And now!--this visit--this incredible declaration--this eagerness for his reward! Maxwell"s contempt and indignation were rising fast. Mere chivalry, mere decent manners even, he thought, might have deterred a man from such an act. Meanwhile, in rapid flashes of thought he began to debate with himself how he should use this letter in his pocket--this besmirching, degrading letter.
But Marcella had much more to say. Presently she roused herself from her trance and looked at her husband.
"Aldous!"--she touched him on the arm, and he turned to her gravely--"There was one moment at Mile End, when--when I did play upon his pity--his friendship. He came down to Mile End on Thursday night. I told you. I saw he was unhappy--unhappy at home. He wanted sympathy desperately. I gave it him. Then I urged him to throw himself into his public work--to think out this vote he was to give. Oh! I don"t know!--I don"t know--" she broke off, in a depressed voice, shaking her head slowly--"I believe I threw myself upon his feelings--I felt that he was very sympathetic, that I had a power over him--it was a kind of bribery."
Her brow drooped under his eye.
"I believe you are quite unjust to yourself," he said unwillingly. "Of course, if any man chooses to misinterpret a confidence--"
"No," she said steadily. "I knew. It was quite different from any other time. I remember how uncomfortable I felt afterwards. I did try to influence him--just through, being a woman. There!--it is quite true."
He could not withdraw his eyes from hers--from the mingling of pride, humility, pa.s.sion, under the dark lashes.
"And if you did, do you suppose that _I_ can blame you?" he said slowly.
He saw that she was holding an inquisition in her own heart, and looking to him as judge. How could he judge?--whatever there might be to judge.
He adored her.
For the moment she did not answer him. She clasped her hands round her knees, thinking aloud.
"From the beginning, I remember I thought of him as somebody quite new and fresh to what he was doing--somebody who would certainly be influenced--who ought to be influenced. And then"--she raised her eyes again, half shrinking--"there was the feeling, I suppose, of personal antagonism to Lord Fontenoy! One could not be sorry to detach one of his chief men. Besides, after Castle Luton, George Tressady was so attractive! You did not know him, Aldous; but to talk to him stirred all one"s energies; it was a perpetual battle--one took it up again and again, enjoying it always. As we got deeper in the fight I tried never to think of him as a member of Parliament--often I stopped myself from saying things that might have persuaded him, as far as the House was concerned. And yet, of course"--her face, in its n.o.bility, took a curious look of hardness--"I _did_ know all the time that he was coming to think more and more of me--to depend on me. He disliked me at first--afterwards he seemed to avoid me--then I felt a change. Now I see I thought of him all along; just in one capacity--in relation to what I wanted--whether I tried to persuade him or no. And all the time--"
A cloud of pain effaced the frown. She leant her head against her husband"s arm.
"Aldous!"--her voice was low and miserable,--"what can his wife have felt towards me? I never thought of her after Castle Luton--she seemed to me such a vulgar, common little being. Surely, surely!--if they are so unhappy, it can"t be--_my_ doing; there was cause enough--"
Nothing could have been more piteous than the tone. It was laden with the remorse that only such a nature could feel for such a cause. Maxwell"s hand touched her head tenderly. A variety of expressions crossed his face, then a sharp flash of decision.
"Dear! I think you ought to know--she has written to me."
Marcella sprang up. Face and neck flushed crimson. She threw him an uncertain look, the nostrils quivering.
"Will you show me the letter?"
He hesitated. On his first reading of it he had vowed to himself that she should never see it. But since her confessions had begun to make the matter clearer to him a moral weight had pressed upon him. She must realise her power, her responsibility! Moreover, they two, with conscience and good sense to guide them, had got to find a way out of this matter. He did not feel that he could hide the letter from her if there was to be common action and common understanding.
So he gave it to her.
She read it pacing up and down, unconscious sounds of pain and protest forcing themselves to her lips from time to time, which made it very difficult for him to stand quietly where he was. On that effusion of gall and bitterness poor Letty had spent her sleepless night. Every charge that malice could bring, every distortion that jealousy could apply to the simplest incident, every insinuation that, judged by her own standard, had seemed to her most likely to work upon a husband--Letty had crowded them all into the mean, ill-written letter--the letter of a shopgirl trying to rescue her young man from the clutches of a rival.
But every sentence in it was a stab to Marcella. When she had finished it she stood with it in her hand beside her writing-table, looking absently through the window, pale, and deep in thought. Maxwell watched her.
When her moment of consideration broke her look swept round to him.
"I shall go to her," she said simply. "I must see her!"
Maxwell pondered.
"I think," he said reluctantly, "she would only repulse and insult you."
"Then it must be borne. It cannot end so."
She walked up to him and let him draw his arm about her. They stood in silence for a minute or two. When she raised her head again, her eyes sought his beseechingly.
"Aldous, help me! If we cannot repair this mischief,--you and I,--what are we worth? I will tell you my plan--"
There was a sound at the door. Husband and wife moved away from each other as the butler entered.
