How can one take his judgment?"
George's mouth twitched. He slipped, smiling, into a place beside Letty.
"Did you hear that?" he inquired.
"Fontenoy's speech, of course," said the under-secretary, looking round. "She's pitching into Leven, I suppose. He's as cranky and unsound as he can be. Shouldn't wonder if you got him before long."
He nodded good-temperedly to Tressady, then got up to speak to a man on the edge of the further group.
"How amusing!" said George, his satirical eyes still watching Lady Maxwell. "How much that set has 'seen and felt' of sweaters, and white-lead workers, and that ilk! Don't they look like it?"
"Who are they?"
Letty was now using all her eyes to find out, and especially for the purpose of carrying away a mental photograph of Lady Maxwell's black hat and dress.
"Oh! the Maxwells' particular friends in the House—most of them as well provided with family and goods as they make 'em: a philanthropic, idealist lot, that yearns for the people, and will be the first to be kicked downstairs when the people gets its own. However, they aren't all quite happy in their minds. Frank Leven there, as Benson says, is decidedly shaky. He is the member for the Maxwells' division—Maxwell, of course, put him in. He has a house there, I believe, and he married Lady Maxwell's great friend, Miss Macdonald—an ambitious little party, they say, who simply insisted on his going into Parliament. Oh, then, Bennett is there—do you see?—the little dark man with a frock-coat and spectacles? He's Lady Maxwell's link with the Independents—oldest workman member—been in the House a long time, so that by now he isn't quite as one-eyed and one-eared as the rest of them. I suppose she hopes to make use of him at critical moments—she takes care to have tools of all sorts. Gracious—listen!"
There was, indeed, a very storm of discussion sweeping through the rival party. Lady Maxwell's penetrating but not loud voice seemed to pervade it, and her eyes and face, as she glanced from one speaker to another, drew alternately the shafts and the sympathy of the rest.
Tressady made a face.
"I say, Letty, promise me one thing!" His hand stole towards hers. Tully discreetly looked the other way. "Promise me not to be a political woman, there's a dear!"
Letty hastily withdrew her fingers, having no mind at all for caresses in public.
"But I must be a political woman—I shall have to be! I know heaps of girls and married women who get up everything in the papers—all the stupidest things—not because they know anything about it, or because they care a rap, but because some of their men friends happen to be members; and when they come to see you, you must know what to talk to them about."
"Must you?" said George, "How odd! As though one went to tea with a woman for the sake of talking about the very same things you have been doing all day, and are probably sick to death of already."
"Never mind," said Letty, with her little air of sharp wisdom. "I know they do it, and I shall have to do it too. I shall pick it up."
"Will you? Of course you will! Only, when I've got a big Bill on, let me do a little of it for myself—give me some of the credit!"
Letty laughed maliciously.
"I don't know why you've taken such a dislike to her," she said, but in rather a contented tone, as her eye once more travelled across to Lady Maxwell. "Does she trample on her husband, after all?"
Tressady gave an impatient shrug.
"Trample on him? Goodness, no! That's all part of the play, too—wifely affection and the rest of it. Why can't she keep out of sight a little? We don't want the women meddling."
"Thank you, my domestic tyrant!" said Letty, making him a little bow.
"How much tyranny will you want before you accept those sentiments?" he asked her, smiling tenderly into her eyes. Both had a moment's pleasant thrill; then George sprang up.
"Ah, here they are at last!—the General, and all the lot. Now, I hope, we shall get some dinner."
Tressady had, of course, to introduce his elderly cousins and his three or four political friends to his future wife; and, amid the small flutter of the performance, the break-up and disappearance of the rival party passed unnoticed. When Tressady's guests entered the dining-room which looks on the terrace, and made their way to the top table reserved for them, the Leven dinner, near the door, was already half through.
George's little banquet passed merrily enough. The grey-haired General and his wife turned out to be agreeable and well-bred people, quite able to repay George's hospitality by the dropping of little compliments on the subject of Letty into his half-yielded ear. For his way of taking such things was always a trifle cynical. He believed that people say habitually twice what they mean, whether in praise or blame; and he did not feel that his own view of Letty was much affected by what other people thought of her.
So, at least, he would have said. In reality, he got a good deal of pleasure out of his fiancée's success. Letty, indeed, was enjoying herself greatly. This political world, as she had expected, satisfied her instinct for social importance better than any world she had yet known. She was determined to get on in it; nor, apparently, was there likely to be any difficulty in the matter. George's friends thought her a pretty, lively creature, and showed the usual inclination of the male sex to linger in her society. She mostly wanted to be informed as to the House and its ways. It was all so new to her!—she said. But her ignorance was not insipid; her questions had flavour. There was much talk and laughter; Letty felt herself the mistress of the table, and her social ambitions swelled within her.
