But before he could interrupt her, she went on: "The harm was, in acting all through—by myself—as if only you and I, and Maxwell's work—were concerned. If I had made you known to him—if I had remembered—had thought—"
But she stopped again, in a kind of bewilderment. In truth she did not yet understand what had happened to her—how it could have happened to her—to her, whose life, soul, and body, to the red ripe of its inmost heart, was all Maxwell's, his possession, his chattel.
Tressady looked at her with a little sad smile.
"It was your unconsciousness," he said, in a low trembling voice, "of what you are—and have—that was so beautiful."
Somehow the words recalled her natural dignity, her noble pride as
Maxwell's wife. She stood erect, composure and self-command returning.
She was not her own, to humble herself as she pleased.
"We must never talk to each other like this again," she said gently, after a little pause. "We must try and understand each other—the real things in each other's lives.—Don't lay a great remorse on me, Sir George!—don't spoil your future, and your wife's—don't give up Parliament! You have great, great gifts! All this will seem just a passing misunderstanding—both to you—and me—by and by. We shall learn to be—real friends—you and we—together?"
She looked at him appealing—her face one prayer.
But he, flushing, shook his head.
"I must not come into your world," he said huskily. "I must go."
The wave of grief rolled upon her again. She turned away, looking across the room with wide dim eyes, as though asking for some help that did not come.
Tressady walked quickly back to the chair where he had been sitting, and took up his hat and gloves. Suddenly, as he looked back to her, he struck one of the gloves across his hand.
"What a coward—what a mean whining wretch I was to come to you this morning! I said to myself—like a hypocrite—that I could come—and go—without a word. My God—if I had!"—the low hoarse voice became a cry of pain—"I might still have taken some joy—"
He wrestled with himself.
"It was mad selfishness," he said at last, recovering himself by a fierce effort. "Mad it must have been—or I could never have come here to give you pain. Some demon drove me. Oh, forgive me!—forgive me! Good-bye! I shall bless you while I live. But you—you must never think of me, never speak of me—again."
She felt his grasp upon her fingers. He stooped, passionately kissed her hand and a fold of her dress. She rose hurriedly; but the door had closed upon him before she had found her voice or choked down the sob in her throat.
She could only drop back into her chair, weeping silently, her face hidden in her hands.
A few minutes passed. There was a step outside. She sprang up and listened, ready to fly to the window and hide herself among the curtains. Then the colour flooded into her cheek. She waited. Maxwell came in. He, too, looked disturbed, and as he entered the room he thrust a letter into his pocket, almost with violence. But when his eyes fell on his wife a pang seized him. He hurried to her, and she leant against him, saying in a sobbing voice:
"George Tressady has been here. I seem to have done him a wrong—and his wife. I am not fit to help you, Aldous. I do such rushing, blind, foolish things—and all that one hoped and worked for turns to mere selfishness and misery. Whom shall I hurt next? You, perhaps—you!"
And she clung to him in despair.
* * * * *
A few minutes later the husband and wife were in conference together, Marcella sitting, Maxwell standing beside her. Marcella's tears had ceased; but never had Maxwell seen her so overwhelmed, so sad, and he felt half ashamed of his own burning irritation and annoyance with the whole matter.
Clearly, what he had dimly foreseen on the night of her return from the Mile End meeting had happened. This young man, ill-balanced, ill-mated, yet full of a sensitive ability and perception, had fallen in love with her; and Maxwell owed his political salvation to his wife's charm.
The more he loved her, the more odious the situation was to him. That any rational being should have even the shred of an excuse for regarding her as the political coquette, using her beauty for a personal end, struck him as a kind of sacrilege, and made him rage inwardly. Nevertheless, the idea struck him—struck and kindled him all at once that the very perfectness of this tie that bound them together weakened her somewhat as a woman in her dealing with the outside world. It withdrew from her some of a woman's ordinary intuitions with regard to the men around her. The heart had no wants, and therefore no fears. To any man she liked she was always ready, as she came to know him, to show her true self with a freedom and loveliness that were like the freedom and loveliness of a noble child. To have supposed that such a man could have any feelings towards her other than those she gave to her friends would have seemed to her a piece of ill-bred vanity. Such contingencies lay outside her ken; she would have brushed them away with a laughing contempt had they been presented to her. Her life was at once too happy and too busy for such things. How could anyone fall in love with Aldous's wife? Why should they?—if one was to ask the simplest question of all.
Yet Maxwell, as he stood looking down upon her, conscious of a certain letter in his inner pocket, felt with growing yet most unwilling determination that he must somehow try and make her turn her eyes upon this dingy world and see it as it is.
For it was not the case merely of a spiritual drama in which a few souls, all equally sincere and void of offence, were concerned. That, in Maxwell's eyes, would have been already disagreeable and tragic enough. But here was this keen, spiteful crowd of London society watching for what it might devour—those hateful newspapers!—not to speak of the ordinary fool of everyday life.
There had not been wanting a number of small signs and warnings. The whole course of the previous day's debate, the hour of Tressady's speech, while Maxwell sat listening in the Speaker's Gallery overhead, had been for him—for her, too—poisoned by a growing uneasiness, a growing distaste for the triumph laid at their feet. She had come down to him from the Ladies' Gallery pale and nervous, shrinking almost from the grasp of his hand.
"What will happen? Has he made his position in Parliament impossible?" she had said to him as they stood together for a moment in the Home Secretary's room; and he understood, of course, that she was speaking of Tressady. In the throng that presently overwhelmed them he had no time to answer her; but he believed that she, too, had been conscious of the peculiar note in some of the congratulations showered upon them on their way through the crowded corridors and lobbies. On the steps of St. Stephen's entrance an old white-haired gentleman, the friend and connection of Maxwell's father, had clapped the successful Minister on the back, with a laughing word in his ear: "Upon my word, Aldous, your beautiful lady is a wife to conjure with! I hear she has done the whole thing—educated the young man, brought him to his bearings, spoilt all Fontenoy's plans, broken up the group, in fact. Glorious!" and the old man looked with eyes half sarcastic, half admiring at the form of Lady Maxwell standing beside the carriage-door.
"I imagine the group has broken itself up," said Maxwell, shortly, shaking off his tormentor. But as he glanced back from, the carriage-window to the crowded doorway, and the faces looking after them, the thought of the talk that was probably passing amid the throng set every nerve on edge.
Meanwhile she sat beside him, unconsciously a little more stately than usual, but curiously silent—till at last, as they were nearing Trafalgar Square, she threw out her hand to him, almost timidly:
"You do rejoice?"
"I do," he said, with a long breath, pressing the hand. "I suppose nothing ever happens as one has foreseen it. How strange, when one looks back to that Sunday!"
