"Oh no! That boy was not an expert, luckily. How absurd the papers have been!"
George shook his head.
"I don"t know what else one could expect," he said, laughing.
"Not at all!"--the flush mounted in the delicate hollow of the cheek.
"Why should there be any more fuss about a woman"s being struck than a man? We don"t want any of this extra pity and talk."
"Human nature, I am afraid," said George, raising his shoulders. Did she really suppose that women could mix in the political fight on the same terms as men--could excite no more emotion there than men? Folly!
Then Maxwell, who was standing behind her, came forward, greeted Tressady kindly, and they talked for a few minutes about the evening"s debate. The keen look of the elder scanned the younger"s face and manner the while with some minuteness. As for George, his dialogue with the Minister, at which more than one pa.s.ser-by threw looks of interest and amus.e.m.e.nt, gave him no particular pleasure. Maxwell"s qualities were not of the kind that specially appealed to him; nor was he likely to attract Maxwell.
Nevertheless, he could have wished their ten minutes" talk to last interminably, merely because of the excuse it gave him to be near her!--played upon by her movements and her tones. He talked to Maxwell of speeches, and votes, and little incidents of the day. And all the time he knew how she was surrounded; how the crowd that was always gathering about her came and went; with whom she talked; above all, how that eager, sensitive charm which she had shown in its fulness to him--perhaps to him only, beside her husband, of all this throng--played through her look, her voice, her congratulations, and her dismays. For had he not seen her in distress and confusion--seen her in tears, wrestling with herself? His heart caressed the thought like a sacred thing, all the time that he was conscious of her as the centre of this political throng--the adored, detested, famous woman, typical in so many ways of changing custom and of an expanding world.
Then, in a flash, as it were, the crowd had thinned, the Maxwells had gone, and George was running down the steps of the members" entrance, into the rain outside. He seemed to carry with him the scent of a rose,--the rose she had worn on her breast,--and his mind was tormented with the question he had already asked himself: "How is it going to end?"
He pushed on through the wet streets, lost in a hundred miseries and exaltations. The sensation was that of a man struggling with a rising tide, carried helplessly in the rush and swirl of it. Yet conscience had very little to say, and, when it did speak, got little but contempt for its pains. What had any clumsy code, social or moral, to do with it? When would Marcella Maxwell, by word or look or thought, betray the man she loved? Not till
A" the seas gang dry, my dear, An the rocks melt wi" the sun!
How he found his way home he hardly knew; for it was a moment of blind crisis with him. All that crowded, dramatic scene of the House--its lights, its faces, its combinations--had vanished from his mind. What remained was a group of three people, contemplated in a kind of terror--terror of what this thing might grow to! Once, in St. James"s Street, the late hour, the soft, gusty night, suddenly reminded him of that other gusty night in February when he had walked home after his parting with Letty, so well content with himself and the future, and had spoken to Marcella Maxwell for the first time amid that little crowd in the Mall. Nothing had been irreparable then. He had his life in his hands.
As for this pa.s.sion, that was creeping into all his veins, poisoning and crippling all his vitalities, he was still independent enough of it to be able to handle it with the irony it deserved. For it was almost as ludicrous as it was pitiable. He did not want any man of the world, any Harding Watton, to tell him that.
What amazed him was the revelation of his own nature that was coming out of it. He had always been rather proud to think of himself as an easygoing fellow with no particular depths. Other men were proud of a "storm period"--of feasting and drinking deep--made a pose of it.
Tressady"s pose had been the very opposite. Out of a kind of good taste, he had wished to take life lightly, with no great emotion. And marriage with Letty had seemed to satisfy this particular canon.
Now, for the first time, certain veils were drawn aside, and he knew what this hunger for love, and love"s response, can do with a man--could do with _him_, were it allowed its scope!
Had Marcella Maxwell been another woman, less innocent, less secure!
As it was, Tressady no sooner dared to give a sensuous thought to her beauty than his own pa.s.sion smote him back--bade him beware lest he should be no longer fit to speak and talk with her, actually or spiritually. For in this hopeless dearth of all the ordinary rewards and encouragements of love he had begun to cultivate a sort of second, or spiritual, life, in which she reigned. Whenever he was alone he walked with her, consulted her, watched her dear eyes, and the soul playing through them. And so long as he could maintain this dream he was conscious of a sort of dignity, of reconciliation with himself; for the pa.s.sions and tragedies of the soul always carry with them this dignity, as Dante, of all mortals, knew first and best.
But with the turn into Upper Brook Street, the dream suddenly and painfully gave way. He saw his own house, and could forget Letty and the problem of his married life no more. What was he going to do with her and it? What relation was he going to establish with his wife, through all these years that stretched so interminably before them? Remorse mingled with the question. But perhaps impatience, still more--impatience of his own misery, of this maze of emotion in which he felt himself entangled, as it were against his will.
During the three days which had pa.s.sed since his quarrel with Letty, their common life had been such a mere confusion of jars and discomforts that George"s hedonist temper was almost at the end of its patience; yet so far, he thought, he had not done badly in the way of forbearance.