"My lord, Mrs. Allison and Lord Fontenoy are in the library. They asked me to say that they wish to consult your lordship on something very urgent. I told them I thought your lordship was engaged, but I would come and see."
Marcella and Maxwell looked at each other. Ancoats! No doubt the catastrophe so long staved off had at last arrived. Maxwell"s stifled exclamation was the groan of the overworked man who hardly knows how to find mind enough for another anxiety. But a new and sudden light shone in his wife"s face. She turned to the servant almost with eagerness:
"Please tell Mrs. Allison and Lord Fontenoy to come up."
CHAPTER XIX
The door opened silently, and there came in a figure that for a moment was hardly recognised by either Maxwell or his wife. Shrunken, pale, and grief-stricken, Ancoats"s poor mother entered, her eye seeking eagerly for Maxwell, perceiving nothing else. She was in black, her veil hurriedly thrown back, and the features beneath it were all blurred by distress and fatigue.
Marcella hurried to her. Mrs. Allison took her hand in both her own with the soft, appealing motion habitual to her, then said hastily, still looking at Maxwell:
"Maxwell, the boy has gone. He left me two days ago. This morning, in my trouble, I sent for Lord Fontenoy, my kind, kind friend. And he persuaded me to come to you at once. I begged him to come too--"
She glanced timidly from one to the other, implying many things.
But even with this preface, Maxwell"s greeting of his defeated antagonist was ceremony itself. The natural instinct of such a man is to mask victory in courtesy. But a paragraph that morning in Fontenoy"s paper--a paragraph that he happened to have seen in Lord Ardagh"s room--had appealed to another natural instinct, stronger and more primitive. It amazed him that even this emergency and Mrs. Allison"s persuasions could have brought the owner of the paper within his doors on this particular morning.
Fontenoy, immersed in the correspondence of the morning, had not yet chanced to see the paragraph, which was Harding Watton"s. Yet, if he had, he could not have shown a more haughty and embarra.s.sed bearing. He was there under a compulsion he did not know how to resist, a compulsion of tears and grief; but the instinct for manners, which so often upon occasion serves the man of ill.u.s.trious family, as well, almost, as good feeling or education may serve another, had been for the time weakened in him by the violences and exhaustion of the political struggle, and he did not feel certain that he could trust himself. He was smarting still through every nerve, and the greeting especially that Maxwell"s tall wife extended to him was gall and bitterness. She meanwhile, as she advanced towards him, was mostly struck with the perfection of his morning dress.
The ultra-correctness and strict fashion that he affected in these matters were generally a surprise to those who knew him only by reputation.
After five minutes" question and answer the Maxwells understood something of the situation. A servant of Ancoats"s had been induced to disclose what he knew. There could be no question that the young fellow had gone off to Normandy, where he possessed a chalet close to Trouville, in the expectation that his fair lady would immediately join him there. She had not yet started. So much Fontenoy had already ascertained. But she had thrown up a recent engagement within the last few days, and before Ancoats"s flight all Fontenoy"s information had pointed to the likelihood of a _coup_ of some sort. As for the boy himself, he had left his mother at Castle Luton, three days before, on the pretext of a Scotch visit, and had instead taken the evening train to Paris, leaving a letter for his mother in which the influence of certain modern French novels of the psychological kind could perhaps be detected. "The call of the heart that drives me from you," wrote this incredible young man, "is something independent of myself. I wring my hands, but I follow where it leads.
Love has its crimes,--that I admit,--but they are the only road to experience. And experience is all I care to live for! At any rate, I cannot accept the limits that you, mother, would impose upon me. Each of us must be content to recognise the other"s personality. I have tried to reconcile you to an affection that must be content to be irregular. You repel it and me, under the influence of a bigotry in which I have ceased to believe. Suffer me, then, to act for myself in this respect. At any time that you like to call upon me I will be your dutiful son, so long as this matter is not mentioned between us. And let me implore you not to bring in third persons. They have already done mischief enough. Against them I should know how to protect myself."
Maxwell returned the letter with a disgust he could hardly repress.
Everything in it seemed to him as pinchbeck as the pa.s.sion itself. Mrs.
Allison took it with the same miserable look, which had in it, Marcella noticed, a certain strange sternness, as of some frail creature nerving itself to desperate things.
"Now what shall we do?" said Maxwell, abruptly.
Fontenoy moved forward. "I presume you still command the same persons you set in motion before? Can you get at them to-day?"
Maxwell pondered. "Yes, the clergyman. The solicitor-brother is too far away. Your idea is to stop the girl from crossing?"
"If it were still possible." Fontenoy dropped his voice, and his gesture induced Maxwell to follow him to the recess of a distant window.
"The chief difficulty, perhaps," said Fontenoy, resuming, "concerns the lad himself. His mother, you will understand, cannot run any risk of being brought in contact with that woman. Nor is she physically fit for the voyage; but someone must go, if only to content her. There has been some wild talk of suicide, apparently--mere bombast, of course, like so much of it, but she has been alarmed."