And behind Kenrick, Justine, the French maid, pushed her way in, weeping and exclaiming. Lady Tressady, it seemed, had been in frightful pain all the afternoon. She was now easier for the moment, though dangerously exhausted. But if the heart attacks returned during the next twenty-four hours, nothing could save her. The probability was that they would return, and she was asking piteously for her son, who had seen her, Justine believed, the day before these seizures began, just before his departure for Paris, and had written. "Et la pauvre ame!" cried the Frenchwoman at last, not caring what she said to this amazing daughter-in-law, "elle est la toujours, quand les douleurs s"apaisent un peu, ecoutant, esperant--et personne ne vient--_personne_! Voulez-vous bien, madame, me dire ou on peut trouver Sir George?"
"Poste Restante, Trouville," said Letty, sullenly. "It is the only address that I know of."
But she stood there irresolute and frowning, while the French girl, hardly able to contain herself, stared at the disfigured face, demanding by her quick-breathing silence, by her whole att.i.tude, something else, something more than Sir George"s address.
Meanwhile Marcella waited in the background, obliged to hear what pa.s.sed, and struck with amazement. It is perhaps truer of the moral world than the social that one half of it never conceives how the other half lives.
George Tressady"s mother--alone--dying--in her son"s absence--and Letty Tressady knew nothing of her illness till it had become a question of life and death, and had then actually refused to go--forgotten the summons even!
When Letty, feverish and bewildered, turned back to the companion whose heart had been poured out before her during this past hour of high emotion, she saw a new expression in Lady Maxwell"s eyes from which she shrank.
"Ought I to go?" she said fretfully, almost like a peevish child, putting her hand to her brow.
"My carriage is downstairs," said Marcella, quickly. "I can take you there at once. Is there a nurse?" she asked, turning to the maid.
Oh, yes; there was an excellent nurse, just installed, or Justine could not have left her mistress; and the doctor close by could be got at a moment"s notice. But the poor lady wanted her son, or at least some one of the family,--Justine bit her lip, and threw a nervous side glance at Letty,--and it went to the heart to see her. The girl found relief in describing her mistress"s state to this grave and friendly lady, and showed more feeling and sincerity in speaking of it than might have been expected from her affected dress and manner.
Meanwhile Letty seemed to be wandering aimlessly about the room. Marcella went up to her.
"Your hat is here, on this chair. I have a shawl in the carriage. Won"t you come at once, and leave word to your maid to bring after you what you want? Then I can go on, if you wish it, and send your telegram to Sir George."
"But you wanted him to do something?" said Letty, looking at her uncertainly.
"Mothers come first, I think!" said Marcella, with a smile of wonder.
"It is best to write it before we go. Will you tell me what to say?"
She went to the writing-table, and had to write the telegram with small help from Letty, who in her dazed, miserable soul was still fighting some demonic resistance or other to the step asked of her. Instinctively and gradually, however, Marcella took command of her. A few quiet words to Justine sent her to make arrangements with Grier. Then Letty found a cloak that had been sent for being drawn round her shoulders, and was coaxed to put on her hat. In another minute she was in the Maxwells"
brougham, with her hand clasped in Marcella"s.
"They will want me to sit up," she said, dashing an irrelevant tear from her eyes, as they drove away. "I am so tired--and I hate illness!"
"Very likely they won"t let you see her to-night. But you will be there if the illness comes on again. You would feel it terribly if--if she died all alone, with Sir George away."
"Died!" Letty repeated, half angrily. "But that would be so horrible--what could I do?"
Marcella looked at her with a strange smile.
"Only be kind, only forget everything but her!"
The softness of her voice had yet a severity beneath it that Letty felt, but had no spirit to resent, Rather it awakened an uneasy and painful sense that, after all, it was not she who had come off conqueror in this great encounter. The incidents of the last half-hour seemed in some curious way to have reversed their positions. Letty, smarting, felt that her relation to George"s dying mother had revealed her to Lady Maxwell far more than any wild and half-sincere confessions could have done. Her vanity felt a deep inner wound, yet of a new sort. At any rate, Marcella"s self-abas.e.m.e.nt was over, and Letty instinctively realised that she would never see it again, while at the same time a new and clinging need had arisen in herself. The very neighbourhood of the personality beside her had begun to thrill and subjugate her. She had been conscious enough before--enviously, hatefully conscious--of all the attributes and possessions that made Maxwell"s wife a great person in the world of London. What was stealing upon her now was glamour and rank and influence of another kind.
Not unmixed, no doubt, with more mundane thoughts! No ordinary preacher, no middle-cla.s.s eloquence perhaps would have sufficed--nothing less dramatic and distinguished than the scene which had actually pa.s.sed, than a Marcella at her feet. Well! there are many modes and grades of conversion. Whether by what was worst in her, or what was best; whether the same weaknesses of character that had originally inflamed her had now helped to subdue her or no, what matter? So much stood--that one short hour had been enough to draw this vain, selfish nature within a moral grasp she was never again to shake off.
