"I am afraid your headache has been very bad all the evening," she said penitently. "Do let me come and look after you."
She went with Letty to her room, and put her into a chair beside the wood fire, that even on this warm night was not unwelcome in the huge place.
Letty, indeed, shivered a little as she bent towards it.
"Must you go so early?" said Marcella, hanging over her. "I heard Sir George speak of the ten o"clock train."
"Oh, yes," said Letty, "that will be best."
She stared into the fire without speaking. Marcella knelt down beside her.
"You won"t hate me any more?" she said, in a low, pleading voice, taking two cold hands in her own.
Letty looked up.
"I should like," she said, speaking with difficulty, "if you cared--to see you sometimes."
"Only tell me when," said Marcella, laying her lips lightly on the hands, "and I will come." Then she hesitated. "Oh, do believe," she broke out at last, but still in the same low voice, "that all can be healed! Only show him love,--forget everything else,--and happiness must come. Marriage is so difficult--such an art--even for the happiest people, one has to learn it afresh day by day."
Letty"s tired eyes wavered under the other"s look.
"I can"t understand it like that," she said. Then she moved restlessly in her chair. "Ferth is a terrible place! I wonder how I shall bear it!"
An hour later Marcella left Madeleine Penley and went back to her own room. The smile and flush with which she had received the girl"s last happy kisses disappeared as she walked along the corridor. Her head drooped, her arms hung listlessly beside her.
Maxwell found her in her own little sitting-room almost in the dark. He sat down by her and took her hand.
"You couldn"t make any impression on him as to Parliament?" she asked him, almost whispering.
"No. He persists that he must go. I think his private circ.u.mstances at Ferth have a great deal to do with it."
She shook her head. She turned away from him, took up a paper-knife, and let it fall on the table beside her. He thought that she must have been in tears, before he found her, and he saw that she could find no words in which to express herself. Lifting her hand to his lips, he held it there, silently, with a touch all tenderness.
"Oh, why am I so happy!" she broke out at last, with a sob, almost drawing her hand away. "Such a life as mine seems to absorb and batten upon other people"s dues--to grow rich by robbing their joy, joy that should feed hundreds and comes all to me! And that besides I should actually bruise and hurt--"
Her voice failed her.
"Fate has a way of being tolerably even, at last," said Maxwell, slowly, after a pause. "As to Tressady, no one can say what will come of it. He has strange stuff in him--fine stuff I think. He will pull himself together. And for the wife--probably, already he owes you much! I saw her look at you to-night--once as you touched her shoulder. Dear!--what spells have you been using?"
"Oh! I will do all I can--all I can!" Marcella repeated in a low, pa.s.sionate voice, as one who makes a vow to her own heart.
"But after to-morrow he will not willingly come across us again," said Maxwell, quietly. "That I saw."
She gave a sad and wordless a.s.sent.
CHAPTER XXIII
Letty Tressady sat beside the doorway of one of the small red-brick houses that make up the village of Ferth. It was a rainy October afternoon, and through the door she could see the black main street --houses and road alike bedabbled in wet and mire. At one point in the street her eye caught a small standing crowd of women and children, most of them with tattered shawls thrown over their heads to protect them from the weather. She knew what it meant. They were waiting for the daily opening of the soup kitchen, started in the third week of the great strike by the Baptist minister, who, in the language of the Tory paper, was "among the worst firebrands of the district." There was another soup kitchen further down, to which George had begun to subscribe immediately on his return to the place. She had thought it a foolish act on his part thus to help his own men to fight him the better. But--now, as she watched the miserable crowd outside the Baptist chapel, she felt the teasing pressure of those new puzzles of her married life which had so far done little else, it seemed, than take away her gaiety and her power of amusing herself.
Near her sat an oldish woman with an almost toothless mouth, who was chattering to her in a tone that Letty knew to be three parts hypocritical.
"Well, the treuth is the men is that fool "ardy when they gets a thing into their yeds, there"s no taakin wi un. There"s plenty as done like the strike, my lady, but they dursent say so--they"d be afeard o" losin the skin off their backs, for soom o" them lads o" Burrows"s is a routin rough lot as done keer what they doos to a mon, an yo canna exspeck a quiet body to stan up agen "em. Now, my son, ee comes in at neet all slamp and downcast, an I says to "im, "Is there noa news yet o" the Jint Committee, John?" I ses to un. "Noa, mither," ee says, "they"re just keepin ov it on." An ee do seem so down"earted when ee sees the poor soart ov a supper as is aw I can gie un to "is stomach. Now, _I"m_ wun o"
thoase as _wants_ nuthin. The doctor ses, "Yo"ve got no blude in yer, Missus "Ammersley, what "ull yer "ave?" An I says, "_Nuthin!_ it"s sun cut, an it"s sun cooked, _nuthin!_" Noa, I"ve niver bin on t" parish--an I _might_--times. An I don"t "old wi strikes. Lor, it is a poor pleace, is ours--ain"t it?--an n.o.bbut a bit o" bread an drippin for supper."
The old woman threw her eyes round her kitchen, bringing them back slyly to Letty"s face. Letty ended by leaving some money with her, and walking away as dissatisfied with her own charity as she was with its recipient.