Suddenly George's attention was recalled to the Maxwell table by the break-up of the group around it. He saw Lady Maxwell rise and look round her as though in search of someone. Her eyes fell upon him, and he involuntarily rose at the same instant to meet the step she made towards him.
"I must say another word of thanks to you"—she held out her hand. "That girl and her grandmother were most grateful to you."
"Ah, well!—I must come and make my report. Sunday, I think you said?"
She assented. Then her expression altered:
"When do you speak?"
The question fell out abruptly, and took George by surprise.
"I? On Monday, I believe, if I get my turn. But I fear the British Empire will go on if I don't!"
She threw a glance of scrutiny at his thin, whimsical face, with its fair moustache and sunburnt skin.
"I hear you are a good speaker," she said simply. "And you are entirely with Lord Fontenoy?"
He bowed lightly, his hands on his sides.
"You'll agree our case was well put? The worst of it—"
Then he stopped. He saw that Lady Maxwell had ceased to listen to him. She turned her head towards the door, and, without even saying good-bye to him, she hurried away from him towards the further end of the room.
"Maxwell, I see!" said Tressady to himself, with a shrug, as he returned to his seat. "Not flattering—but rather pretty, all the same!"
He was thinking of the quick change that had remade the face while he was talking to her—a change as lovely as it was unconscious.
Lord Maxwell, indeed, had just entered the dining-room in search of his wife, and he and she now left it together, while the rest of the Leven party gradually dispersed. Letty also announced that she must go home.
"Let me just go back into the House and see what is going on," said
George. "Ten to one I sha'n't be wanted, and I could see you home."
He hurried off, only to return in a minute with the news that the debate was given up to a succession of superfluous people, and he was free, at any rate for an hour. Letty, Miss Tulloch, and he accordingly made their way to Palace Yard. A bright moon shone in their faces as they emerged into the open air, which was still mild and spring-like, as it had been all the week.
"I say—send Miss Tulloch home in a cab!" George pleaded in Letty's ear, "and walk with me a bit. Come and look at the moon over the river. I will bring you back to the bridge and put you in a cab."
Letty looked astonished and demure. "Aunt Charlotte would be shocked," she said.
George grew impatient, and Letty, pleased with his impatience, at last yielded. Tully, the most complaisant of chaperons, was put into a hansom and despatched.
As the pair reached the entrance of Palace Yard they were overtaken by a brougham, which drew up an instant in the gateway itself, till it should find an opening in the traffic outside.
"Look!" said George, pressing Letty's arm.
She looked round hurriedly, and, as the lamps of the gateway shone into the carriage, she caught a vivid glimpse of the people inside it. Their faces were turned towards each other as though in intimate conversation—that was all. The lady's hands were crossed on her knee; the man held a despatch-box. In a minute they were gone; but both Letty and George were left with the same impression—the sense of something exquisite surprised. It had already visited George that evening, only a few minutes earlier, in connection with the same woman's face.
Letty laughed, rather consciously.
George looked down upon her as he guided her through the gate.
"Some people seem to find it pleasant to be together!" he said, with a vibration in his voice. "But why did we look?" he added, discontentedly.
"How could we help it, you silly boy?"
They walked to wards the bridge and down the steps, happy in each other, and freshened by the night breeze. Over the river the moon, hung full and white, and beneath it everything—the silver tracks on the water, the blaze of light at Charing Cross Station, the lamps on Westminster Bridge and in the passing steamers, a train of barges, even the darkness of the Surrey shore—had a gentle and poetic air. The vast city had, as it were, veiled her greatness and her tragedy; she offered herself kindly and protectingly to these two—to their happiness and their youth.
George made his companion wait beside the parapet and look, while he himself drew in the air with a sort of hunger.
"To think of the hours we spend in this climate," he said, "caged up in abominable places like the House of Commons!"
The traveller's distaste for the monotony of town and indoor life spoke in his vehemence. Letty raised her eyebrows.
"I am very glad of my furs, thank you! You seem to forget that it is
February."
"Never mind!—since Monday it has had the feel of April. Did you see my mother to-day?"
"Yes. She caught me just after luncheon, and we talked for an hour."
"Poor darling! I ought to have been there to protect you. But she vowed she would have her say about that house."
