She shook hands unconsciously with him and with Louis. The two Cravens turned to the door. Wharton advanced into the room, and let them pa.s.s.
"You have been in a hurry to tell your story!" he said, as Louis walked by him.
Contemptuous hate breathed from every feature, but he was perfectly self-controlled.
"Yes--" said Craven, calmly--"Now it is your turn."
The door was no sooner shut than Wharton strode forward and caught her hand.
"They have told you everything? Ah!--"
His eye fell upon the evening paper. Letting her go, he felt for a chair and dropped into it. Throwing himself back, his hands behind his head, he drew a long breath and his eyes closed. For the first time in his life or hers she saw him weak and spent like other men. Even his nerve had been worn down by the excitement of these five fighting hours. The eyes were lined and hollow--the brow contracted; the young roundness of the cheek was lost in the general pallor and patchiness of the skin; the lower part of the face seemed to have sharpened and lengthened,--and over the whole had pa.s.sed a breath of something aging and withering the traces of which sent a shiver through Marcella. She sat down near him, still in her nurse"s cloak, one trembling hand upon her lap.
"Will you tell me what made you do this?" she asked, not being able to think of anything else to say.
He opened his eyes with a start.
In that instant"s quiet the scene he had just lived through had been rushing before him again--the long table in the panelled committee-room, the keen angry faces gathered about it. Bennett, in his blue tie and shabby black coat, the clear moist eyes vexed and miserable--Molloy, small and wiry, business-like in the midst of confusion, cool in the midst of tumult--and Wilkins, a black, hectoring leviathan, thundering on the table as he flung his broad Yorkshire across it, or mouthing out Denny"s letter in the midst of the sudden electrical silence of some thirty amazed and incredulous hearers.
"_Spies,_ yo call us?" with a finger like a dart, threatening the enemy--"Aye; an" yo"re aboot reet! I and my friends--we _have_ been trackin" and spyin" for weeks past. We _knew_ those men, those starvin"
women and bairns, were bein" _sold_, but we couldn"t prove it. Now we"ve come at the how and the why of it! And we"ll make it harder for men like you to _sell "em again_! Yo call it infamy?--well, _we_ call it detection."
Then rattling on the inner ear came the phrases of the attack which followed on the director of "The People"s Banking a.s.sociation," the injured innocent of as mean a job, as unsavoury a bit of vulturous finance, as had cropped into publicity for many a year--and finally the last dramatic cry:
"But it"s noa matter, yo say! Mester Wharton has n.o.bbut played his party and the workin" man a dirty trick or two--_an" yo mun have a gentleman!_ Noa--the workin" man isn"t fit _himself_ to speak wi" his own enemies i"
th" gate--_yo mun have a gentleman_!--an" Mester Wharton, he says he"ll tak" the post, an" dea his best for yo--an", remember, _yo mun have a gentleman_! Soa now--Yes! or No!--wull yo?--or _woan"t yo_?"
And at that, the precipitation of the great unwieldy form half across the table towards Wharton"s seat--the roar of the speaker"s immediate supporters thrown up against the dead silence of the rest!
As to his own speech--he thought of it with a soreness, a disgust which penetrated to bones and marrow. He had been too desperately taken by surprise--had lost his nerve--missed the right tone throughout. Cool defiance, free self-justification, might have carried him through.
Instead of which--faugh!
All this was the phantom-show of a few seconds" thought. He roused himself from a miserable reaction of mind and body to attend to Marcella"s question.
"Why did I do it?" he repeated; "why--"
He broke off, pressing both his hands upon his brow. Then he suddenly sat up and pulled himself together.
"Is that tea?" he said, touching the tray. "Will you give me some?"
Marcella went into the back kitchen and called Minta. While the boiling water was brought and the tea was made, Wharton sat forward with his face on his hands and saw nothing. Marcella whispered a word in Minta"s ear as she came in. The woman paused, looked at Wharton, whom she had not recognised before in the dark--grew pale--and Marcella saw her hands shaking as she set the tray in order. Wharton knew nothing and thought nothing of Kurd"s widow, but to Marcella the juxtaposition of the two figures brought a wave of complex emotion.
Wharton forced himself to eat and drink, hardly speaking the while.
Then, when the tremor of sheer exhaustion had to some extent abated, he suddenly realised who this was that was sitting opposite to him ministering to him.
She felt his hand--his quick powerful hand--on hers.
"To _you_ I owe the whole truth--let me tell it!"
She drew herself away instinctively--but so softly that he did not realise it. He threw himself back once more in the chair beside her--one knee over the other, the curly head so much younger to-night than the face beneath it supported on his arms, his eyes closed again for rest--and plunged into the story of the _Clarion_.
It was admirably told. He had probably so rehea.r.s.ed it to himself several times already. He described his action as the result of a double influence working upon him--the influence of his own debts and necessities, and the influence of his growing conviction that the maintenance of the strike had become a blunder, even a misfortune for the people themselves.