After the first moment of angry disgust, he had said to himself that the tearing up of the photograph was a jealous freak, which Letty had a right to if it pleased her. At any rate, he had made no comment whatever upon it, and had done his best to resume his normal manner with her the next day. She had been, apparently, only the more enraged; and, although there had been no open quarrelling since, her cutting, contemptuous little airs had been very hard to bear. Nor was it possible for George to ignore her exasperated determination to have her own way in the matter both of friends and expenses.
As he took his latch-key out of the lock, and turned up the electric light, he saw two handsome marqueterie chairs standing in the hall. He went to look at them in some perplexity. Ah! no doubt they had been sent as specimens. Letty had grown dissatisfied with the chairs originally bought for the dining-room. He remembered to have heard her say something about a costly set at a certain Asher"s, that Harding had found.
He studied them for a few moments, his mouth tightening. Then, instead of going upstairs, he went into his study, and sat down to his table to write a letter.
Yes--he had better go off to Staffordshire by the early train; and this letter, which he would put upon her writing-desk in the drawing-room, should explain him to Letty.
The letter was long and candid, yet by no means without tenderness. "I have written to Asher," it said, "to direct him to send in the morning for the chairs I found in the hall. They are too expensive for us, and I have told him that I will not buy them, I need not say that in writing to him I have avoided every word that could be annoying to you. If you would only trust me, and consult me a little about such things,--trifles as they be,--life just now would be easier than it is."
Then he pa.s.sed to a very frank statement of their financial position, and of his own steady resolve not to allow himself to drift into hopeless debt. The words were clear and sharp, but not more so than the course of the preceding six weeks made absolutely necessary. And their very sharpness led him to much repentant kindness at the end. No doubt she was disappointed both in him and in his circ.u.mstances; and, certainly, differences had developed between them that they had never foreseen at the time of their engagement. But to "make a good thing" of living together was never easy. He asked her not to despair, not to judge him hardly. He would do his best--let her only give him back her confidence and affection.
He closed the letter, and then paced restlessly about the little room for a time. It seemed to him that he was caught in a vice--that neither happiness, nor decent daily comfort, nor even the satisfactions of ambition, were ever to be his.
Next day he was off to Euston before Letty was properly awake. She found his letter waiting for her when she descended, and spent the day in a pale excitement. Yet by the end of it she had pretty well made up her mind. She would have to give in on the money question. George"s figures and her natural shrewdness convinced her that the ultimate results of fighting him in this matter could only be more uncomfortable for herself than for him. But as to her freedom in choosing her own friends, or as to her jealousy of Lady Maxwell, she would never give in. If George had ceased to court his wife, then he could have nothing to say if she looked for the amus.e.m.e.nt and admiration that were her due from other people. There was no harm in that. Everybody else did it; and she was not going to be pretty and young for nothing. Whereupon she sat down and wrote a line to Lord Cathedine to tell him that she and "Tully" would be at the Opera on the following night, and to beg him to make sure that she got her "cards for Clarence House." Moreover, she meant to make use of him to procure her a card for a very smart ball, the last of the season, which was coming off in a fortnight. That could be arranged, no doubt, at the Opera.
George returned from the North in a few days looking, if possible, thinner and more careworn than when he went. He had found the strike a very stubborn business. Burrows was riding the storm triumphantly; and while upon his own side Tressady looked in vain for a "man," there was a dogged determination to win among the masters. George"s pugnacity shared it fully. But he was beginning to ask himself a number of questions about these labour disputes which, apparently, his co-employers did not ask themselves. Was it that here, no less than in matters that concerned the Bill before Parliament, _her_ influence, helped by the power of an expanding mind, had developed in him that fatal capacity for sympathy, for the double-seeing of compromise, which takes from a man all the joy of battle.
Letty, at any rate, was not troubled by anything of the sort. When he came back he found that she was ready to be on fairly amicable terms with him. Moreover, she had postponed the more expensive improvements and changes she had begun to make at Perth against his will; nor was there any sign of the various new purchases for the London house with which she had threatened him. On the other hand, she ceased to consult him about her own engagements; and she let him know, though without any words on the subject, that she had entirely broken with his mother--would neither see her nor receive her. As her att.i.tude on this point involved--or, apparently, must involve--a refusal to accept her husband"s statement made solemnly under strong emotion, George"s pride took it in absolute silence. No doubt it was her revenge upon him for their crippled income--and for Lady Maxwell.
The effect of her behaviour on this point was to increase his own pity for his mother. He told her frankly that Letty could not get over the inroads upon their income and the shortening of their resources produced by the Shapetsky debt, just at a time when they should have been able to spend, and were already hampered by the state of the coal trade. It would be better that she and Letty should not meet for a time. He would do his best to make it up.
Lady Tressady took his news with a curious equanimity.
"Well, she always hated me!" she said--"I don"t exactly know why--and was a little jealous of my gowns, too, I think. Don"t mind, George. I must say it out. You know, she doesn"t really dress very well--Letty doesn"t.
