"You think I should do myself more harm, than good to anybody else?"
"No.--Only it would be serious," she repeated after a pause.
Instantly he dropped the subject as far as his own action was concerned. He led her back into discussion of other people, and of the situation in general.
Then suddenly, as they talked, a host of thoughts fled cloud-like, rising and melting, through Marcella"s memory. She remembered with what prestige--considering his youth and inexperience--he had entered Parliament, the impression made by the short and brilliant campaign of his election. Now, since the real struggle of the session had begun, his energies seemed to have been unaccountably in abeyance, and eclipse.
People she noticed had ceased to talk of him. But supposing, after all, there had been a crisis of mind and conviction underlying it?--supposing that now, at the last moment, in a situation that cried out for a leader, something should suddenly release his powers and gifts to do their proper work--
It vexed her to realise her own excitement, together with an odd shrinking and reluctance that seemed to be fighting with it. All in a moment, to Tressady"s astonishment, she recalled the conversation to the point where it had turned aside.
"And you think--you _really_ think"--her voice had a nervous appealing note--"that even at this eleventh hour--No, I don"t understand!--I _can"t_ understand!--why, or how you should still think it possible to change things enough!"
He felt a sting of pleasure, and the pa.s.sing sense of hurt pride was soothed. At least he had conquered her attention, her curiosity!
"I am sure that anything might still happen," he said stubbornly.
"Well, only let it be settled!" she said, trying to speak lightly, "else there will be nothing left of some of us."
She raised her hand, and pushed back her hair with a childish gesture of weariness, that was quite unconscious, and therefore touching.
As she spoke, indeed, the thought of a strong man hara.s.sed with overwork, and patiently preparing to lay down his baffled task, and all his cherished hopes, captured her mind, brought a quick rush of tears even to her eyes. Tressady looked at her; he saw the moisture in the eyes, the reddening of the cheek, the effort for self-control.
"Why do you let yourself feel it so much?" he said resentfully; "it is not natural, nor right."
"That"s our old quarrel, isn"t it?" she answered, smiling.
He was staring at the ground again, poking with his stick.
"There are so many things one _must_ feel," he said in a bitter low voice; "one may as well try to take politics calmly."
She looked down upon him, understanding, but not knowing how to meet him, how to express herself. His words and manner were a confession of personal grief,--almost an appeal to her,--the first he had ever made.
Yet how to touch the subject of his marriage! She shrank from it painfully. What ominous, disagreeable things she had heard lately of the young Lady Tressady from people she trusted! Why, oh! why had he ruined his own life in such a way!
And with the yearning towards all suffering which was natural to her, there mingled so much else--inevitable softness and grat.i.tude for that homage towards herself, which had begun to touch and challenge all the loving, responsive impulse which was at the root of her character--an eager wish to put out a hand and guide him--all tending to shape in her this new longing to rouse him to some critical and courageous action, action which should give him at least the joy that men get from the strenuous use of natural powers, from the realisation of themselves. And through it all the most divinely selfish blindness to the real truth of the situation! Yet she tried not to think of Maxwell--she wished to think only of and for her friend.
After his last words they stood side by side in silence for a few moments. But the expression of her eyes, of her att.i.tude, was all sympathy. He must needs feel that she cared, she understood, that his life, his pain, his story mattered to her. At last she said, turning her face away from him, and from the few people who had not yet left the garden to go and listen to some music that was going on in the drawing-room:
"Sometimes, the best way to forget one"s own troubles--don"t you think?--is to put something else first for a time--perhaps in your case, the public life and service. Mightn"t it be? Suppose you thought it all really out, what you have been saying to me--gave yourself up to it--and then _determined_. Perhaps afterwards--"
She paused--overcome with doubt, even shyness--and very pale too, as she turned to him again. But so beautiful! The very perplexity which spoke in the gently quivering face as it met his, made her lovelier in his eyes.
It seemed to strike down some of the barrier between them, to present her to him as weaker, more approachable.
But after waiting a moment, he gave a little harsh laugh.
"Afterwards, when one has somehow settled other people"s affairs, one might see straighter in one"s own? Is that what you mean?"
"I meant," she said, speaking with difficulty, "what I have often found--myself--that it helps one sometimes, to throw oneself altogether into something outside one"s own life, in a large disinterested way.
Afterwards, one comes back to one"s own puzzles--with a fresh strength and hope."
"Hope!" he said despondently, with a quick lifting of the shoulders.
Then, in another tone--
"So that"s your advice to me--to take this thing seriously--to take myself seriously--to think it out?"
"Yes, yes," she said eagerly; "don"t trifle with it--with what you might think and do--till it is too late to think and do anything."
