"Admirable!" he thought to himself, "_admirable!_ We are all there--my mother and I--three parts of mankind."
But on a page of the other book he had marked these lines--for the beauty of them:
"Beatus qui amat te, et amic.u.m in te, et inimic.u.m propter te. Solus enim nullum eorum amitt.i.t, cui omnes in illo cari sunt qui non amitt.i.tur."
He hung over the fire, pondering the two utterances.
"A marvellous music," he thought of the last. "But I know no more what it means than I know what a symphony of Brahms" means. Yet some say they know. Perhaps of _her_ it might be true."
The weeks ran on. Outside, the strike was at its worst, though George still believed the men would give in before Christmas. There was hideous distress, and some bad rioting in different parts of the country. Various attempts had been made by the employers to use and protect non-union labour, but the crop of outrage they had produced had been too threatening: in spite of the exasperation of the masters they had been perforce let drop. The Press and the public were now intervening in good earnest--"every fool thinks he can do our business for us," as George would put it bitterly to Letty. Burrows was speaking up and down the district with a superhuman energy, varied only by the drinking-bouts to which he occasionally succ.u.mbed; and George carried a revolver with him when he went abroad.
The struggle wore him to death; the melancholy of his temperament had never been so marked. At the same time Letty saw a doggedness in him, a toughness like Fontenoy"s own, which astonished her. Two men seemed to be fighting in him. He would talk with perfect philosophy of the miners"
point of view, and the physical-force sanction by which the lawless among them were determined to support it; but at the same time he belonged to the stiffest set among the masters.
Meanwhile, at home, friction and discomfort were constantly recurring.
In the course of three or four weeks Lady Tressady had several attacks of illness, and it was evident that her weakness increased rapidly. And with the weakness, alas! the ugly incessant irritability, that dried up the tenderness of nurses, and made a battleground of the sick-room.
Though, indeed, she could never be kept in her room; she resented being left a moment alone. She claimed, in spite of the anxieties of the moment, to be constantly amused; and though George could sometimes distract and quiet her, nothing that Letty did, or said, or wore was ever tolerable to a woman who merely saw in this youth beside her a bitter reminder of her own.
At last, one day early in November, came a worse turn than usual. The doctor was in the house most of the day, but George had gone off before the alarm to a place on the further side of the county, and could not be got at till the evening.
He came in to find Letty waiting for him in the hall. There had been a rally; the doctor had gone his way marvelling, and it was thought there was no immediate danger.
"But oh, the pain!" said Letty, under her breath, pressing her hands together, and shivering. Her eyes were red, her cheeks pale; he saw that she was on the point of exhaustion; and he guessed that she had never seen such a sight before.
He ran up to visit his mother, whom he found almost speechless from weakness, yet waiting, with evident signs of impatience and temper, for her evening food. And while he and Letty were at their melancholy dinner together, Justine came flying downstairs in tears. Miladi would not eat what had been taken to her. She was exciting herself; there would be another attack.
Husband and wife hurried from the room. In the hall they found the butler just receiving a parcel left by the railway delivery-cart.
George pa.s.sed the box with an exclamation and a shudder. It bore a large label, "From Worth et Cie," and was addressed to Lady Tressady. But Letty stopped short, with a sudden look of pleasure.
"You go to her. I will have this unpacked."
He went up and coaxed his mother like a child to take her soup and champagne. And presently, just as she was revived enough to talk to him, Letty appeared. Her mother-in-law frowned, but Letty came gaily up to the bed.
"There is a parcel from Paris for you," she said, smiling. "I have had it opened. Would you like it brought in?"
Lady Tressady first whimpered, and said it should go back--what did a dying woman want with such things?--then demanded greedily to see it.
Letty brought it in herself. It was a new evening gown of the softest greens and sh.e.l.l-pinks, fit for a bride in her first season. To see the invalid, ashen-grey, stretching out her hand to finger it was almost more than George could stand. But Letty shook out the rustling thing, put on the skirt herself that Lady Tressady might see, and paraded up and down in it, praising every cut and turning with the most ingenious ardour.
"I sha"n"t wear it, of course, till after Christmas," said Lady Tressady at last, still looking at it with half-shut covetous eyes. "Isn"t it _darling_ the way the lace is put on! Put it away. George!--it"s the _first_ I"ve had from him this year."