He looked down upon her, trying to see her expression in the shifting light. He had gone through a disagreeable little scene with his mother at breakfast. She had actually lectured him on the rashness of taking the Brook Street house!—he understanding the whole time that what the odd performance really meant was, that if he took it he would have a smaller margin of income wherefrom to supplement her allowance.
"Oh, it was all right!" said Letty, composedly. "She declared we should get into difficulties at once, that I could have no idea of the value of money, that you always had been extravagant, that everybody would be astonished at our doing such a thing, etcetera, etcetera. I think—you don't mind?—I think she cried a little. But she wasn't really very unhappy."
"What did you say?"
"Well, I suggested that when we were married, we and she should both set up account-books; and I promised faithfully that if she would let us see hers, we would let her see ours."
George threw back his head with a gurgle of laughter.
"Well?"
"She was afraid," said Letty, demurely, "that I didn't take things seriously enough. Then I asked her to come and see my gowns."
"And that, I suppose, appeased her?"
"Not at all. She turned up her nose at everything, by way of punishing me. You see, she had on a new-Worth—the third since Christmas. My poor little trousseau rags had no chance."
"H'm!" said George, meditatively. "I wonder how my mamma is going to manage when we are married," he added, after a pause.
Letty made no reply. She was walking firmly and briskly; her eyes, full of a sparkling decision, looked straight before her; her little mouth was close set. Meanwhile through George's mind there passed a number of fragmentary answers to his own question. His feeling towards his mother was wholly abnormal; he had no sense of any unseemliness in the conversation about her which was gradually growing common between himself and Letty; and he meant to draw strict lines in the future. At the same time, there was the tie of old habit, and of that uneasy and unwelcome responsibility with regard to her which had descended upon him at the time of his father's death. He could not honestly regard himself as an affectionate son; but the filial relationship, even in its most imperfect aspect, has a way of imposing itself.
"Ah, well! I daresay we shall pull through," he said, dismissing the familiar worry with a long breath. "Why, how far we have come!" he added, looking back at Charing Cross and the Westminster towers. "And how extraordinarily mild it is! We can't turn back yet, and you'll be tired if I race you on in this way. Look, Letty, there's a seat! Would you be afraid—just five minutes?"
Letty looked doubtful.
"It's so absurdly late. George, you are funny! Suppose somebody came by who knew us?"
He opened his eyes.
"And why not? But see! there isn't a carriage, and hardly a person, in sight. Just a minute!"
Most unwillingly Letty let herself be persuaded. It seemed to her a foolish and extravagant thing to do; and there was now no need for either folly or extravagance. Since her engagement she had dropped a good many of the small audacities of the social sort she had so freely allowed herself before it. It was as though, indeed, now that these audacities had served their purpose, some stronger and perhaps inherited instincts emerged in her, obscuring the earlier self. George was sometimes astonished by an ultra-conventional note, of which certainly he had heard nothing in their first days of intimacy at Malford.
However, she sat down beside him, protesting. But he had no sooner stolen her hand, than the moonlight showed her a dark, absent look creeping over his face. And to her amazement he began to talk about the House of Commons, about the Home Secretary's speech, of all things in the world! He seemed to be harking back to Mr. Dowson's arguments, to some of the stories the Home Secretary had told of those wretched people who apparently enjoy dying of overwork and phosphorus, and white-lead, who positively will die of them, unless the inspectors are always harrying them. He still held her hand, but she saw he was not thinking of her; and a sudden pique rose in her small mind. Generally, she accepted his love-making very coolly—just as it came, or did not come. But to-night she asked herself with irritation—for what had he led her into his silly escapade, but to make love to her? And now here were her fingers slipping out of his, while he harangued her on things she knew and cared nothing about, in a voice and manner he might have addressed to anybody!
"Well, I don't understand—I really don't!" she interrupted sharply. "I thought you were all against the Government—I thought you didn't believe a word they say!"
He laughed.
"The difference between them and us, darling, is only that they think the world can be mended by Act of Parliament, and we think it can't. Do what you will, we say the world is, and must be, a wretched hole for the majority of those that live in it; they suppose they can cure it by quack meddlings and tyrannies."
He looked straight before him, absorbed, and she was struck with the harsh melancholy of his face.
What on earth had he kept her here for to talk this kind of talk!
"George, I really must go!" she began, flushing, and drawing her hand away.
Instantly he turned to her, his look brightening and melting.
