And, stretching her slim neck, she turned and gave her husband a tiny flying kiss on the cheek. Mechanically grateful, George took her hand in his, but he did not make her the pretty speech she expected. Just before she spoke he was about to tell her of his evening--of the meeting, and of his drive home with Lady Maxwell. He had been far too proud hitherto, and far too confident in himself, to make any secret to Letty of what he did.
And, luckily, she had raised no difficulties. In truth, she had been too well provided with amus.e.m.e.nts and flatteries of her own since their return from the country to leave her time or opportunities for jealousy.
Perhaps, secretly, the young husband would have been more flattered if she had been more exacting.
But as she quoted Harding something stiffened in him. Later, after the ball, when they were alone, he would tell her--he would try and make her understand what sort of a woman Marcella Maxwell was. In his trouble of mind a confused plan crossed his thoughts of trying to induce Lady Maxwell to make friends with Letty. But a touch of that charm, that poetry!--he asked no more.
He glanced at his wife. She looked pretty and young as she sat beside him, lost in a pleasant pondering of social successes. But he wondered, uncomfortably, why she must use such a thickness of powder on her still unspoilt complexion; and her dress seemed to him fantastic, and not over-modest. He had begun to have the strangest feeling about their relation, as though he possessed a double personality, and were looking on at himself and her, wondering how it would end. It was characteristic, perhaps, of his half-developed moral life that his sense of ordinary husbandly responsibility towards her was not strong. He always thought of her as he thought of himself--as a perfectly free agent, dealing with him and their common life on equal terms.
The house to which they were going belonged to very wealthy people, and Letty was looking forward feverishly to the cotillon.
"They say, at the last dance they gave, the cotillon gifts cost eight hundred pounds," she said gleefully, to George. "They always do things extraordinarily well."
No doubt it was the prospect of the cotillon that had brought such a throng together. The night was stifling; the stairs and the supper-room were filled with a struggling mob; and George spent an hour of purgatory wondering at the gaieties of his cla.s.s.
He had barely more than two glimpses of Letty after they had fought their way into the room. On the first occasion, by stretching himself to his full height so as to look over the intervening crowd, he saw her seated in a chair of state, a mirror in one hand and a lace handkerchief in the other. Young men were being brought up behind her to look into the gla.s.s over her shoulder, and she was merrily brushing their images away.
Presently a tall, dark fellow advanced, with jet-black moustache and red cheeks. Letty kept her handkerchief suspended a moment over the reflection in the gla.s.s. George could see the corners of her lips twitching with amus.e.m.e.nt. Then she quietly handed the mirror to the leader of the cotillon, rose, gathered up her white skirt a little, the music struck up joyously, and she and Lord Cathedine spun round the room together, followed by the rest of the dancers.
George meanwhile found few people to talk to. He danced a few dances, mostly with young girls in the white frocks of their first season--a species of partner for which, as a rule, he had no affinity at all. But on the whole he pa.s.sed the time leaning against the wall in a corner, lost in a reverie which was a vague compound of this and that, there and here; of the Manx Road schoolroom, its odours and heats, its pale, uncleanly crowd absorbed in the things of daily bread, with these gay, scented rooms, and this extravagance of decoration, that made even flowers a vulgarity, with these costly cotillon gifts--pins, bracelets, rings--that were being handed round and wondered over by people who had already more of such things than they could wear; of these rustling women, in their silks and diamonds, with that gaunt stooping image of the loafer"s wife, smiling her queer defiance at pain and fate, and letting meddling "lidies" know that without sixteen hours" "settin" she could not keep her husband and children alive. Stale commonplace, that all the world knows by heart!--the squalor of the _pauperum tabernae_ dimming the glory of the _regum turres_. Yet there are only a few men and women in each generation who really pa.s.s into the eclipsing shadow of it. Others talk--_they_ feel and struggle. There were many elements in Tressady"s nature that might seem destined to force him into their company. Yet hitherto he had resolutely escaped his destiny--and enjoyed his life.
About supper-time he found himself near Lady Cathedine, a thin-faced, silent creature, whose eyes suddenly attracted him. He took her down to supper, and spent an exceedingly dull time. She had the air of one pining to talk, to confide herself. Yet in practice it was apparently impossible for her to do it. She fell back into monosyllables or gentle ba.n.a.lities; and George noticed that she was always restlessly conscious of the movements in the room--who came in, who went out--and throwing little frightened glances towards the door.
He was glad indeed when his task was over. On their way to the drawing-rooms they pa.s.sed a broad landing, which on one side led out to a balcony, and had been made into a decorated bower for sitting-out. At the farther end he saw Letty sitting beside Harding Watton. Letty was looking straight before her, with a flushed and rather frowning face.
Harding was talking to her, and, to judge from his laughing manner, was amusing himself, if not her.
George duly found Lady Cathedine a seat, and returned himself to ask Letty whether it was not time to go. He found, however, that she had been carried off by another partner, and could only resign himself to a fresh twenty minutes of boredom. He leant, yawning, against the wall, feeling the evening interminable.