She looked up at him appealingly. He stooped and kissed her.
"I am so glad you like it, mother dear. Can"t you sleep now?"
"Yes, I think so. Good-night. And good-night, Letty."
Letty came, and Lady Tressady held her hand, while the blue eyes, still bearing the awful impress of suffering, stared at her oddly.
"It was nice of you to put it on, Letty. I didn"t think you"d have done it. And I"m glad you think it"s pretty. I wish you would have one made like it. Kiss me."
Letty kissed her. Then George slipped his wife"s arm in his, and they left the room together. Outside Letty turned suddenly white, and nearly fell. George put his arms round her, and carried her down to his study.
He put her on the sofa, and watched her tenderly, rubbing the cold hands.
"How you _could_," he said at last, in a low voice, when he saw that she was able to talk; "how you _could!_ I shall never forget that little scene."
"You"d have done anything, if you"d seen her this morning," she said, with her eyes still closed.
He sat beside her, silent, thinking over the miseries of the last few weeks. The net result of them--he recognised it with a leap of surprise--seemed to have been the formation of a new and secret bond between himself and Letty. During all the time he had been preparing himself for the worst this strange thing had been going on. How had it been possible for her to be, comparatively, so forbearing? He could see nothing in his past knowledge of her to explain it.
He recalled the effort and gloom with which she had made her first preparations for Lady Tressady. Yet she had made them. Is there really some mystic power, as the Christians say, in every act of self-sacrifice, however imperfect,--a power that represents at once the impelling and the rewarding G.o.d,--that generates, moreover, from its own exercise, the force to repeat itself? Personally such a point of view meant little to him, nor did his mind dwell upon it long. All that he knew was that some angel had stirred the pool--that old wounds smarted less--that hope seemed more possible.
Letty knew quite well that he was watching her in a new way, that there was a new clinging in his touch. She, little more than he, understood what was happening to her. From time to time during these weeks of painful tension there had been hours of wild rebellion, when she had hated her surroundings, her mother-in-law, and her general ill-luck as fiercely as ever. Then there had followed strange appeas.e.m.e.nts, and inflowing calms--moments when she had been able somehow to express herself to one who cared to listen who poured upon her in return a sympathy which braced while it healed.
Suddenly she opened her eyes.
"Do you want to hear about that first time when she came to see me?" she whispered, her look wavering under his.
He flushed and hesitated. Then he kissed her hand.
"No, not now. You are worn out. Another time. But I love you for thinking of telling me."
A feeling of rest and well-being stole over her. Mercifully he made no protestations, and she asked for none, but there was a gentle moving of heart towards heart. And the memory of that hour, that night, made one of the chief barriers between her and despair in the time that followed.
Two days later a painless death, death in her sleep, overtook Lady Tressady. Her delicate face, restored to its true years, and framed in its natural grey hair, seemed for the first time beautiful to George when he saw her in her coffin. He could not remember admiring her, even when he was a boy, and she was reckoned among the handsomest women of her day.
Parting with her was like the snapping of a strain that had pulled life out of its true bearings and proportions. An immense, inevitable relief followed. But after her death Letty never said a harsh word of her, and George had a queer, humble feeling that after all he might be found to owe her much.
For as November and December pa.s.sed away the relation between the husband and wife steadily settled and improved. "We shall rub along," George said to himself in his frank, secret thoughts--"in the end it will be much better perhaps than either of us could have hoped." That no doubt was the utmost that could ever be said; but it was much.
The night after his mother"s death, Letty abruptly, violently even, as though worked up to it by an inner excitement, told him the story of her wrestle with Marcella. Then, throwing some letters into his hand she broke into sobbing and ran away from him. When he went to look for her his own eyes were wet. "Who else could have done such a thing?" he said; and Letty made no protest.
The letters gave him food for thought for many a day afterwards. They were little less of a revelation to him than the motives and personality lying behind them had been to Letty. In spite of all that he had felt for the woman who had written them, they still roused in him a secret and abiding astonishment. We use the words "spiritual," "poetic" in relation to human conduct; we talk as though all that the words meant were familiarly understood by us; and yet when the spiritual or the poetic comes actually to walk among us, slips into the forms and functions of our common life, we find it amazing, almost inhuman. It gives us some trouble to take it simply, to believe in it simply.