She made no reply, and since then Tressady's name had been hardly mentioned between them. They had discussed every speech but his—even when the morning papers came, reflecting the astonishment and excitement of the public. The pang in Marcella's mind was—"Aldous thinks I asked a personal favour—Did I?" And memory would fall back into anxious recapitulation of the scene with Tressady. Had she indeed pressed her influence with him too much—taken advantage of his Parliamentary youth and inexperience? In the hours of the night that followed the division, merely to ask the question tormented a conscience as proud as it was delicate.
And now!—this visit—this incredible declaration—this eagerness for his reward! Maxwell's contempt and indignation were rising fast. Mere chivalry, mere decent manners even, he thought, might have deterred a man from such an act. Meanwhile, in rapid flashes of thought he began to debate with himself how he should use this letter in his pocket—this besmirching, degrading letter.
But Marcella had much more to say. Presently she roused herself from her trance and looked at her husband.
"Aldous!"—she touched him on the arm, and he turned to her gravely—"There was one moment at Mile End, when—when I did play upon his pity—his friendship. He came down to Mile End on Thursday night. I told you. I saw he was unhappy—unhappy at home. He wanted sympathy desperately. I gave it him. Then I urged him to throw himself into his public work—to think out this vote he was to give. Oh! I don't know!—I don't know—" she broke off, in a depressed voice, shaking her head slowly—"I believe I threw myself upon his feelings—I felt that he was very sympathetic, that I had a power over him—it was a kind of bribery."
Her brow drooped under his eye.
"I believe you are quite unjust to yourself," he said unwillingly. "Of course, if any man chooses to misinterpret a confidence—"
"No," she said steadily. "I knew. It was quite different from any other time. I remember how uncomfortable I felt afterwards. I did try to influence him—just through, being a woman. There!—it is quite true."
He could not withdraw his eyes from hers—from the mingling of pride, humility, passion, under the dark lashes.
"And if you did, do you suppose that I can blame you?" he said slowly.
He saw that she was holding an inquisition in her own heart, and looking to him as judge. How could he judge?—whatever there might be to judge. He adored her.
For the moment she did not answer him. She clasped her hands round her knees, thinking aloud.
"From the beginning, I remember I thought of him as somebody quite new and fresh to what he was doing—somebody who would certainly be influenced—who ought to be influenced. And then"—she raised her eyes again, half shrinking—"there was the feeling, I suppose, of personal antagonism to Lord Fontenoy! One could not be sorry to detach one of his chief men. Besides, after Castle Luton, George Tressady was so attractive! You did not know him, Aldous; but to talk to him stirred all one's energies; it was a perpetual battle—one took it up again and again, enjoying it always. As we got deeper in the fight I tried never to think of him as a member of Parliament—often I stopped myself from saying things that might have persuaded him, as far as the House was concerned. And yet, of course"—her face, in its nobility, took a curious look of hardness—"I did know all the time that he was coming to think more and more of me—to depend on me. He disliked me at first—afterwards he seemed to avoid me—then I felt a change. Now I see I thought of him all along; just in one capacity—in relation to what I wanted—whether I tried to persuade him or no. And all the time—"
A cloud of pain effaced the frown. She leant her head against her husband's arm.
"Aldous!"—her voice was low and miserable,—"what can his wife have felt towards me? I never thought of her after Castle Luton—she seemed to me such a vulgar, common little being. Surely, surely!—if they are so unhappy, it can't be—my doing; there was cause enough—"
Nothing could have been more piteous than the tone. It was laden with the remorse that only such a nature could feel for such a cause. Maxwell's hand touched her head tenderly. A variety of expressions crossed his face, then a sharp flash of decision.
"Dear! I think you ought to know—she has written to me."
Marcella sprang up. Face and neck flushed crimson. She threw him an uncertain look, the nostrils quivering.
"Will you show me the letter?"
He hesitated. On his first reading of it he had vowed to himself that she should never see it. But since her confessions had begun to make the matter clearer to him a moral weight had pressed upon him. She must realise her power, her responsibility! Moreover, they two, with conscience and good sense to guide them, had got to find a way out of this matter. He did not feel that he could hide the letter from her if there was to be common action and common understanding.
So he gave it to her.
She read it pacing up and down, unconscious sounds of pain and protest forcing themselves to her lips from time to time, which made it very difficult for him to stand quietly where he was. On that effusion of gall and bitterness poor Letty had spent her sleepless night. Every charge that malice could bring, every distortion that jealousy could apply to the simplest incident, every insinuation that, judged by her own standard, had seemed to her most likely to work upon a husband—Letty had crowded them all into the mean, ill-written letter—the letter of a shopgirl trying to rescue her young man from the clutches of a rival.
But every sentence in it was a stab to Marcella. When she had finished it she stood with it in her hand beside her writing-table, looking absently through the window, pale, and deep in thought. Maxwell watched her.
When her moment of consideration broke her look swept round to him.
"I shall go to her," she said simply. "I must see her!"
Maxwell pondered.
"I think," he said reluctantly, "she would only repulse and insult you."
"Then it must be borne. It cannot end so."
She walked up to him and let him draw his arm about her. They stood in silence for a minute or two. When she raised her head again, her eyes sought his beseechingly.
"Aldous, help me! If we cannot repair this mischief,—you and I,—what are we worth? I will tell you my plan—"
There was a sound at the door. Husband and wife moved away from each other as the butler entered.
"My lord, Mrs. Allison and Lord Fontenoy are in the library. They asked me to say that they wish to consult your lordship on something very urgent. I told them I thought your lordship was engaged, but I would come and see."
Marcella and Maxwell looked at each other. Ancoats! No doubt the catastrophe so long staved off had at last arrived. Maxwell's stifled exclamation was the groan of the overworked man who hardly knows how to find mind enough for another anxiety. But a new and sudden light shone in his wife's face. She turned to the servant almost with eagerness:
"Please tell Mrs. Allison and Lord Fontenoy to come up."
CHAPTER XIX
The door opened silently, and there came in a figure that for a moment was hardly recognised by either Maxwell or his wife. Shrunken, pale, and grief-stricken, Ancoats's poor mother entered, her eye seeking eagerly for Maxwell, perceiving nothing else. She was in black, her veil hurriedly thrown back, and the features beneath it were all blurred by distress and fatigue.
Marcella hurried to her. Mrs. Allison took her hand in both her own with the soft, appealing motion habitual to her, then said hastily, still looking at Maxwell:
"Maxwell, the boy has gone. He left me two days ago. This morning, in my trouble, I sent for Lord Fontenoy, my kind, kind friend. And he persuaded me to come to you at once. I begged him to come too—"
She glanced timidly from one to the other, implying many things.