"Must you? Well, the world sha'n't be a wretched hole for us, shall it, darling? We'll make a little nest in it—we'll forget what we can't help—we'll be happy as long as the fates let us—won't we, Letty?"
His arm slipped round behind her. He caught her hands.
He had recollected himself. Nevertheless Letty was keenly conscious that it was all most absurd, this sitting on a seat in a public thoroughfare late at night, and behaving like any 'Arry and 'Arriet.
"Why, of course we shall be happy," she said, rising with decision as she spoke; "only somehow I don't always understand you, George. I wish I knew what you were really thinking about."
"You!" he said, laughing, and drawing her hand within his arm, as they turned backwards towards the bridge.
She shook her head doubtfully. Whereupon he awoke fully to the situation, and during the short remainder of their walk he wooed and flattered her as usual. But when he had put her safely into a hansom at the corner of the bridge, and smiled good-bye to her, he turned to walk back to the House in much sudden flatness of mood. Her little restless egotisms of mind and manner had chilled him unawares. Had Fontenoy's speech been so fine, after all? Were politics—was anything—quite worth while? It seemed to him that all emotions were small, all crises disappointing.
CHAPTER VI
The following Sunday, somewhere towards five o'clock, George rang the bell of the Maxwells' house in St. James's Square. It was a very fine house, and George's eye, as he stood waiting, ran over the facade with an amused, investigating look.
He allowed himself the same expression once or twice in the hall, as one mute and splendid person relieved him of his coat, and another, equally mute and equally unsurpassable, waited for him on the stairs, while across a passage beyond the hall he saw two red-liveried footmen carrying tea.
"When one is a friend of the people," he pondered as he went upstairs, "is one limited in horses but not in flunkeys? These things are obscure."
He was ushered first into a stately outer drawing-room, filled with old French furniture and fine pictures; then the butler lifted a velvet curtain, pronounced the visitor's name with a voice and emphasis as perfectly trained as the rest of him, and stood aside for George to enter.
He found himself on the threshold of a charming room looking west, and lit by some last beams of February sun. The pale-green walls were covered with a medley of prints and sketches. A large writing-table, untidily heaped with papers, stood conspicuous on the blue self-coloured carpet, which over a great part of the floor was pleasantly void and bare. Flat earthenware pans, planted with hyacinths and narcissus, stood here and there, and filled the air with spring scents. Books ran round the lower walls, or lay piled where-ever there was a space for them; while about the fire at the further end was gathered a circle of chintz-covered chairs—chairs of all shapes and sizes, meant for talking. The whole impression of the pretty, disorderly place, compared with the stately drawing-room behind it, was one of intimity and freedom; the room made a friend of you as you entered.
Half a dozen people were sitting with Lady Maxwell when Tressady was announced. She rose to meet him with great cordiality, introduced him to little Lady Leven, an elfish creature in a cloud of fair hair, and with a pleasant "You know all the rest," offered him a chair beside herself and the tea-table.
"The rest" were Frank Leven, Edward Watton, Bayle, the Foreign Office private secretary who had been staying at Malford House at the time of Tressady's election, and Bennett, the "small, dark man" whom George had pointed out to Letty in the House as a Labour member, and one of the Maxwells' particular friends.
"Well?" said Lady Maxwell, turning to her new visitor as she handed him some tea, "were you as much taken with the grandmother as the grandmother was taken with you? She told me she had never seen a 'more haffable gentleman, nor one as she'd a been more willin to ha done for'!"
George laughed. "I see," he said, "that my report has been anticipated."
"Yes—I have been there. I have found a 'case' in them indeed—alack! The granny—I am afraid she is an unseemly old woman—and the elder girl both work for the Jew son-in-law on the first floor—homework of the most abominable kind—that girl will be dead in a year if it goes on."
George was rapidly conscious of two contradictory impressions—one of pleasure, one of annoyance—pleasure in her tall, slim presence, her white hand, and all the other flashing points of a beauty not to be denied—and irritation that she should have talked "shop" to him with her first breath. Could one never escape this altruistic chatter?
But he was not left to grapple with it alone, for Lady Leven looked up quickly.
"Mr. Watton, will you please take Lady Maxwell's tea away if she mentions the word 'case' again? We gave her fair warning."
Lady Maxwell hastily clasped both her hands round her tea-cup.
"Betty, we have discussed the opera for at least twenty minutes."
"Yes—at peril of our lives!" said Lady Leven. "I never talked so fast before. One felt as though one must say everything one had to say about Melba and the de Reszkes, all in one breath—before one's poor little subject was torn from one—one would never have such a chance again."