Yet nothing in truth could be a more inevitable outcome of character and circ.u.mstance than these letters of Marcella Maxwell to George Tressady"s wife. Marcella had suffered under a strong natural remorse, and to free her heart from the load of it she had thrown herself into an effort of reconciliation and atonement with all the pa.s.sion, the subtlety, and the resource of her temperament. She had now been wooing Letty Tressady for weeks, nor had the eager contriving ability she had been giving to the process missed its reward. Letty fresh from the new impressions made upon her by Marcella at home, and Marcella as a wife, by a beauty she could no longer hate, and a charm to which she had been forced to yield, had found herself amid the loneliness and dulness of Perth gradually enveloped and possessed anew by the same influence, acting in ways that grew week by week more personal, and more subduing.
What to begin with could be more flattering either to heart or vanity than the persistence with which one of the most famous women of her time--watched, praised, copied, attacked, surrounded, as Letty knew her to be, from morning till night--had devoted herself first to the understanding, then to the capturing, of the smaller, narrower life. The reaction towards a natural reserve, a certain proud, instinctive self-defence, which had governed Marcella"s manner during a great part of Letty"s visit to the Court, had been in these letters deliberately broken down--at first with effort, then more and more frankly, more and more sweetly. Day after day, as Letty knew, Marcella had taken time from politics, from society, from her most cherished occupations, to write to this far-off girl, from whom she had nothing either to gain or to fear, who had no claims whatever on her friendship, had things gone normally, while thick about the opening of their relation to each other hung the memory of Letty"s insults and Letty"s violence.
And the letters were written with such abandonment! As a rule Marcella was a hasty or impatient correspondent. She thought letters a waste of time; life was full enough without them. But here, with Letty, she lingered, she took pains. The mistress of Les Rochers writing to her absent, her exacting Pauline, could hardly have been more eager to please. She talked--at leisure--of all that concerned her--husband, child, high politics, the persons she saw, the gaieties she bore with, the books she read, the schemes in which she was busied; then, with greater tenderness, greater minuteness, of the difficulties and tediums of Letty"s life at Ferth, as they had been dismally drawn out for her in Letty"s own letters. The animation, the eager kindness of it all went for much; the amazing self-surrender, self-offering, implied in every page for much more.
Strange!--as he read the letters George felt his own heart beating. Were they in some hidden way meant for him too?--he seemed to hear in them a secret message--a woman"s yearning, a woman"s response.
At any rate, the loving, reconciling effort had done its work. Letty could not be insensible to such a flattery, a compliment so unexpected, so bewildering--the heart of a Marcella Maxwell poured out to her for the taking. She neither felt it so profoundly, nor so delicately as hundreds of other women could have felt it. Nevertheless the excitement of it had thrilled and broken up the hardnesses of her own nature. And with each yielding on her part had come new capacity for yielding, new emotions that amazed herself; till she found herself, as it were, groping in a strange world, clinging to Marcella"s hand, trying to express feelings that had never visited her before, one moment proud of her new friend with a pride half moral, half selfish, the next, ill at ease with her, and through it all catching dimly the light of new ideals.
One day, as George walked into Letty"s sitting-room, to discuss some small business of the afternoon, he saw on her writing-table that same photograph of Lady Maxwell and her boy, whereof an earlier copy had come to such a tragic end in Letty"s hands. He walked up to it with an exclamation; Letty was not in the room. Suddenly, however, she came in.
He made no attempt whatever to disguise that he had been looking at the photograph; he bent over it indeed a moment longer, deliberately. Then, walking away to the window, he began speaking of the matter which had brought him to look for his wife. Letty answered absently. The colour had rushed to her face. Her hands fidgeted with the books and papers on her table, and her mind was full of fevered remembrance.
Presently George, having settled the little point he came to speak of, fell silent. But he still stood by the window, looking out through the rain-splashed gla.s.s to the wintry valley below with its chimneys and straggling village. Letty, who was pretending to write a note, raised her head, looked at him--the quick breath beating through the parted lips, the blue eyes half wild, half miserable. She was not nearly so pretty as she had been a year before. George had often noticed it; it made part of his remorse. But the face was more troubling, infinitely more human; and, in truth, he knew it much better, was more sensitively alive to it, so to speak, than he ever had been in the days of their courtship.