Perhaps this old body was the only person in the village who would have begged of "Tressady"s wife" at this particular moment. Letty, moreover, had some reason to believe that her son was one of the roughest of Burrows"s bodyguard; while the old woman was certainly no worse off than any of her neighbours.
Outside, she was disturbed to find as she walked home, that the street was full of people, in spite of the rain--of gaunt men and pinched women, who threw her hostile and sidelong glances as she pa.s.sed. She hurried through them. How was it that she knew nothing of them--except, perhaps, of the few toadies and parasites among them? How was one to penetrate into this ugly, incomprehensible world of "the people"? The mere idea of trying to do so filled her with distaste and ennui. She was afraid of them. She wished she had not stayed so long with that old gossip, Mrs. Hammersley, and that there were not so many yards of dark road between her and her own gate. Where was George? She knew that he had gone up to the pits that afternoon to consult his manager about some defect in the pumping arrangements. She wished she had secured his escort for the walk home.
But before she left the village she paused irresolutely, then turned down a side street, and went to see Mary Batchelor, George"s old nurse, the mother who had lost her only son in his prime.
When, a few minutes later, she came up the lane, she was flatly conscious of having done a virtuous thing--several virtuous things--that afternoon, but certainly without any pleasure in them. She did not get on with Mary, nor Mary with her. The tragic absorption of the mother--little abated since the spring--in her dead boy seemed somehow to strike Letty dumb.
She felt pity, but yet the whole emotion was beyond her, and she shrank from it. As for Mary, she had so far received Lady Tressady"s visits with a kind of dull surprise, always repeated and not flattering. Letty believed that, in her inmost heart, the broken woman was offended each time that it was not George who came. Moreover, though she never said a word of it to Tressady"s wife, she was known to be pa.s.sionately on the side of the strikers, and her manner gave the impression that she did not want to be talking with their oppressors. Perhaps it was this feeling that had reconciled her to the loutish lad who lived with her, and had been twice "run in" by the police for stone-throwing at non-union men since the beginning of the strike. At any rate, she took a great deal more notice of him than she had done.
No--they were not very satisfactory, these attempts of Letty"s in the village. She thought of them with a kind of inner exasperation as she walked home. She had been going to a few old and sick people, and trying to ignore the strike. But at bottom she felt an angry resentment towards these loafing, troublesome fellows, who filled the village street when they ought to have been down in the pits--who were starving their own children no less than disturbing and curtailing the incomes of their betters. Did they suppose that people were going to run pits for them for nothing? Their drink and their religion seemed to her equally hideous.
She hated the two Dissenting ministers of the place only less than Valentine Burrows himself, and delighted to pa.s.s their wives with her head high in air.
With these general feelings towards the population in her mind, why these efforts at consolation and almsgiving? Well, the poor old people were not responsible; but she did not see that any good had come of it.
She had said nothing about her visits to George, nor did-she suppose that he had noticed them. He had been so incessantly busy since their arrival with conferences and committees that she had seen very little of him. It was generally believed that the strike was nearing its end, and that the men were exhausted; but she did not think that George was very hopeful yet.
Presently, as she neared a dark slope of road, bordered with trees on one side and the high "bank" of the main pit on the other, her thoughts turned back to their natural and abiding subject--herself. Oh, the dulness of life at Ferth during the last three weeks! She thought of her amus.e.m.e.nts in town, of the country houses where they might now be staying but for George"s pride, of Cathedine, even; and a rush of revolt and self-pity filled her mind. George always away, nothing to do in the ugly house, and Lady Tressady coming directly--she said to herself, suffocating, her small hands stiffening, that she felt fit to kill herself.
Half-way down the slope she heard steps behind her in the gathering darkness, and at the same moment something struck her violently on the shoulder. She cried out, and clutched at some wooden railings along the road for support, as the lump of "dirt" from the bank which had been flung at her dropped beside her.
"Letty, is that you?" shouted a voice from the direction of the village--her husband"s voice. She heard running. In a few seconds George had reached her and was holding her.
"What is it struck you? I see! Cowards! _d.a.m.ned_ cowards! Has it broken your arm? Try and move it."
Sick with pain she tried to obey him. "No," she said faintly; "it is not broken--I think not."
"Good!" he cried, rejoicing; "probably only a bad bruise. The brute mercifully picked up nothing very hard"--and he pushed the lump with his foot. "Take my scarf, dear; let me sling it. Ah!--what was that?
Letty! can you be brave--can you let me go one minute? I sha"n"t be out of your sight."
And he pointed excitedly to a dark spot moving among the bushes along the lower edge of the "bank."
Letty nodded. "I can stay here."
George leapt the palings and ran. The dark spot ran too, but in queer leaps and bounds. There was the sound of a scuffle, then George returned, dragging something or someone behind him.
"I knew it," he said, panting, as he came within earshot of his wife; "it was that young ruffian, Mary Batchelor"s grandson! Now you stand still, will you? I could hold two of the likes of you with one hand. Madan!"
He had but just parted from his manager on the path which led sideways up the "bank," and waited anxiously to see if his voice would reach the Scotchman"s ears. But no one replied. He shouted again; then he put two fingers in his mouth and whistled loudly towards the pit, holding the struggling lad all the time.