Lady Maxwell laughed, but coloured too.
"Am I such a nuisance?" she said, dropping her hands on her knee with a little sigh. Then she turned to Tressady.
"But Lady Leven really makes it out worse than it is. We haven't even approached a Factory Act all the afternoon."
Lady Leven sprang forward in her chair. "Because! because, my dear, we simply declined to let you. We made a league—didn't we, Mr. Bennett?—even you joined it."
Bennett smiled.
"Lady Maxwell overworks herself—we all know that," he said, his look, at once kind, honest, and perennially embarrassed, passing from Lady Leven to his hostess.
"Oh, don't sympathise, for Heaven's sake!" cried Betty. "Wage war upon her—it's our only hope."
"Don't you think Sunday at least ought to be frivolous?" said Tressady, smiling, to Lady Maxwell.
"Well, personally, I like to talk about what interests me on Sunday as well as on other days," she said with a frank simplicity; "but I know I ought to be kept in order—I become a terrible bore."
Frank Leven roused himself from the sofa on which he had languidly subsided.
"Bores?" he said indignantly, "we're all bores. We all have been bores since people began to think about what they're pleased to call 'social work.' Why should I love my neighbour?—I'd much rather hate him. I generally do."
"Doesn't it all depend," said Tressady, "on whether he happens to be able to make it disagreeable for you in return?"
"That's just it," said Betty Leven, eagerly. "I agree with Frank—it's all so stupid, this 'loving' everybody. It makes one positively hot. We sit under a clergyman, Frank and I, who talks of nothing every Sunday but love—love—like that, long-drawn-out—how our politics should be 'love,' and our shopping should be 'love'—till we long simply to bastinado somebody. I want to have a little real nice cruelty—something sharp and interesting. I should like to stick pins into my maid, only unfortunately, as she has more than once pointed out to me, it would be so much easier for her to stick them into me!"
"You want the time of Miss Austen's novels back again," said young Bayle, stooping to her, with his measured and agreeable smile—"before even the clergy had a mission."
"Ah! but it would be no good," said Lady Leven, sighing, "if she were there!"
She threw out her small hand towards her hostess, and everybody laughed.
Up to the moment of the laugh, Lady Maxwell had been lying back in her chair listening, the beautiful mouth absently merry, and the eyes speaking—Tressady thought—of quite other things, of some hidden converse of her own, going on in the brain behind the eyes. A certain prophetess-air seemed natural to her. Nevertheless, that first impression of her he had carried away from the hospital scene was being somehow blurred and broken up.
She joined in the laugh against herself; then, with a little nod towards her assailant, she said to Edward Watton, who was sitting on her right hand. "You're not taken in, I know."
"Oh, if you mean that I go in for 'cases' and 'causes' too," cried Lady Leven, interrupting, "of course I do—I can't be left alone. I must dance as my generation pipes."
"Which means," said her husband, drily, "that she went for two days filling soda-water bottles the week before last, and a day's shirt-making last week. From the first, I was told that she would probably return to me with an eye knocked out, she being totally inexperienced and absurdly rash. As to the second, to judge from the description she gave me of the den she had been sitting in when she came home, and the headache she had next day, I still expect typhoid. The fortnight isn't up till Wednesday."
There was a shout of mingled laughter and inquiry.
"How did you do it?—and whom did you bribe?" said Bayle to Lady Leven.
"I didn't bribe anybody," she said indignantly. "You don't understand. My friends introduced me."
Then, drawn out by him, she plunged into a lively account of her workshop experiences, interrupted every now and then by the sarcastic comments of her husband and the amusement of the two younger men who had brought their chairs close to her. Betty Leven ranked high among the lively chatterboxes of her day and set.
Lady Maxwell, however, had not laughed at Frank Leven's speech. Rather, as he spoke of his wife's experiences, her face had clouded, as though the blight of some too familiar image, some sad ever-present vision, had descended upon her.
Beimett also did not laugh. He watched the Levens indulgently for a few minutes, then insensibly he, Lady Maxwell, Edward Watton, and Tressady drew together into a circle of their own.
"Do you gather that Lord Fontenoy's speech on Friday has been much taken up in the country?" said Bennett, bending forward and addressing Lady Maxwell. Tressady, who was observing him, noticed that his dress was precisely the "Sunday best" of the respectable workman, and was, moreover, reminded by the expression of the eyes and brow that Bennett was said to have been a well-known "local preacher" in his north-country youth.
