George had had but a few words with his hostess before dinner, and afterwards a short conversation was all that either claimed. She had hoped and planned so much! On the stage of imagination before he came--she had seen his coming so often. All was to be forgotten and forgiven, and this difficult visit was to lead naturally and without recall to another and happier relation. And now that he was here she felt herself tongue-tied, moving near him in a dumb distress. Both realised the pressure of the same necessities, the same ineluctable facts; and tacitly, they met and answered each other, in the common avoidance of a companionship which could after all avail nothing. Once or twice, as they stood together after dinner, he noticed amid her gracious kindness, her inquiries after Mrs. Allison or his mother, the search her eyes made for Letty, and presently she began to talk with nervous, almost appealing, emphasis--with a marked significance and intensity indeed--of Letty"s fatigue after her nursing, and the need she had for complete change and rest. George found himself half resenting the implications of her manner, as the sentences flowed on. He felt her love of influence, and was not without a hidden sarcasm. In spite of his pa.s.sionate grat.i.tude to her, he must needs ask himself, did she suppose that a man or a marriage was to be remade in a month, even by her plastic fingers? Women envisaged these things so easily, so childishly, almost.
When he moved away, a number of men who had already been talking to him after dinner, and some of the most agreeable women of the party besides, closed about him, making him, as it were, the centre of a conversation which was concerned almost entirely with the personalities and chances of the political moment. He was scarcely less astonished than Letty had been by his own position amongst the guests gathered under Maxwell"s roof. Never had he been treated with so much sympathy, so much deference even. Clearly, if he willed it so, what had seemed the dislocation might only be the better beginning of a career. Nonsense! He meant to throw it all up as soon as Parliament met again in February. The state of his money affairs alone determined that. The strike was going from bad to worse. He must go home and look after his own business. It was a folly ever to have attempted political life. Meanwhile he felt the stimulus of his reception in a company which included some of the keenest brains in England. It appealed to his intelligence and virility, and they responded. Letty once, glancing at him, saw that he was talking briskly, and said to herself, with contradictory bitterness, that he was looking as well as ever, and was going, she supposed, to behave as if nothing had happened.
"What is the matter with you to-night, my lady?" said Naseby, taking a seat beside his hostess. "May I be impertinent and guess?--you don"t like your gems? Lady Leven has been telling me tales about them. They are the most magnificent things I ever saw. I condole with you."
She turned rather listlessly to meet his bantering look.
""Come you in friendship, or come you in war?"" she said, pointing to a seat beside her. "I have no fight in me. But I have a great many things to say to you."
He reddened for an instant, then recovered himself.
"So have I to you," he said briskly. "In the first place, I have some fresh news from Mile End."
She half laughed, as who should say, "You put me off," then surrendered herself with eagerness to the pleasure of his report. At the moment of his approach, under pretence of talking to an elderly cousin of Maxwell"s, she had been lost in such an abstraction of powerless pity for George Tressady--whose fair head, somehow, never escaped her, wherever it moved--that she had hardly been able to bear with her guests or the burden of the evening.
But Naseby roused her. And, indeed, his story so far was one to set the blood throbbing in the veins of a creature who, on one side pure woman, was on the other half poet, half reformer. Since the pa.s.sage of the Maxwell Bill, indeed, Naseby and a few friends of his, some "gilded youths" like himself, together with some trade-union officials of a long experience, had done wonders. They had been planning out the industrial reorganisation of a whole district, through its two staple trades, with the enthusiastic co-operation of the workpeople themselves; and the result so far struck the imagination. Everywhere the old workshops were to be bought up, improved, or closed; everywhere factories in which life might be decent, and work more than tolerable, were to be set up; everywhere the prospective shortening of hours, and the doing away with the most melancholy of the home trades was working already like the incoming of a great slowly surging tide, raising a whole population on its breast to another level of well-being and of hope.
Most of what had been done or designed was of course already well known to Maxwell"s wife; she had indeed given substantial help to Naseby throughout. But Naseby had some fresh advances to report since she was last in East London, and she drank them in with an eagerness, which somehow a.s.suaged a hidden smart; while he wondered a little perhaps in his philosopher"s soul at the woman of our English day, with her compunctions and altruisms, her entanglement with the old scheme of things, her pining for a new. It had often seemed to him that to be a Nihilist nurse among a Russian peasantry would be an infinitely easier task than to reconcile the social remorses and compa.s.sions that tore his companion"s mind with the social pageant in which her life, do what she would, must needs be lived. He knew that, intellectually, she no more than Maxwell saw any way out of unequal place, unequal spending, unequal recompense, if civilisation were to be held together; but he perceived that morally she suffered. Why? Because she and not someone else had been chosen to rule the palace and wear the gems that yet must be? In the end, Naseby could but shrug his shoulders over it. Yet even his sceptical temper made no question of sincerity.