But even with this preface, Maxwell's greeting of his defeated antagonist was ceremony itself. The natural instinct of such a man is to mask victory in courtesy. But a paragraph that morning in Fontenoy's paper—a paragraph that he happened to have seen in Lord Ardagh's room—had appealed to another natural instinct, stronger and more primitive. It amazed him that even this emergency and Mrs. Allison's persuasions could have brought the owner of the paper within his doors on this particular morning.
Fontenoy, immersed in the correspondence of the morning, had not yet chanced to see the paragraph, which was Harding Watton's. Yet, if he had, he could not have shown a more haughty and embarrassed bearing. He was there under a compulsion he did not know how to resist, a compulsion of tears and grief; but the instinct for manners, which so often upon occasion serves the man of illustrious family, as well, almost, as good feeling or education may serve another, had been for the time weakened in him by the violences and exhaustion of the political struggle, and he did not feel certain that he could trust himself. He was smarting still through every nerve, and the greeting especially that Maxwell's tall wife extended to him was gall and bitterness. She meanwhile, as she advanced towards him, was mostly struck with the perfection of his morning dress. The ultra-correctness and strict fashion that he affected in these matters were generally a surprise to those who knew him only by reputation.
After five minutes' question and answer the Maxwells understood something of the situation. A servant of Ancoats's had been induced to disclose what he knew. There could be no question that the young fellow had gone off to Normandy, where he possessed a chalet close to Trouville, in the expectation that his fair lady would immediately join him there. She had not yet started. So much Fontenoy had already ascertained. But she had thrown up a recent engagement within the last few days, and before Ancoats's flight all Fontenoy's information had pointed to the likelihood of a coup of some sort. As for the boy himself, he had left his mother at Castle Luton, three days before, on the pretext of a Scotch visit, and had instead taken the evening train to Paris, leaving a letter for his mother in which the influence of certain modern French novels of the psychological kind could perhaps be detected. "The call of the heart that drives me from you," wrote this incredible young man, "is something independent of myself. I wring my hands, but I follow where it leads. Love has its crimes,—that I admit,—but they are the only road to experience. And experience is all I care to live for! At any rate, I cannot accept the limits that you, mother, would impose upon me. Each of us must be content to recognise the other's personality. I have tried to reconcile you to an affection that must be content to be irregular. You repel it and me, under the influence of a bigotry in which I have ceased to believe. Suffer me, then, to act for myself in this respect. At any time that you like to call upon me I will be your dutiful son, so long as this matter is not mentioned between us. And let me implore you not to bring in third persons. They have already done mischief enough. Against them I should know how to protect myself."
Maxwell returned the letter with a disgust he could hardly repress. Everything in it seemed to him as pinchbeck as the passion itself. Mrs. Allison took it with the same miserable look, which had in it, Marcella noticed, a certain strange sternness, as of some frail creature nerving itself to desperate things.
"Now what shall we do?" said Maxwell, abruptly.
Fontenoy moved forward. "I presume you still command the same persons you set in motion before? Can you get at them to-day?"
Maxwell pondered. "Yes, the clergyman. The solicitor-brother is too far away. Your idea is to stop the girl from crossing?"
"If it were still possible." Fontenoy dropped his voice, and his gesture induced Maxwell to follow him to the recess of a distant window.
"The chief difficulty, perhaps," said Fontenoy, resuming, "concerns the lad himself. His mother, you will understand, cannot run any risk of being brought in contact with that woman. Nor is she physically fit for the voyage; but someone must go, if only to content her. There has been some wild talk of suicide, apparently—mere bombast, of course, like so much of it, but she has been alarmed."
"Do you propose, then, to go yourself?"
"I am of no use," said Fontenoy, decisively.
Maxwell had cause to know that the statement was true, and did not press him. They fell into a rapid consultation.
Meanwhile, Marcella had drawn Mrs. Allison to the sofa beside her, and was attempting a futile task of comfort. Mrs. Allison answered in monosyllables, glancing hither and thither. At last she said in a low, swift voice, as though addressing herself, rather than her companion, "If all fails, I have made up my mind. I shall leave his house. I can take nothing more from him."
Marcella started. "But that would deprive you of all chance, all hope of influencing him," she said, her eager, tender look searching the other woman's face.
"No; it would be my duty," said Mrs. Allison, simply, crossing her hands upon her lap. Her delicate blue eyes, swollen with weeping, the white hair, of which a lock had escaped from its usual quiet braids and hung over her blanched cheeks, her look at once saintly and indomitable—every detail of her changed aspect made a chill and penetrating impression. Marcella began to understand what the Christian might do, though the mother should die of it.
Meanwhile she watched the two men at the other side of the room, with a manifest eagerness for their return. Presently, indeed, she half rose and called:
"Aldous!"
Lord Maxwell turned.
"Are you thinking of someone who might go to Trouville?" she asked him.
"Yes, but we can hit on no one," he replied, in perplexity.
She moved towards him, bearing herself with a peculiar erectness and dignity.
"Would it be possible to ask Sir George Tressady to go?" she said quietly.
Maxwell looked at her open-mouthed for an instant. Fontenoy, behind him, threw a sudden, searching glance at the beautiful figure in grey.
"We all know," she said, turning back to the mother, "that Ancoats likes
Sir George."
Mrs. Allison shrunk a little from the clear look. Fontenoy's rage of defeat, however modified in her presence, had nevertheless expressed itself to her in phrases and allusions that had both perplexed and troubled her. Had Marcella indeed made use of her beauty to decoy a weak youth from his allegiance? And now she spoke his name so simply.
But the momentary wonder died from the poor mother's mind.
"I remember," she said sadly, "I remember he once spoke to me very kindly about my son."
"And he thought kindly," said Marcella, rapidly; "he is kind at heart. Aldous! if Cousin Charlotte consents, why not at least put the case to him? He knows everything. He might undertake what we want, for her sake,—for all our sakes,—and it might succeed."
The swift yet calm decision of her manner completed Maxwell's bewilderment.
His eyes sought hers, while the others waited, conscious, somehow, of a dramatic moment. Fontenoy's flash of malicious curiosity made him even forget, while it lasted, the little tragic figure on the sofa.
"What do you say, Cousin Charlotte?" said Maxwell at last.
His voice was dry and business-like. Only the wife who watched him perceived the silent dignity with which he had accepted her appeal.
He went to sit beside Mrs. Allison, stooping over her, while they talked in a low key. Very soon she had caught at Marcella's suggestion, with an energy of despair.
"But how can we find him?" she said at last, looking helplessly round the room, at the very chair, among others, where Tressady had just been sitting.
Maxwell felt the humour of the situation without relishing it.
"Either at his own house," he said shortly, "or the House of Commons."
"He may have left town this morning. Lord Fontenoy thought"—she looked timidly at her companion—"that he would be sure to go and explain himself to his constituents at once."
"Well, we can find out. If you give me instructions,—if you are sure this is what you want,—we will find out at once. Are you sure?"