Lady Maxwell smiled, and pointed to Tressady.
"Here," she said, "is Lord Fontenoy's first-lieutenant."
Bennett looked at George.
"I should be glad," he said, "to know what Sir George thinks?"
"Why, certainly—we think it has been very warmly taken up," said George, promptly—"to judge from the newspapers, the letters that have been pouring in, and the petitions that seem to be preparing."
Lady Maxwell's eyes gleamed. She looked at Bennett silently a moment, then she said:
"Isn't it amazing to you how strong an impossible case can be made to look?"
"It is inevitable," said Bennett, with a little shrug, "quite inevitable. These social experiments of ours are so young—there is always a strong case to be made out against any of them, and there will be for years to come."
"Well and good," said George; "then we cavillers are inevitable too. Don't attack us—praise us rather; by your own confession, we are as much a part of the game as you are."
Bennett smiled slightly, but did not in reality quite follow. Lady
Maxwell bent forward.
"Do you know whether Lord Fontenoy has any personal knowledge of the trades he was speaking about?" she said, in her rich eager voice; "that is what I want so much to find out."
George was nettled by both the question and the manner.
"I regard Fontenoy as a very competent person," he said drily. "I imagine he did his best to inform himself. But there was not much need; the persons concerned—whom you think you are protecting—were so very eager to inform us!"
Lady Maxwell flushed.
"And you think that settles it—the eagerness of the cheap life to be allowed to maim and waste itself? But again and again English law has stepped in to prevent it—and again and again everybody has been thankful."
"It is all a question of balance, of course," said George. "Must a few unwise people be allowed to kill themselves—or thousands lose their liberty?"
His blue eyes scanned her beautiful impetuous face with a certain cool hardness. Internally he was more and more in revolt against a "monstrous regiment of women" and the influence upon the most complex economic problems of such a personality as that before him.
But his word "liberty" pricked her. The look of feeling passed away. Her eyes kindled as sharply and drily as his own.
"Freedom?—let me quote you Cromwell! 'Every sectary saith, "O give me liberty!" But give it him, and to the best of his power he will yield it to no one else.' So with your careless or brutal employer—give him liberty, and no one else shall get it."
"Only by metaphor—not legally," said George, stubbornly. "So long as men are not slaves by law there is always a chance for freedom. Any way we stand for freedom—as an end, not a means. It is not the business of the State to make people happy—not at all!—at least that is our view—but it is the business of the State to keep them free."
"Ah!" said Bennett, with a long breath, "there you've hit the nail—the whole difference between you and us."
George nodded. Lady Maxwell did not speak immediately. But George was conscious that he was being observed, closely considered. Their glances crossed an instant, in antagonism, certainly, if not in dislike.
"How long is it since you came home from India?" she asked him suddenly.
"About six months."
"And you were, I think, a long time abroad?"
"Nearly four years. Does that make you think I have not had much time to get up the things I am going to vote about?" said the young man, laughing. "I don't know! On the broadest issues of politics, one makes up one's mind as well in Asia as in Europe—better perhaps."
"On the Empire, I suppose—and England's place in the world? That's a side which—I know—I remember much too little. You think our life depends on a governing class—and that we and democracy are weakening that class too much?"
"That's about it. And for democracy it is all right. But you—you are the traitors!"
His thrust, however, did not rouse her to any corresponding rhetoric. She smiled merely, and began to question him about his travels. She did it with great deftness, so that after an answer or two both his temper and manner insensibly softened, and he found himself talking with ease and success. His mixed personality revealed itself—his capacity for certain veiled enthusiasms, his respect for power, for knowledge, his pessimist beliefs as to the average lot of men.
Bennett, who listened easily, was glad to help her make her guest talk. Frank Leven left the group near the sofa and came to listen, too. Tressady was more and more spurred, carried out of himself. Lady Maxwell's fine eyes and stately ways were humanised after all by a quick responsiveness, which for most people, however critical, made conversation with her draw like a magnet. Her intelligence, too, was competent, left the mere feminine behind in these connections that Tressady offered her, no less than in others. She had not lived in the world of high politics for nearly five years for nothing; so that unconsciously, and indeed quite against his will, Tressady found himself talking to her, after a while, as though she had been a man and an equal, while at the same time taking more pains than he would ever have taken for a man.
"Well, you have seen a lot!" said Frank Leven at last, with a rather envious sigh.
Bennett's modest face suddenly reddened.
"If only Sir George will use his eyes to as good purpose at home—" he said involuntarily, then stopped. Few men were more unready and awkward in conversation; yet when roused he was one of the best platform speakers of his day.