Then a Harrow and Oxford acquaintance came up to him, and they chatted for a time behind a stand of flowers that stood between them and one of the doorways to the ballroom. At the end of the dance George saw Lady Cathedine hurrying up to this door with the quick, furtive step that was characteristic of her. She pa.s.sed on the other side of the flowers, and George heard her say to someone just inside the room:
"Robert, the carriage has come!"
A pause; then a thick voice said, in an emphatic undertone:
"d.a.m.n the carriage!--go away!"
"But, Robert, you know we _promised_ to look in at Lady Tuam"s on the way home."
The thick voice dropped a note lower.
"d.a.m.n Lady Tuam! I shall come when it suits me."
Lady Cathedine fell back, and George saw her cross the landing, and drop into a chair beside an old general, who was snoozing in a peaceful corner till his daughters should see fit to take him home. The old general took no notice of her, and she sat there, playing with her fan, her rather prominent grey eyes staring out of her white face.
Both George and his friend, as it happened, had heard the conversation.
The friend raised his eyebrows in disgust.
"What a brute that fellow is! They have been married four months.
However, she was amply warned."
"Who was she?"
"The daughter of old Wickens, the banker. He married her for her money, and lives upon it religiously. By now, I should think, he has dragged her through every torture that marriage admits of."
"So soon?" said George, drily.
"Well," said the friend, laughing, "no doubt it admits of a great many."
"I am ready to go home," said a voice at Tressady"s elbow.
Something in the intonation surprised him, and he turned quickly.
"By all means," he said, throwing an astonished look at his wife, who had come up to him on Lord Cathedine"s arm. "I will go and look for the carriage."
What was the matter, he asked himself as he ran downstairs--what was the meaning of Letty"s manner and expression?
But by the time he had sent for the carriage the answer had suggested itself. No doubt Harding Watton had given Letty news of that hansom in Pall Mall, and no doubt, also--He shrugged his shoulders in annoyance.
The notion of having to explain and excuse himself was particularly unpalatable. What a fool he had been not to tell Letty of his East End adventure on their way to Queen"s Gate.
He was standing in a little crowd at the foot of the stairs when Letty swept past him in search of her wraps. He smiled at her, but she held her head erect as though she did not see him.
So there was to be a scene. George felt the rise of a certain inner excitement. Perhaps it was as well. There were a good many things he wanted to say.
At the same time, the Cathedine episode had filled him with a new disgust for the violences and brutalities to which the very intimacy of the marriage relation may lead. If a scene there was to be, he meant to be more or less frank, and at the same time to keep both himself and her within bounds.
"You can"t deny that you made a secret of it from me," cried Letty, angrily. "I asked you what had been doing in the House, and you never let me suspect that you had been anywhere else the whole evening."
"I daresay," said George, quietly. "But I never meant to make any mystery. Something you said about Lady Maxwell put me off telling you--then. I thought I would wait till we got home."
They were in George"s study--the usual back-room on the ground-floor, which George could not find time to make comfortable, while Letty had never turned her attention to it. Tressady was leaning against the mantelpiece. He had turned up a solitary electric light, and in the cold glare of it Letty was sitting opposite to him, angrily upright. The ugly light had effaced the half-tones of the face and deepened the lines of it, while it had taken all the grace from her extravagant dress and tumbled flowers. She seemed to have lost her prettiness.
"Something I said about Lady Maxwell?" she repeated scornfully. "Why shouldn"t I say what I like about Lady Maxwell? What does she matter either to you or to me that I should not laugh at her if I please?
Everybody laughs at her."
"I don"t think so," said Tressady, quietly. "I have seen her to-night in a curious and touching scene--in a meeting of very poor people. She tried to make a speech, by the way, and spoke badly. She did not carry the meeting with her, and towards the end it got noisy. As we came out she was struck with a stone, and I got a hansom for her, and drove her home to St. James"s Square. We were just turning into the Square when Harding saw us. I happened to be with her in the crowd when the stone hit her.
What do you suppose I could do but bring her home?"
"Why did you go? and why didn"t you tell me at once?"
"Why did I go?" Tressady hesitated, then looked down upon his wife.
"Well!--I suppose I went because Lady Maxwell is very interesting to watch--because she is sympathetic and generous, and it stirs one"s mind to talk to her."
"Not at all!" cried Letty, pa.s.sionately. "You went because she is handsome--because she is just a superior kind of flirt. She is always making women anxious about their husbands under this pretence of politics. Heaps of women hate her, and are afraid of her."
She was very white, and could hardly save herself from the tears of excitement. Yet what was working in her was not so much Harding Watton"s story as this new and strange manner of her husband"s. She had sat haughtily silent in the carriage on their way home, fully expecting him to question her--to explain, entreat, excuse himself, as he had generally been ready to do whenever she chose to make a quarrel. But he, too, said nothing, and she could not make up her mind how to begin. Then, as soon as they were shut into his room her anger had broken out, and he had not yet begun to caress and appease her. Her surprise had brought with it a kind of shock. What was the matter? Why was she not mistress as usual?
As she made her remark about Marcella, Tressady smiled a little, and played with a cigarette he had taken up.
"Whom do you mean?" he asked her. "One often hears these things said of her in the vague, and never with any details. I myself don"t believe it.
Harding, of course, believes anything to her disadvantage."