"I can think of nothing better," she said, with a piteous gesture. "And if he goes, I have only one message to give him. Ancoats knows that I have exhausted every argument, every entreaty. Now let him tell my son"—her voice grew firm, in spite of her look of anguish—"that if he insists on surrendering himself to a life of sin I can bear him company no more. I shall leave his house, and go somewhere by myself, to pray for him."
Maxwell tried to soothe her, and there was some half-whispered talk between them, she quietly wiping away her tears from time to time.
Meanwhile, Marcella and Fontenoy sat together a little way off, he at first watching Mrs. Allison, she silent, and making no attempt to play the hostess. Gradually, however, the sense of her presence beside him, the memory of Tressady's speech, of the scene in the House of the night before, began to work in his veins with a pricking, exciting power. His family was famous for a certain drastic way with women; his father, the now old and half-insane Marquis, had parted from his mother while Fontenoy was still a child, after scenes that would have disgraced an inn parlour. Fontenoy himself, in his reckless youth, had simply avoided the whole sex, so far as its reputable members were concerned; till one woman by sympathy, by flattery perhaps, by the strange mingling in herself of iron and gentleness, had tamed him. But there were brutal instincts in his blood, and he became conscious of them as he sat beside Marcella Maxwell.
Suddenly he broke out, bending forward, one hand on his knee, the other nervously adjusting the eyeglass without which he was practically blind.
"I imagine your side had foreseen last night better than we had?"
She drew herself together instantly.
"One can hardly say. It was evident, wasn't it, that the House as a whole was surprised? Certainly, no one could have foreseen the numbers."
She met his look straight, her white hand playing with Mrs.
Allison's card.
"Oh! a slide of that kind once begun goes like the wind," said Fontenoy. "Well, and are you pleased with your Bill—not afraid of your promises—of all the Edens you have held out?"
The smile that he attempted roused such ogerish associations in Marcella, she must needs say something to give colour to the half-desperate laugh that caught her.
"Did you suppose we should be already en penitence?" she asked him.
The man's wrath overcame him. So England—all the serious forces of the country—were to be more and more henceforward at the mercy of this kind of thing! He had begun the struggle with a scornful disbelief in current gossip. He—politically and morally the creation of a woman—had yet not been able to bring himself to fear a woman. And now he sat there, fiercely saying to himself that this woman, playing the old game under new names, had undone him.
"Ah! I see," he said. "You are of the mind of the Oxford don—never regret, never retract, never apologise?"
The small, reddish eyes, like needle-points, fixed the face before him. She looked up, her beautiful lips parting. She felt the insult—marvelled at it! On such an errand, in her own house! Scorn was almost lost in astonishment.
"A quotation which nobody gets right—isn't it so?" she said calmly. "If a wise man said it, I suppose he meant, 'Don't explain yourself to the wrong people,' which is good advice, don't you think?"
She rose as she spoke, and moved away from him, that she might listen to what her husband was saying. Fontenoy was left to reflect on the folly of a man who, being driven to ask a kindness of his enemy, cannot keep his temper in the enemy's house. Yet his temper had been freshly tried since he entered it. The whole suggestion of Tressady's embassy was to himself galling in the extreme. "There is a meaning in it," he thought; "of course she thinks it will save appearances!" There was no extravagance, no calumny, that this cold critic of other men's fervours was not for the moment ready to believe.
Nevertheless, as he threw himself back in his chair, and his eye caught Mrs. Allison's bent figure on the other side of the room, he knew that he must needs submit—he did submit—to anything that could give that torn heart ease. Of his two passions, one, the passion for politics, seemed for the moment to have lost itself in disgust and disappointment; to the other he clung but the more strongly. Once or twice in her talk with Maxwell, Mrs. Allison raised her gentle eyes and looked across to Fontenoy. "Are you there, my friend?" the glance seemed to say, and a thrill spread itself through the man's rugged being. Ah, well! the follies of this young scapegrace must wear themselves out in time, and either he would marry and so free his mother, or he would so outrage her conscience that she would separate herself from him. Then would come other people's rewards.
Presently, indeed, Mrs. Allison rose from her seat and advanced to him with hurried steps.
"We have settled it, I think; Maxwell will do all he can. It seems hard to trust so much to a stranger like Sir George Tressady, but if he will go—if Ancoats likes him? We must do the best, mustn't we?"
She raised to him her delicate, small face, in a most winning dependence.
Fontenoy did not even attempt resistance.
"Certainly—it is not a chance to lose. May I suggest also"—he looked at Maxwell—"that there is no time to lose?"
"Give me ten minutes, and I am off," said Maxwell, hurriedly carrying a bundle of unopened letters to a distance. He looked through them, to see if anything especially urgent required him to give instructions to his secretary before leaving the house.
"Shall I take you home?" said Fontenoy to Mrs. Allison.
She drew her thick veil round her head and face, and said some tremulous words, which unconsciously deepened the gloom on Fontenoy's face. Apparently they were to the effect that before going home she wished to see the Anglican priest in whom she especially confided, a certain Father White, who was to all intents and purposes her director. For in his courtship of this woman of fifty, with her curious distinction and her ethereal charm, which years seemed only to increase, Fontenoy had not one rival, but two—her son and her religion.
Fontenoy's fingers barely touched those of Maxwell and his wife. As he closed the door behind Mrs. Allison, leaving the two together, he said to himself contemptuously that he pitied the husband.
When the latch had settled, Maxwell threw down his letters and crossed the room to his wife.
"I only half understood you," he said, a flush rising in his face. "You really mean that we, on this day of all days—that I—am to personally ask this kindness of George Tressady?"
"I do!" she cried, but without attempting any caress. "If I could only go and ask it myself!" "That would be impossible!" he said quickly.
"Then you, dear husband—dear love!—go and ask it for me! Must we not—oh! do see it as I do!—must we not somehow make it possible to be friends again, to wipe out that—that half-hour once for all?"—she threw out her hand in an impetuous gesture. "If you go, he will feel that is what we mean—he will understand us at once—there is nothing vile in him—nothing! Dear, he never said a word to me I could resent till this morning. And, alack, alack! was it somehow my fault?" She dropped her face a moment on the back of the chair she held. "How I am to play my own part—well! I must think. But I cannot have such a thing on my heart, Aldous—I cannot!"
He was silent a moment; then he said:
"Let me understand, at least, what it is precisely that we are doing. Is the idea that it should be made possible for us all to meet again as though nothing had happened?"
She shrank a moment from the man's common sense; then replied, controlling herself:
"Only not to leave the open sore—to help him to forget! He must know—he does know"—she held herself proudly—"that I have no secrets from you. So that when the time comes for remembering, for thinking it over, he will shrink from you, or hate you. Whereas, what I want"—her eyes filled with tears—"is that he should know you—only that! I ought to have brought it about long ago."
