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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ces, 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 n.o.body wanted, and of cries that stirred n.o.body"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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sion, 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 a.s.sistance 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 pa.s.sed 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."