When all his budget was out, and her comments made, she leant back a little in her chair, studying him. A smile came to play about her lips.
"What do you want to say to me?" he asked her quickly.
She looked round her to see that they were not overheard.
"When did you see Madeleine last?"
"At her brother"s house, a fortnight ago."
"Was she nice to you?"
He bit his lip, and drew his brows a little together, under her scrutiny.
"Do you imagine I am going to be cross-examined like this?"
"Yes--reply!"
"Well, I don"t know what her conception of "niceness" may be; it didn"t fit mine. She had got it into her head that I "pitied" her, which seemed to be a crime. I didn"t see how to disprove it, so I came away."
He spoke with a dry lightness, but she perceived anxiety and unrest under his tone. She bent forward.
"Do you know where Madeleine is now?"
"Not in the least."
"In the Long Gallery. I sent her there."
"Upon my word!" he said, after a pause. "Do you want to rule us all?"
His cheek had flushed again; his look was half rebellious.
A flash of pain struck through her brightness.
"No, no!" she said, protesting. "But I know--you don"t!"
He rose deliberately, and bowed with the air of obeying her commands.
Then suddenly he bent down to her.
"I knew perfectly well that she was in the Long Gallery! But I also knew that Mrs. Bayle had chosen to join her there. The coast, you may perceive, is now clear."
He walked away. Marcella looked round, and saw an elegant little bride, Mr. Bayle"s new wife, rustling into the room again. She leant back in her chair, half laughing, yet her eyes were wet. The new joy brought a certain ease to old regrets. Only that word "rule" rankled a little.
Yet the old regrets were all sharp and active again. It seemed to be impossible now to talk with George Tressady, to make any real breach in the barrier between them; but how impossible also not to think of him!--of the young fellow, who had given Maxwell his reward, and said to herself such sad, such agitating things! She did think of him. Her heart ached to serve him. The situation made a new and a very troubling appeal to her womanhood.
The night was warm, and still, and the windows were open to it as they had been on that May night at Castle Luton. Maxwell came to look for Tressady, and took him out upon a flagged terrace that ran the length of the house.
They talked first of the Ancoats incident, George supplementing his letters by some little verbal pictures of Ancoats"s life and surroundings that made Maxwell laugh grimly from time to time. As to Mrs. Allison, Maxwell reported that Ancoats seemed to have gained his point. There was talk of the marriage coming off some time in the winter.
"Well, Fontenoy has earned his prize," said George.
"There are more than twelve years between them. But she seems to be one of the women who don"t age. I have seen her go through griefs that would kill most women; and it has been like the pa.s.sage of a storm over a flower."
"Religion, I suppose, carried to that point, protects one a good deal,"
said George, not, in truth, feeling much interest in the matter or in Mrs. Allison now that his task was done.
"And especially religion of the type that allows you to give your soul into someone else"s keeping. There is no such anodyne," said Maxwell, musing. "I have often noticed how Catholic women keep their youth and softness. But now, do allow me a few words about yourself. Is what I hear about your withdrawal from Parliament irrevocable?"
George"s reply led to a discussion in which Maxwell, without any attempt at party proselytism, endeavoured to combat all that he could understand of the young man"s twofold disgust, disgust with his own random convictions no less than with the working of the party machine.
"Where do I belong?" he said. "I don"t know myself. I ought never to have gone in. Anyway, I had better stand aside for a time."
"But evidently the Malford people want to keep you."
"Well, and of course I shall consult their convenience as much as I can,"
said George, unwillingly, but would say no more.
Nothing, indeed, could be more flattering, more healing, than all that was implied in Maxwell"s earnestness, in the peculiar sympathy and kindness with which the elder man strove to win the younger"s confidence; but George could not respond. His whole inner being was too sore; and his mind ran incomparably more upon the d.a.m.nable letter that must be lying somewhere in the archives of the memory of the man talking to him, than upon his own political prospects. The conversation ended for Maxwell in mere awkwardness and disappointment,--deep disappointment if the truth were known. Once roused his idealism was little less stubborn, less wilful than Marcella"s.
When the ladies withdrew, a brilliant group of them stood for a moment on the first landing of the great oak staircase, lighting candles and chattering. Madeleine Penley took her candle absently from Marcella"s hand, saying nothing. The girl"s curious face under its crown of gold-red hair was transformed somehow to an extraordinary beauty. The frightened parting of the lips and lifting of the brows had become rather a look of exquisite surprise, as of one who knows at last "the very heart of love."
"I am coming to you, presently," murmured Marcella, laying her cheek against the girl"s.
"Oh, _do_ come!" said Madeleine, with a great breath, and she walked away, unsteadily, by herself, into the darkness of the tapestried pa.s.sage, her white dress floating behind her.
Marcella looked after her, then turned with shining eyes to Letty Tressady. Her expression changed.