"Are you forgetting that I owe him this morning my political existence?"
The voice betrayed the inner passion.
"He would be the last person to remember it!" she cried. "Why not take it quite, quite simply?—behave so as to say to him, without words, 'Be our friend—join with us in putting out of sight what hurts us no less than you to think of. Shut the door upon the old room—pass with us into a new!'—oh! if I could explain!"
She hid her face in her hands again.
"I understand," he said, after a long pause. "It is very like you. I am not quite sure it is very wise. These things, to my mind, are best left to end themselves. But I promised Mrs. Allison; and what you ask, dear, you shall have. So be it."
She lifted her head hastily, and was dismayed by the signs of agitation in him as he turned away. She pursued him timidly, laying her hand on his arm.
"And then—"
Her voice sank to its most pleading note. He caught her hand; but she withdrew herself in haste.
"And then," she went on, struggling for a smile, "then you and I have things to settle. Do you think I don't know that I have made all your work, and all your triumph, gall and bitterness to you—do you think I don't know?"
She gazed at him with a passionate intensity through her tears, yet by her gesture forbidding him to come near her. What man would not have endured such discomforts a thousand times for such a look?
He stooped to her.
"We are to talk that out, then, when I come back?—Please give these letters to Saunders—there is nothing of importance. I will go first to Tressady's house."
* * * * *
Maxwell drove away through the sultry streets, his mind running on his task. It seemed to him that politics had never put him to anything so hard. But he began to plan it with his usual care and precision. The butler who opened the door of the Upper Brook Street house could only say that his master was not at home.
"Shall I find him, do you imagine, at the House of Commons?"
The butler could not say. But Lady Tressady was in, though just on the point of going out. Should he inquire?
But the visitor made it plain that he had no intention of disturbing Lady Tressady, and would find out for himself. He left his card in the butler's hands.
"Who was that, Kenrick?" said a sharp voice behind the man as the hansom drove away. Letty Tressady, elaborately dressed, with a huge white hat and lace parasol, was standing on the stairs, her pale face peering out of the shadows. The butler handed her the card, and telling him to get her a cab at once, she ran up again to the drawing-room.
Meanwhile Maxwell sped on towards Westminster, frowning over his problem. As he drove down Whitehall the sun brightened to a naked midday heat, throwing its cloak of mists behind it. The gilding on the Clock Tower sparkled in the light; even the dusty, airless street, with its withered planes, was on a sudden flooded with gaiety. Two or three official or Parliamentary acquaintances saluted the successful minister as he passed; and each was conscious of a certain impatience with the gravity of the well-known face. That a great man should not be content to look victory, as well as win it, seemed a kind of hypocrisy.
In the House of Commons, a few last votes and other oddments of the now dying session were being pushed through to an accompaniment of empty benches. Tressady was not there, nor in the library. Maxwell made his way to the upper lobby, where writing-tables and materials are provided in the window-recesses for the use of members.
He had hardly entered the lobby before he caught sight at its further end of the long straight chin and fair head of the man he was in quest of. And almost at the same moment, Tressady, who was sitting writing amid a pile of letters and papers, lifted his eyes and saw Lord Maxwell approaching.
He started, then half rose, scattering his papers. Maxwell bowed as he neared the table, then stopped beside it, without offering his hand.
"I fear I may be disturbing you," he said, with simple but cold courtesy. "The fact is I have come down here on an urgent matter, which may perhaps be my excuse. Could you give me twenty minutes, in my room?"
"By all means," said Tressady. He tried to put his papers together, but to his own infinite annoyance his hand shook. He seemed hardly to know what to do with them.
"Do not let me hurry you," said Maxwell, in the same manner. "Will you follow me at your leisure?"
"I will follow you immediately," said Tressady; "as soon as I have put these under lock and key."
His visitor departed. Tressady remained standing a moment by the table, his blue eyes, unusually wide open, fixed absently on the river, a dark red flush overspreading the face. Then he rapidly threw his papers together into a black bag that stood near, and walked with them to his locker in the wall.
For an hour after he left Marcella Maxwell he had wandered blindly up and down the Green Park; at the end of it a sudden impulse had driven him to the House, as his best refuge both from Letty and himself. There he found waiting for him a number of letters, and a sheaf of telegrams besides from his constituency, with which he had just begun to grapple when Maxwell interrupted him. Some hours of hard writing and thinking might, he thought, bring him by reaction to some notion of what to do with the next days and nights—how to take up the business of his private life again.
Now, as he withdrew his key from the lock, in a corridor almost empty of inhabitants, abstraction seized him once more. He leant against the wall a moment, with his hands in his pockets, seeing her face—the tears on her cheek—feeling the texture of her dress against his lips. Barely two hours ago! No doubt she had confided all to Maxwell in the interval. The young fellow burnt with mingled rage and shame. This interview with the husband seemed to transform it all to vaudeville, if not to farce. How was he to get through it with any dignity and self-command? Moreover, a passionate resentment towards Maxwell developed itself. His telling of his secret had been no matter for a common scandal, a vulgar jealousy. She knew that—she could not have so misrepresented him. A sense of the situation to which he had brought himself on all sides made his pride feel itself in the grip of something that asked his submission. Yet why, and to whom?
He walked along through the interminable corridors towards Maxwell's room in the House of Lords, a prey to what afterwards seemed to him the meanest moment of his life. Little knowing the pledges that a woman had given for him, he did say to himself that Maxwell owed him much—that he was not called upon to bear everything from a man he had given back to power. And all the time his thoughts built a thorn-hedge about her face, her pity. Let him see them no more, not even in the mirror of the mind. Great heaven! what harm could such as he do to her?
By the time he reached Maxwell's door he seemed to himself as hard and cool as usual. As he entered, the minister was standing by an oriel window, overlooking the river, turning over the contents of a despatch-box that had just been brought him. He advanced at once; and Tressady noticed that he had already dismissed his secretary.
"Will you sit by the window?" said Maxwell. "The day promises to be extraordinarily hot."
Tressady took the seat assigned him. Maxwell's grey eye ran over the young man's figure and bearing. Then he bent forward from a chair on the other side of a small writing-table.
"You will probably have guessed the reason of my intrusion upon you—you and I have already discussed this troublesome affair—and the kind manner in which you treated our anxieties then—"
"Ancoats!" exclaimed Tressady, with a start he could not control. "You wish to consult me about Ancoats?"
A flash of wonder crossed the other's mind. "He imagined—" Instinctively
Maxwell's opening mildness stiffened into a colder dignity.