George laughed.
"One sees best what appeals to one, I am afraid," he said, only to be instantly conscious that he had made a rather stupid admission in face of the enemy.
Lady Maxwell's lip twitched; he saw the flash of some quick thought cross her face. But she said nothing.
Only when he got up to go, she bade him notice that she was always at home on Sundays, and would be glad that he should remember it. He made a rather cold and perfunctory reply. Inwardly he said to himself, "Why does she say nothing of Letty, whom she knows—and of our marriage—if she wants to make friends?"
Nevertheless, he left the house with the feeling of one who has passed an hour not of the common sort. He had done himself justice, made his mark. And as for her—in spite of his flashes of dislike he carried away a strong impression of something passionate and vivid that clung to the memory. Or was it merely eyes and pose, that astonishingly beautiful colour, and touch of classic dignity which she got—so the world said—from some remote strain of Italian blood? Most probably! All the same, she had fewer of the ordinary womanly arts than he had imagined. How easy it would have been to send that message to Letty she had not sent! He thought simply that for a clever woman she might have been more adroit.
* * * * *
The door had no sooner closed behind Tressady than Betty Leven, with a quick look after him, bent across to her hostess, and said in a stage whisper:
"Who? Post me up, please."
"One of Fontenoy's gang," said her husband, before Lady Maxwell could answer. "A new member, and as sharp as needles. He's been exactly to all the places where I want to go, Betty, and you won't let me."
He glanced at his wife with a certain sharpness. For Tressady had spoken in passing of nilghai-shooting in the Himalayas, and the remark had brought the flush of an habitual discontent to the young man's cheek.
Betty merely held out a white child's wrist.
"Button my glove, please, and don't talk. I have got ever so many questions to ask Marcella."
Leven applied himself rather sulkily to his task while Betty pursued her inquiries.
"Isn't he going to marry Letty Sewell?"
"Yes," said Lady Maxwell, opening her eyes rather wide. "Do you know her?"
"Why, my dear, she's Mr. Watton's cousin—isn't she?" said Betty, turning towards that young man. "I saw her once at your mother's."
"Certainly she is my cousin," said that young man, smiling, "and she is going to marry Tressady at Easter. So much I can vouch for, though I don't know her so well, perhaps, as the rest of my family do."
"Oh!" said Betty, drily, releasing her husband and crossing her small hands across her knee. "That means—Miss Sewell isn't one of Mr. Watton's favourite cousins. You don't mind talking about your cousins, do you? You may blacken the character of all mine. Is she nice?"
"Who—Letty? Why, of course she is nice," said Edward Watton, laughing.
"All young ladies are."
"Oh goodness!" said Betty, shaking her halo of gold hair. "Commend me to cousins for letting one down easy."
"Too bad, Lady Leven!" said Watton, getting up to escape. "Why not ask Bayle? He knows all things. Let me hand you over to him. He will sing you all my cousin's charms."
"Delighted!" said Bayle as he, too, rose—"only unfortunately I ought at this moment to be at Wimbledon."
He had the air of a typical official, well dressed, suave, and infinitely self-possessed, as he held out his hand—deprecatingly—to Lady Leven.
"Oh! you private secretaries!" said Betty, pouting and turning away from him.
"Don't abolish us," he said, pleading. "We must live."
"Je n'en vois pas la nécessité!" said Betty, over her shoulder.
"Betty, what a babe you are!" cried her husband, as Bayle, Watton, and
Bennett all disappeared together.
"Not at all!" cried Betty. "I wanted to get some truth out of somebody.
For, of course, the real truth is that this Miss Sewell is—"
"Is what?" said Leven, lost in admiration all the time, as Lady Maxwell saw, of his wife's dainty grace and rose-leaf colour.
"Well—a—minx!" said Betty, with innocent slowness, opening her blue eyes very wide; "a mischievous—rather pretty—hard-hearted—flirting—little minx!"
"Really, Betty!" cried Lady Maxwell. "Where have you seen her?"
"Oh, I saw her last year several times at the Wattons' and other places," said Betty, composedly. "And so did you too, please, madam. I remember very well one day Mrs. Watton brought her into the Winterbournes' when you and I were there, and she chattered a great deal."
"Oh yes!—I had forgotten."
"Well, my dear, you'll soon have to remember her! so you needn't talk in that lofty tone. For they're going to be married at Easter, and if you want to make friends with the young man, you'll have to realise the wife!"