Meanwhile, as they drove towards Warwick Square Marcella"s only thought was how to hand her over safe to her husband. A sense of agonised responsibility awoke in the elder woman at the thought of Cathedine. But no more emotion--only common sense and gentleness.
As they neared Warwick Square, Letty withdrew her hand.
"I don"t suppose you will ever want to see me again," she said huskily, turning her head away.
"Do you think that very possible between two people who have gone through such a time as you and I have?" said Marcella, pale, but smiling. "When may I come to see you to-morrow? I shall send to inquire, of course, very early."
Some thought made Letty"s breath come quickly. "Will you come in the afternoon--about four?" she said hastily. "I suppose I shall be here."
They were just stopping at the door in Warwick Square. "You said you would tell me--"
"I have a great deal to tell you.... I will come, then, and see if you can be spared.... Good-night. I trust she will be better! I will go on and send the telegram."
Letty felt her hand gravely pressed, the footman helped her out, and in another minute she was mounting the stairs leading to Lady Tressady"s room, having sent a servant on before her to warn the nurse of her arrival.
The nurse came out, finger on lip. She was very glad to see Lady Tressady, but the doctor had left word that nothing whatever was to be allowed to disturb or excite his patient. Of course, if the attack returned--But just now there was hope. Only it was so difficult to keep her quiet. Instead of trying to sleep, she was now asking for Justine, declaring that Justine must read French novels aloud to her, and bring out two of her evening dresses, that she might decide on some alteration in the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs. "I daren"t fight with her," said the nurse, evidently in much perplexity. "But if she only raises herself in bed she may kill herself."
She hurried back to her patient, promising to inform the daughter-in-law at once if there was a change for the worse, and Letty, infinitely relieved, made her way to the spare room of the house, where Grier was already unpacking for her.
After a hasty undressing she threw herself into bed, longing for sleep.
But from a short nightmare dream she woke up with a start. Where was she?
In her mother-in-law"s house,--she could actually hear the shrill affected voice laughing and talking in the room next door,--and brought there by Marcella Maxwell! The strangeness of these two facts kept her tossing restlessly from side to side. And where was George? Just arrived at Paris, perhaps. She thought of the glare and noise of the Gare du Nord--she heard his cab rattling over the long stone-paved street outside. In the darkness she felt a miserable sinking of heart at the thought of his going with every minute farther, farther away from her.
Would he ever forgive her that letter to Lord Maxwell, when he knew of it? Did she want him to forgive her?
A mood that was at once soft and desolate stole upon her, and made her cry a little. It sprang, perhaps, from a sense of the many barriers she had heaped up between herself and happiness. The waves of feeling, half self-a.s.sertive, half repentant, ebbed and flowed. One moment she yearned for the hour when Marcella was to come to her; the next, she hated the notion of it. So between dream and misery, amid a maze of thought without a clue, Letty"s night pa.s.sed away. By the time the morning dawned, the sharp conviction had shaped itself within her that she had grown older, that life had pa.s.sed into another stage, and could never again be as it had been the day before. Two emotions, at least, or excitements, had emerged from all the rest and filled her mind--the memory of the scene with Marcella, and the thought of George"s return.
PART III
CHAPTER XXI
"My dear, you don"t mean to say you have had her here for ten days?"
The speaker was Betty Leven, who had just arrived at Maxwell Court, and was sitting with her hostess under the cedars in front of the magnificent Caroline mansion, which it was the never-ending task of Marcella"s life to bring somehow into a democratic scheme of things.
A still September afternoon, lightly charged with autumn mists, lay gently on the hollows of the park. Betty was in her liveliest mood and her gayest dress. Her hat, a marvel in poppies, was perched high upon no less ingenious waves and frettings of hair. Her straw-coloured gown, which was only simple for the untrained eye, gave added youth even to her childish figure; and her very feet, clothed in the smallest and most preposterous of shoes, had something merry and provocative about them, as they lay crossed upon the wooden footstool Marcella had pushed towards her.
The remark just quoted followed upon one made by her hostess, to the effect that Lady Tressady would be down to tea shortly.
"Now, Betty," said Marcella, seriously, though she laughed, "I meant to have a few words with you on this subject first thing--let"s have them.
Do you want to be very kind to me, or do you ever want me to be very nice to you?"
Betty considered.
"You can"t do half as much for me now as you once could, now that Frank"s going to leave Parliament," she remarked, with as much worldly wisdom as her face allowed. "Nevertheless, the quality of my nature is such that, sometimes, I might even be nice to you for nothing. But information before benevolence--why have you got her here?"
"Because she was f.a.gged and unhappy in London, and her husband had gone to take his mother abroad, after first doing Maxwell a great kindness,"
said Marcella,--not, however, without embarra.s.sment, as Betty saw,--"and I want you to be kind to her."
"Reasons one and two no reasons at all," said Betty, meditating; "and the third wants examining. You mean that George Tressady went after Ancoats?"