"Then--just as I was at my wit"s end, conscious besides that the paper was on a wrong line, and must somehow be got out of it--came the overtures from the Syndicate. I knew perfectly well I ought to have refused them--of _course_ my whole career was risked by listening to them. But at the same time they gave me a.s.surances that the workpeople would ultimately gain--they proved to me that I was helping to extinguish the trade. As to the _money_--when a great company has to be launched, the people who help it into being get _paid_ for it--it is invariable--it happens every day. I like the system no more than you may do--or Wilkins. But consider. I was in such straits that _bankruptcy_ lay between me and my political future. Moreover--I had lost nerve, sleep, balance. I was scarcely master of myself when Pearson first broached the matter to me--"
"Pearson!" cried Marcella, involuntarily. She recalled the figure of the solicitor; had heard his name from Frank Leven. She remembered Wharton"s impatient words--"There is a tiresome man wants to speak to me on business--"
It was _then I_--that evening! Something sickened her.
Wharton raised himself in his chair and looked at her attentively with his young haggard eyes. In the faint lamplight she was a pale vision of the purest and n.o.blest beauty. But the lofty sadness of her face filled him with a kind of terror. Desire--impotent pain--violent resolve, swept across him. He had come to her, straight from the scene of his ruin, as to the last bulwark left him against a world bent on his destruction, and bare henceforward of all delights.
"Well, what have you to say to me?" he said, suddenly, in a low changed voice--"as I speak--as I look at you--I see in your face that you distrust--that you have judged me; those two men, I suppose, have done their work! Yet from you--_you_ of all people--I might look not only for justice--but--I will dare say it--for kindness!"
She trembled. She understood that he appealed to the days at Mellor, and her lips quivered.
"No," she exclaimed, almost timidly--"I try to think the best. I see the pressure was great."
"And consider, please," he said proudly, "what the reasons were for that pressure."
She looked at him interrogatively--a sudden softness in her eyes. If at that moment he had confessed himself fully, if he had thrown himself upon her in the frank truth of his mixed character--and he could have done it, with a Rousseau-like completeness--it is difficult to say what the result of this scene might have been. In the midst of shock and repulsion, she was filled with pity; and there were moments when she was more drawn to his defeat and undoing, than she had ever been to his success.
Yet how question him? To do so, would be to a.s.sume a right, which in turn would imply _his_ rights. She thought of that mention of "gambling debts," then of his luxurious habits, and extravagant friends. But she was silent. Only, as she sat there opposite to him, one slim hand propping the brow, her look invited him.
He thought he saw his advantage.
"You must remember," he said, with the same self-a.s.sertive bearing, "that I have never been a rich man, that my mother spent my father"s savings on a score of public objects, that she and I started a number of experiments on the estate, that my expenses as a member of Parliament are very large, and that I spent thousands on building up the _Clarion_.
I have been ruined by the _Clarion_, by the cause the _Clarion_ supported. I got no help from my party--where was it to come from? They are all poor men. I had to do everything myself, and the struggle has been more than flesh and blood could bear! This year, often, I have not known how to move, to breathe, for anxieties of every sort. Then came the crisis--my work, my usefulness, my career, all threatened. The men who hated me saw their opportunity. I was a fool and gave it them. And my enemies have used it--to the bitter end!"
Tone and gesture were equally insistent and strong. What he was saying to himself was that, with a woman of Marcella"s type, one must "bear it out." This moment of wreck was also with him the first moment of all-absorbing and desperate desire. To win her--to wrest her from the Cravens" influence--that had been the cry in his mind throughout his dazed drive from the House of Commons. Her hand in his--her strength, her beauty, the romantic reputation that had begun to attach to her, at his command--and he would have taken the first step to recovery, he would see his way to right himself.
Ah! but he had missed his chance! Somehow, every word he had been saying rang false to her. She could have thrown herself as a saving angel on the side of weakness and disaster which had spoken its proper language, and with a reckless and confiding truth had appealed to the largeness of a woman"s heart. But this patriot--ruined so n.o.bly--for such disinterested purposes--left her cold! She began to think even--hating herself--of the thousands he was supposed to have made in the gambling over that wretched company--no doubt for the "cause" too!
But before she could say a word he was kneeling beside her.
"_Marcella_ I give me my answer!--I am in trouble and defeat--be a woman, and come to me!"
He had her hands. She tried to recover them.
"No!" she said, with pa.s.sionate energy, "_that_ is impossible. I had written to you before you came, before I had heard a word of this.
Please, _please_ let me go!"
"Not till you explain!"--he said, still holding her, and roused to a white heat of emotion--"_why_ is it impossible? You said to me once, with all your heart, that you thanked me, that I had taught you, helped you. You cannot ignore the bond between us! And you are free. I have a right to say to you--you thirst to save, to do good--come and save a man that cries to you!--he confesses to _you_, freely enough, that he has made a hideous mistake--help him to redeem it!"
She rose suddenly with all her strength, freeing herself from him, so that he rose too, and stood glowering and pale.
"When I said that to you," she cried, "I was betraying "--her voice failed her an instant--"we were both false--to the obligation that should have held us--restrained us. No! _no!_ I will never be your wife!
We should hurt each other--poison each other!"