Suddenly it flashed across them both how far they had travelled since their first meeting in the spring. Her mind filled with a kind of dread, an uneasy sense of responsibility--then with a tremulous consciousness of power. It was as though she felt something fluttering like a bird in her hands. And all the time there echoed through her memory a voice speaking in a moonlit garden--"You know--you don"t mind my saying it?--n.o.body is ever converted--politically--nowadays."
No, but there may be honest advance and change--why not? And if she had influenced him--was it not Maxwell"s work and thought that had spoken through her?
"Well, anyway," said Tressady"s voice beside her, "whatever happens--you"ll believe--"
"That you won"t help to give us the _coup de grace_ unless you must?" she said, half laughing, yet with manifest emotion. "Anyway, I should have believed that."
"And you really care so much?" he asked her again, looking at her wondering.
She suddenly dropped her head upon her hands. They were alone now in the moonlit garden, and she was leaning over the low wall that divided them from the school enclosure. But before he could say anything--before he could even move closer to her--she had raised her face again, and drawn her hand rapidly across her eyes.
"I suppose one is tired and foolish after all these weeks," she said, with a breaking voice--"I apologise. You see when one comes to see everything through another"s eyes--to live in another"s life--" He felt a sudden stab, then a leap of joy--hungry, desolate joy--that she should thus admit him to the very sanctuary of her heart--let him touch the "very pulse of the machine." At the same moment that it revealed the eternal gulf between them, it gave him a delicious pa.s.sionate sense of intimity--of privilege.
"You have--a marvellous idea of marriage"--he said, under his breath, as he moved slowly beside her towards the house.
She made no answer. In another minute she was talking to him of indifferent things, and immediately afterwards he found himself parted from her in the crowd of the drawing-room.
When the party dispersed and he was walking alone towards Aldgate through the night, he could do nothing but repeat to himself fragments of what she had said to him--lost all the time in a miserable yearning memory of her eyes and voice.
His mind was made up. And as he lay sleepless and solitary through the night, he scarcely thought any more of the strait to which his married life had come. Forty-eight hours hence he should have time for that. For the present he had only to "think out" how it might be possible for him to turn doubt and turmoil into victory, and lay the crown of it at Marcella Maxwell"s feet.
Meanwhile Marcella, on her return to St. James"s Square, put her hands on Maxwell"s shoulders, and said to him, in a voice unlike herself: "Sir George Tressady was at the party to-night. I _think_ he may be going to throw Lord Fontenoy over. Don"t be surprised if he speaks in that sense to-morrow."
Maxwell looked extraordinarily perturbed.
"I hope he will do nothing of the kind," he said, with decision. "It will do him enormous harm. All the conviction he has ever shown has been the other way. It will be thought to be a mere piece of caprice and indiscipline."
Marcella said nothing. She walked away from him, her hands clasped behind her, her soft skirt trailing--a pale muse of meditation--meditation in which for once she did not invite him to share.
"Tressady, by all that"s wonderful!" said a member of Fontenoy"s party to his neighbour. "What"s _he_ got to say?"
The man addressed bent forward, with his hands on his knees, to look eagerly at the speaker.
"I knew there was something up," he said. "Every time I have come across Tressady to-day he has been deep with one or other of those fellows"--he jerked his head towards the Liberal benches. "I saw him b.u.t.tonholing Green in the Library, then with Speedwell on the Terrace. And just look at their benches! They"re as thick as bees! Yes, by George! there _is_ something up."
His young sportsman"s face flushed with excitement, and he tried hard through the intervening heads to get a glimpse of Fontenoy. But nothing was to be seen of the leader but a hat jammed down over the eyes, a square chin, and a pair of folded arms.
The House, indeed, throughout the day had worn an aspect which, to the experienced observer--to the smooth-faced Home Secretary, for instance, watching the progress of this last critical division--meant that everything was possible, the unexpected above all. Rumours gathered and died away. Men might be seen talking with unaccustomed comrades; and those who were generally most frank had become discreet. It was known that Fontenoy"s anxiety had been growing rapidly; and it was noticed that he and the young viscount who acted as the Whip of the party had kept an extraordinarily sharp watch on all their own men through the dinner-hour.
Fontenoy himself had spoken before dinner, throwing scorn upon the clause, as the ill-conceived finish of an impossible Bill. So the landlords were to be made the executants, the police, of this precious Act? Every man who let out a tenement-house in workmen"s dwellings was to be haled before the law and punished if a tailor on his premises did his work at home, if a widow took in shirtmaking to keep her children. Pa.s.s, for the justice or the expediency of such a law in itself. But who but a madman ever supposed you could get it carried out! What if the landlords refused or neglected their part? _Quis custodiet?_ And was Parliament going to make itself ridiculous by setting up a law, which, were it a thousand times desirable, you simply could not enforce?
The speech was delivered with amazing energy. It abounded in savage epigram and personality; and a month before it would have had great effect. Every Englishman has an instinctive hatred of paper reforms.