Though, my goodness, the bills! Wait till you see them before you call _me_ extravagant. You should make her go to that new woman--what do they call her? She"s a _darling_, and such a style! Never mind about Letty; you needn"t bother. I daresay she isn"t very nice to _you_ about it. But if you don"t come and see me, I shall cut my throat, and leave a note on the dressing-table. It would spoil your career dreadfully, so you"d better take care."
But, indeed, George came, without any pressing, almost every day. He saw her in her bursts of gaiety and affectation, when the habits of a lifetime a.s.serted themselves as strongly as ever; and he saw her in her moments of pain and collapse, when she could hide the omens of inexorable physical ill neither from herself nor him. By the doctor"s advice, he ceased to press her to give in, to resign herself to bed and invalidism.
It was best, even physically, to let her struggle on. And he was both astonished and touched by her pluck. She had never been so repellent to him as on those many occasions in the past when she had feigned illness to get her way. Now that Death was really knocking, the half-gay, half-frightened defiance with which she walked the palace of life, one moment listening to the sounds at the gate, the next throwing herself pa.s.sionately into the revelry within, revealed to the son a new fact about her--a fact of poetry unutterably welcome.
Even her fawning dependents, the Fullertons, ceased to annoy him. They were poor parasites, but she thought for them, and they professed to love her in return. She had emptied her life of finer things, but this relation of patron and flatterer, such as it was, did something to fill the vacancy; and George made no further effort to disturb it.
It was surprising, indeed, how easily, as the weeks went on, he came to bear many of those ways of hers which had once set him most on edge--even her absurd outbursts of affection towards him, and preposterous praise of him in public. In time he submitted even to being flown at and kissed before the Fullertons. Amazing into what new relations that simple perspective of _the end_ will throw all the stuff of life!
In Parliament the weeks rushed by. The first and comparatively non-contentious sections of the Bill pa.s.sed with a good deal of talk and delay. George spoke once or twice, without expecting to speak, instinctively pleasing Fontenoy where he could. They had now but little direct intercourse. But George did not feel that his leader had become his enemy, and was not slow to recognise a magnanimity he had not foreseen. Yet, after all, he had not offered the worst affront to party discipline. Fontenoy could still count on his vote. As to the rest of his party, he saw that he was to be finally reckoned as a "crank," and let alone. It was not, he found, altogether to be regretted. The position gave him a new freedom of speech.
Meanwhile he and Marcella Maxwell rarely met. Week after week pa.s.sed, and still Tressady avoided those gatherings at the Mile End house, of which he heard full accounts from Edward Watton. He once formally asked Letty if she would go with him to one of Lady Maxwell"s East End "evenings,"
and she, with equal formality, refused. But he did not take advantage of her refusal to go himself. Was it fear of his own weakness, or compunction towards Letty, or the mere dread of being betrayed into something at once ridiculous and irreparable?
At the same time, it was surprising how often during these weeks he had occasion to pa.s.s through St. James"s Square. Once or twice he saw her go out or come in, and sometimes was near enough to catch the sudden smile and look which surely must be the smile and look she gave her friends, and not to every pa.s.sing stranger! Once or twice, also, he met her for a few minutes in the Lobby, or on the Terrace, but always in a crowd. She never repeated her invitation. He divined that she was, perhaps, vexed with herself for having seemed to press the point on the night of the second reading.
July drew to an end. The famous "workshop clause" had been debated for nearly ten days, the whole country, as it were, joining in. One evening in the last week of the month Naseby and Lady Madeleine were sitting together in a corner of a vast drawing-room in Carlton House Terrace.
The drawing-room was Mrs. Allison"s. She had returned about a fortnight before from Bad Wildheim, and was now making an effort, for the boy"s sake, to see some society. As she moved about the room in her black silk and lace she was more gentle, but in a sense more inaccessible, than ever. She talked with everyone, but her eyes followed her son"s auburn head, with its strange upstanding tufts of hair above the fair, freckled face; or they watched the door, even when she was most animated. She looked ill and thin, and the many friends who loved her would have gladly clung about her and cherished her. But it was not easy to cherish Mrs. Allison.
"Do you see how our hostess keeps a watch for Fontenoy?" said Naseby, in a low voice, to Lady Madeleine.
Madeleine turned her startled face to him. Nature had given her this hunted look--the slightly open mouth, the wide eyes of one who perpetually hears or expects bad news. Naseby did not like it, and had tried to laugh her out of her scared ways before this. But he had no sooner laughed at her than he found himself busy--to use Watton"s word--in "stroking" and making it up to her, so tender and clinging was the girl"s whole nature, so golden was her hair, so white her skin!
"Isn"t it the division news she is expecting?"
"Yes--but don"t look so unhappy! She will bear up--even if they are beaten. And they will be beaten. Fontenoy"s hopes have been going down.
The Government will get through this clause at all events--by a shave."
"What a fuss everybody is making about this Bill!"
"Well, you don"t root up whole industries without a fuss. But, certainly, Maxwell has roused the country finely."