"I fear we may be making an altogether improper claim upon you," he said quietly; "but this morning, about an hour ago, Ancoats's mother came to us with the news that he had left her two days ago, and was now discovered to be at Trouville, where he has a chalet, waiting for this girl, of whom we all know, to join him. You will imagine Mrs. Allison's despair. The entanglement is in itself bad enough. But she—I think you know it—is no ordinary woman, nor can she bring any of the common philosophy of life to bear upon this matter. It seems to be sapping her very springs of existence, and the impression she left upon myself—and upon Lady Maxwell"—he said the words slowly—"was one of the deepest pity and sorrow. As you also know, I believe, I have till now been able to bring some restraining influence to bear upon the girl, who is of course not a girl, but a very much married woman, with a husband always threatening to turn up and avenge himself upon her. There is a good man, one of those High Church clergymen who interest themselves specially in the stage, who has helped us many times already. I have telegraphed to him, and expect him here before long. We know that she has not yet left London, and it may be possible again, at the eleventh hour, to stop her. But that—"
"Is not enough," said Tressady, quickly, raising his head. "You want someone to grapple with Ancoats?"
Face and voice were those of another man—attentive, normal, sympathetic.
Maxwell observed him keenly.
"We want someone to go to Ancoats; to represent to him his mother's determination to leave him for good if this disgraceful affair goes on; to break the shock of the girl's non-arrival to him, if, indeed, we succeed in stopping her; and to watch him for a day or two, in case there should be anything in the miserable talk of suicide with which he seems to have been threatening his mother."
"Oh! Suicide! Ancoats!" said Tressady, throwing back his head.
"We rate him, apparently, much the same," said Maxwell, drily. "But it is not to be wondered at that the mother should be differently affected. She sent you"—the speaker paused a moment—"what seemed to me a touching message."
Tressady bent forward.
"'Tell him that I have no claim upon him—that I am ashamed to ask this of him. But he once said some kind words to me about my son, and I know that Ancoats desired his friendship. His help might save us. I can say no more.'"
Tressady looked up quickly, reddening involuntarily.
"Was Fontenoy there—did he agree?"
"Fontenoy agreed," said Maxwell, in the same measured voice. "In fact, you grasp our petition. To speak frankly, my wife suggested it, and I was deputed to bear it to you. But I need not say that we are quite prepared to find that you are not able to do what we have ventured to ask of you, or that your engagements will not permit it."
A strange gulp rose in Tressady's throat. He understood—oh! he understood her—perfectly.
He leant back in his chair, looking through the open window to the Thames. A breeze had risen and was breaking up the thunderous sky into gay spaces of white and blue. The river was surging and boiling under the tide, and strings of barges were mounting with the mounting water, slipping fast along the terrace wall. The fronts of the various buildings opposite rose in shadow against the dazzling blue and silver of the water. Here over the river, even for this jaded London, summer was still fresh; every mast and spar, every track of boat or steamer in the burst of light, struck the eye with sharpness and delight.
Each line and hue printed itself on Tressady's brain. Then he turned slowly to his companion. Maxwell sat patiently waiting for his reply; and for the first time Tressady received, as it were, a full impression of a personality he had till now either ignored or disliked. In youth Maxwell had never passed for a handsome man. But middle life and noble habit were every year giving increased accent and spiritual energy to the youth's pleasant features; and Nature as she silvered the brown hair, and drove deep the lines of thought and experience, was bringing more than she took away. A quiet, modest fellow Maxwell would be to the end; not witty; not brilliant; more and more content to bear the yoke of the great commonplaces of life as subtlety and knowledge grew; saying nothing of spiritual things, only living them—yet a man, it seemed, on whom England would more and more lay the burden of her fortunes.
Tressady gazed at him, shaken with new reverences, new compunctions. Maxwell's eyes were drawn to his—mild, penetrating eyes, in which for an instant Tressady seemed to read what no words would ever say to him. Then he sprang up.
"There is an afternoon train put on this month. I can catch it. Tell me, if you can, a few more details."
Maxwell took out a half-sheet of notes from his pocket, and the two men standing together beside the table went with care into a few matters it was well for Tressady to know. Tressady threw a quick intelligence into his questions that inevitably recalled to Maxwell the cut-and-thrust of his speech on the preceding evening; nor behind his rapid discussion of a vulgar business did the constrained emotion of his manner escape his companion.
At last all was settled. At the last moment an uneasy question rose in Maxwell's mind. "Ought we, at such a crisis, to be sending him away from his wife?" But he could not bring himself to put it, even lightly, into words, and as it happened Tressady did not leave him in doubt.
"I am glad you caught me," he said nervously, in what seemed an awkward pause, while he looked for his hat, forgetting where he had put it. "I was intending to leave London to-night. But my business can very well wait till next week. Now I think I have everything."
He gathered up a new Guide-Chaix that Maxwell had put into his hand, saw that the half-sheet of notes was safely stowed into his pocket-book, and took up his hat and stick. As he spoke, Maxwell had remembered the situation and Mrs. Allison's remark. No doubt Tressady had proposed to go north that night on a mission of explanation to his Market Malford constituents, and it struck one of the most scrupulous of men with an additional pang, that he should be thus helping to put private motives in the way of public duty. But what was done was done. And it seemed impossible that either should speak a word of politics.
"I ought to say," said Tressady, pausing once more as they moved together towards the door, "that I have not ultimately much hope for Mrs. Allison. If this entanglement is put aside, there will be something else. Trouville itself, in August, I should imagine, is a place of bonnes fortunes for the man who wants them, and Ancoats's mind runs to such things."
He spoke with a curious eagerness, like one who pleads that his good-will shall not be judged by mere failure or success.
Maxwell raised his shoulders.
"Nothing that can happen will in the least affect our gratitude to you," he said gravely.
"Gratitude!" muttered the young man under his breath. His lip trembled. He looked uncertainly at his companion. Maxwell did not offer his hand, yet as he opened the door for his visitor there was a quiet cordiality and kindness in his manner that made his renewed words of thanks sound like a strange music in Tressady's ears.
* * * * *
When the minister was once more alone he walked back to the window, and stood looking down thoughtfully on the gay pageant of the river. She was right—she was always right. There was nothing vile in that young fellow, and his face had a look of suffering it pained Maxwell to remember. Why had he personally not come to know him better? "I think too little of men, too much of machinery," he said to himself, despondently; "unconsciously I leave the dealing with human beings far too often to her, and then I wonder that a man sees and feels her as she is!"
Yet as he stood there in the sunshine a feeling of moral relief stole upon him, the feeling that rewards a man who has tried to deal greatly with some common and personal strait. Some day, not yet, he would make Tressady his friend. He calmly felt it to be within his power.
Unless the wife!—He threw up his hand, and turned back to his writing-table. What was to be done with that letter? Had Tressady any knowledge of it? Maxwell could not conceive it possible that he had. But, no doubt, it would come to his knowledge, as well as Maxwell's reply.
For he meant to reply, and as he glanced at the clock on his table he saw that he had just half an hour before his clergyman-visitor arrived. Instantly, in his methodical way, he sat down to his task, labouring it, however, with toil and difficulty, when it was once begun.
The few words he ultimately wrote ran as follows:
"Dear Lady Tressady,—Your letter was a great surprise and a great pain to me. I believe you will recognise before long that you wrote it under a delusion, and that you have said in it both unkind and unjust things of one who is totally incapable of wronging you or anyone else. My wife read your letter, for she and I have no secrets. She will try and see you at once, and I trust you will not refuse to see her. She will prove to you, I think, that you have been giving yourself quite needless torture, for which she has no responsibility, but for which she is none the less sorrowful and distressed.
"I have treated your letter in this way because it is impossible to ignore the pain and trouble which drove you to write. I need not say that if it became necessary for me to write or act in another way, I should think only of my wife. But I will trust to the effect upon you of her own words and character; and I cannot believe that you will misconstrue the generosity that prompts her to go to you.
"Is it not possible, also, that your misunderstanding of your husband may be in its own way as grave as your misunderstanding of Lady Maxwell? Forgive an intrusive question, and believe me,
"Yours faithfully,
"MAXWELL."
He read it anxiously over and over, then took a hasty copy of it, and finally sealed and sent it. He was but half satisfied with it. How was one to write such a letter without argument or recrimination? The poor thing had a vulgar, spiteful, little soul; that was clear from her outpouring. It was also clear that she was miserable; nor could Maxwell disguise from himself that in a sense she had ample cause. From that hard fact, with all its repellent and unpalatable consequences, a weaker man would by now have let his mind escape, would at any rate have begun to minimise and make light of George Tressady's act of the morning. In Maxwell, on the contrary, after a first movement of passionate resentment which had nothing whatever in common with ordinary jealousy, that act was now generating a compelling and beneficent force, that made for healing and reparation. Marcella had foreseen it, and in her pain and penitence had given the impulse. For all things are possible to a perfect affection, working through a nature at once healthy and strong.
Yet when Maxwell was once more established in his room at the Privy Council, overwhelmed with letters, interviews, and all the routine of official business, those who had to do with him noticed an unusual restlessness in their even-tempered chief. In truth, whenever his work left him free for a moment, all sorts of questions would start up in his mind: "Is she there? Is that woman hurting and insulting her? Can I do nothing? My love! my poor love!"
* * * * *
But Marcella's plans so far had not prospered.
When George Tressady, after hastily despatching his most urgent business at the House, drove up to his own door in the afternoon just in time to put his things together and catch a newly-put-on dining-train to Paris, he found the house deserted. The butler reminded him that Letty accompanied by Miss Tulloch had gone to Hampton Court to join a river party for the day. George remembered; he hated the people she was to be with, and instinct told him that Cathedine would be there.
A rush of miserable worry overcame him. Ought he to be leaving her?
Then, in the darkness of the hall, he caught sight of a card lying on the table. Her card! Amazement made him almost dizzy, while the man at his arm explained.
"Her ladyship called just after luncheon. She thought she would have found my lady in—before she went out. But her ladyship is coming again, probably this evening, as she wished to see Lady Tressady particularly."
Tressady gave the man directions to pack for him immediately, then took the card into his study, and stood looking at it in a tumult of feeling. Ah! let him begone—out of her way! Oh, heavenly goodness and compassion! It seemed to him already that an angel had trodden this dark house, and that another air breathed in it.
That was his first thought. Then the rush of sore longing, of unbearable self-contempt, stirred all his worser self to life again. Had she not better after all have left him and Letty alone! What did such lives as theirs matter to her?
He ran upstairs to make his last preparations, wrote a few lines to Letty describing Mrs. Allison's plight and the errand on which he was bound, and in half an hour was at Charing Cross.
CHAPTER XX
"Did you ring, my lady?"
"Yes. Kenrick, if Lady Maxwell calls to see me to-night, you will say, please, that I am particularly engaged, and unable to receive anyone."
Letty Tressady had just come in from her river party. Dressed in a delicate gown of lace and pale green chiffon, she was standing beside her writing-table with Lady Maxwell's card in her hand. Kenrick had given it to her on her arrival, together with the message which had accompanied it, and she had taken a few minutes to think it over. As she gave the man his order, the energy of the small figure, as it half turned towards the door, the brightness of the eyes under the white veil she had just thrown back, no less than the emphasis of her tone, awakened in the butler the clear perception that neither the expected visit nor his mistress's directions were to be taken as ordinary affairs. After he left the drawing-room, Grier passed him on the stairs. He gave her a slight signal, and the two retired to some nether region to discuss the secrets of their employers.
Meanwhile Letty, having turned on the electric light in the room, walked to the window and set it half open behind the curtain. In that way she would hear the carriage approaching, it was between eight and nine o'clock. No doubt Lady Maxwell would drive round after dinner.
Then, still holding the card lightly in her hand, she threw herself on the sofa. She was tired, but so excited that she could not rest—first, by the memory of the day that had just passed; still more by the thought of the rebuff she was about to administer to the great lady who had affronted her. No doubt her letter had done its work. The remembrance of it tilled her with an uneasy joy. Did George know of it by now? She did not care. Lady Maxwell, of course, was coming to try and appease her, to hush it up. There had been a scene, it was to be supposed, between her and her stiff husband. Letty gloated over the dream of it. Tears, humiliation, reproaches, she meted them all out in plenty to the woman she hated. Nor would things end there. Why, London was full of gossip! Harding's paragraph—for of course it was Harding's—had secured that. How clever of him! Not a name!—not a thing that could be taken hold of!—yet so clear. Well!—if she, Letty, was to be trampled on and set aside, at any rate other people should suffer too.
So George had gone off to France, leaving her alone, without "Good-bye." She did not believe a word of his excuse; and, if it were true, it was only another outrage that he should have thought twice of such a matter at such a crisis. But it was probably a mere device of his and hers—she would find out for what.
Her state of tension was too great to allow her to stay in the same place for more than a few minutes. She got up, and went to the glass before the mantelpiece. Taking out the pins that held her large Gainsborough hat, she arranged her hair with her hands, putting the curls of the fringe in their right place, fastening up some stray ends. She had given orders, as we have seen, to admit no one, and was presumably going to bed. Nevertheless, her behaviour was instinctively the behaviour of one who expects a guest.
When, more or less to her satisfaction, she had restored the symmetry of the little curled and crimped head, she took her face between her hands, and stared at her own reflection. Memories of the party she had just left, of the hot river, the slowly filling locks, the revelry, the champagne, danced in her mind, especially of a certain walk through a wood. She defiantly watched the face in the glass grow red, the eyelids quiver. Then, like the tremor from some volcanic fire far within, a shudder ran through her. She dropped her head on her hands. She hated—hated him! Was it to-morrow evening she had told him he might come? She would go down to Ferth.
Wheels in the quiet street! Letty flew to the window like an excited child, her green and white twinkling through the room.
A brougham, and a tall figure in black stepping slowly out of it. Letty sheltered herself behind a curtain, held her breath, and listened.
Presently her lower lip dropped a little. What was Kenrick about? The front door had closed, and Lady Maxwell had not re-entered her carriage.
She opened the drawing-room door with care, and was stooping over the banisters when she saw Kenrick on the stairs. He seemed to be coming from the direction of George's study.
"What have you been doing?" she asked him in a hard under-voice, looking at him angrily. "I told you not to let Lady Maxwell in."
"I told her, my lady, that you were engaged and could see no one. Then her ladyship asked if she might write a few lines to you and send them up, asking when you would be able to see her. So I showed her into Sir George's study, my lady, and she is writing at Sir George's desk."
"You should have done nothing of the sort," said Letty, sharply. "What is that letter?"
She took it from his hand before the butler, somewhat bewildered by the responsibilities of his position, could explain that he had just found it in the letterbox, where it might have been lying some little time, as he had heard no knock.
She let him go downstairs again, to await Lady Maxwell's exit, and herself ran back to read her letter, her heart beating, for the address of the sender was on the envelope.
When she had finished she threw it down, half suffocating.
"So I am to be lectured and preached to besides. Good heavens! In his lofty manner, I suppose, that people talk of. Prig—odious, insufferable prig! So I have mistaken George, have I? My own husband! And insulted her—her! And she is actually downstairs, writing to me, in my own house!"
She locked her hands, and began stormily to pace the room again. The image of her rival, only a few feet from her, bending over George's table, worked in her with poisonous force. Suddenly she swept to the bell and rang it. A door opened downstairs. She ran to the landing.
"Kenrick!"
"Yes, my lady." She heard a pause, and the soft rustle of a dress.
"Tell Lady Maxwell, please"—she struggled hard for the right, the dignified tone—"that if it is not too late for her to stay, I am now able to see her."
She hurried back into the drawing-room and waited. Would she come? Letty's whole being was now throbbing with one mad desire. If Kenrick let her go!
But steps approached; the door was thrown open.
Marcella Maxwell came in timidly, very pale, the dark eyes shrinking from the sudden light of the drawing-room. She was bareheaded, and wore a long cloak of black lace over her white evening dress. Letty's flash of thought as she saw her was twofold: first, hatred of her beauty, then triumph in the evident nervousness with which her visitor approached her.
Without making the slightest change of position, the mistress of the house spoke first.
"Will you please tell me," she said, in her sharpest, thinnest voice, "to what I owe the honour of this visit?"
Marcella paused half-way towards her hostess.
"I read your letter to my husband," she said quietly, though her voice shook, "and I thought you would hardly refuse to let me speak to you about it."
"Then perhaps you will sit down," said Letty, in the same voice; and she seated herself.
If she had wished to heighten the effect of her reception by these small discourtesies she did not succeed. Rather, Marcella's self-possession returned under them. She looked round simply for a chair, brought one forward within speaking distance of her companion, moving once more, in her thin, tall grace, with all that unconscious dignity Letty had so often envied and admired from a distance.
But neither dignity nor grace made any bar to the emotion that filled her. She bent forward, clasping her hands on her knee.
"Your letter to my husband made me so unhappy—that I could not help coming," she said, in a tone that was all entreaty, all humbleness. "Not—of course—that it seemed to either of us a true or just account of what had happened"—she drew herself up gently—"but it made me realise—though indeed I had realised it before I read it—that in my friendship with your husband I had been forgetting—forgetting those things—one ought to remember most. You will let me put things, won't you, in my own way, as they seem to me? At Castle Luton Sir George attracted me very much. The pleasure of talking to him there first made me wish to try and alter some of his views—to bring him across my poor people—to introduce him to our friends. Then, somehow, a special bond grew up between him and me with regard to this particular struggle in which my husband and I"—she dropped her eyes that she might not see Letty's heated face—"have been so keenly interested. But what I ought to have felt—from the very first—was, that there could be, there ought to have been, something else added. Married people "—she spoke hurriedly, her breath rising and falling—"are not two, but one—and my first step should have been to come—and—and ask you to let me know you too—to find out what your feelings were, whether you wished for a friendship—that—that I had perhaps no right to offer to Sir George alone. I have been looking into my own heart"—her voice trembled again—"and I see that fault, that great fault. To be excluded myself from any strong friendship my husband might make, would be agony to me!" The frank, sudden passion of her lifted eyes sent a thrill even through Letty's fierce and hardly, kept silence. "And that I wanted to say to you, first of all. I wronged my own conception of what marriage should be, and you were quite, quite right to be angry!"
"Well, I think it's quite clear, isn't it, that you forgot from the beginning George had a wife?" cried Letty, in her most insulting voice. "That certainly can't be denied. Anybody could see that at Castle Luton!"
Marcella looked at her in perplexity. What could suggest to her how to say the right word, touch the right chord? Would she be able to do more than satisfy her own conscience and then go, leaving this strange little fury to make what use she pleased of her visit and her avowals?
She shaded her eyes with her hand a moment, thinking. Then she said:
"Perhaps it is of no use for me to ask you to remember how full our minds—my husband's and mine—have been of one subject—one set of ideas. But, if I am not keeping you too long, I should like to give you an account, from my point of view, of the friendship between Sir George and myself. I think I can remember every talk of ours, from our first meeting in the hospital down to—down to this morning."
"This morning!" cried Letty, springing up. "This morning! He went to you to-day?"
The little face convulsed with passion raised an intolerable distress in Marcella.
"Yes, he came to see me," she said, her dark eyes, full of pain, full, too, once more, of entreaty, fixed upon her interrogator. "But do let me tell you! I never saw anyone in deeper trouble—trouble about you—trouble about himself."
Letty burst into a wild laugh.
"Of course! No doubt he went to complain of me—that I flirted—that I ill-treated his mother—that I spent too much money—and a lot of other pleasant little things. Oh! I can imagine it perfectly. Besides that, I suppose he went to be thanked. Well, he deserved that. He has thrown away his career to please you; so if you didn't thank him, you ought! Everybody says his position in Parliament now isn't worth a straw—that he must resign—which is delightful, of course, for his wife. And I saw it all from the beginning—I understood exactly what you wanted to do at Castle Luton—only I couldn't believe then—I was only six weeks married—"
A wave of excitement and self-pity swept over her. She broke off with a sob.
Marcella's heart was wrung. She knew nothing of the real Letty Tressady. It was the wife as such, slighted and set aside, that appealed to the imagination, the remorse of this happy, this beloved woman. She rose quickly, she held out her hands, looking down upon the little venomous creature who had been pouring these insults upon her.