"Married at Easter? How do you know?"
"In the first place Mr. Watton said so, in the next there are such things as newspapers. But of course you didn't notice such trifles, you never do."
"Betty, you're very cross with me to-day!" Lady Maxwell looked up at her friend with a little pleading air.
"Oh no! only for your good. I know you're thinking of nothing in the world but how to make that man take a reasonable view of Maxwell's Bill. And I want to impress upon you that he's probably thinking a great deal more about getting married than about Factory Bills. You see, your getting married was a kind of accident. But other people are different. And oh, dear, you do know so little about them when they don't live hi four pair backs! There, don't defend yourself—you sha'n't!"
And, stooping, Betty stifled her friend's possible protest by kissing her.
"Now then, come along, Frank—you've got your speech to write—and I've got to copy it out. Don't swear! you know you're going to have two whole days' golfing next week. Good-bye, Marcella! My love to Aldous—and tell him not to be so late next time I come to tea. Good-bye!"
And off she swept, pausing, however, on the landing to open the door again and put in an eager face.
"Oh! and, by the way, the young man has a mother—Frank reminded me. His womenkind don't seem to be his strong point—but as she doesn't earn even four-and-sixpence a week—very sadly the contrary—I won't tell you any more now, or you'll forget. Next time!"
When Marcella Maxwell was at last left alone, she began to pace slowly up and down the large bare room, as it was very much her wont to do.
She was thinking of George Tressady, and of the personality his talk had seemed to reveal.
"His heart is all in power—in what he takes for magnificence." she said to herself. "He talks as if he had no humanity, and did not care a rap for anybody. But it is a pose—I think it is a pose. He is interesting—he will develop. One would like—to show him things."
After another pensive turn or two she stopped beside a photograph that stood upon her writing-table. It was a photograph of her husband—a tall, smoothfaced man, with pleasant eyes, features of no particular emphasis, and the free carriage of the country-bred Englishman. As she looked at it her face relaxed unconsciously, inevitably; under the stimulus of some habitual and secret joy. It was for his sake, for his sake only that she was still thinking of George Tressady, still pondering the young man's character and remarks.
So much at least was true—no other member of Fontenoy's party had as yet given her even the chance of arguing with him. Once or twice in society she had tried to approach Fontenoy himself, to get somehow into touch with him. But she had made no way. Lord Fontenoy had simply turned his square-jawed face and red-rimmed eyes upon her with a stupid irresponsive air, which Marcella knew perfectly well to be a mask, while it protected him none the less effectively for that against both her eloquence and her charm. The other members of the party were young aristocrats, either of the ultra-exclusive or of the sporting type. She had made her attempts here and there among them, but with no more success. And once or twice, when she had pushed her attack to close quarters, she had been suddenly conscious of an underlying insolence in her opponent—a quick glance of bold or sensual eyes which seemed to relegate the mere woman to her place.
But this young Tressady, for all his narrowness and bitterness, was of a different stamp—or she thought so.
She began to pace up and down again, lost in reverie, till after a few minutes she came slowly to a stop before a long Louis Quinze mirror—her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes half consciously studying what she saw.
Her own beauty invariably gave her pleasure—though very seldom for the reasons that would have affected other women. She felt instinctively that it made life easier for her than it could otherwise have been; that it provided her with a natural and profitable "opening" in any game she might wish to play; and that even among the workmen, unionist leaders, and officials of the East End it had helped her again and again to score the points that she wanted to make. She was accustomed to be looked at, to be the centre, to feel things yielding before her; and without thinking it out, she knew perfectly well what it was she gained by this "fair seeming show" of eye and lip and form. Somehow it made nothing seem impossible to her; it gave her a dazzling self-confidence.
The handle of the door turned. She looked round with a smiling start, and waited.
A tall man in a grey suit came in, crossed the room quickly, and put his arms round her. She leant back against his shoulder, putting up one hand to touch his cheek caressingly.
"Why, how late you are! Betty left reproaches for you."
"I had a walk with Dowson. Then two or three people caught me on the way back—Rashdell among others." (Lord Rashdell was Foreign Secretary.) "There are some interesting telegrams from Paris—I copied them out for you."
The country happened to be at the moment in the midst of one of its periodical difficulties with France. There had been a good deal of diplomatic friction, and a certain amount of anxiety at the Foreign Office. Marcella lit the silver kettle again and made her man some fresh tea, while he told her the news, and they discussed the various points of the telegrams he had copied for her, with a comrade's freedom and vivacity. Then she said: