"No," she said steadily; "she has told me much about everything--but that."
He walked restlessly about for a few seconds, then returned, holding out his hands.
"Well, my dear, I said some mad and miserable things. They are as dead now as if they had never been spoken. And they were not love-making--they were crying for the moon. Take me, and forget them. I am an unsatisfactory sort of fellow, but I will do the best I can."
"Wait a bit," she said, retreating, and speaking with a hard incisiveness. "There are plenty of things you don"t know. Perhaps you don"t know, for instance, that I wrote to Lord Maxwell? I sat up writing it that night--he got it the same morning you saw her."
"You wrote to Maxwell!" he said in amazement--then, under his breath--"to complain of her. My G.o.d!"
He walked away again, trying to control himself.
"You didn"t suppose," she said huskily, "I was going to sit down calmly under your neglect of me? I might have been silly in not--not seeing what kind of a woman she was; that"s different--besides, of course, she ought to have thought more about me. But _that"s_ not all!"
Her hand shook as she stood leaning on the sofa. George turned, and looked at her attentively.
"The day you left I went to Hampton Court with the Lucys. Cathedine was there. Of course I flirted with him all the time, and as we were going through a wood near the river he said abominable things to me, and kissed me."
Her brows were drawn defiantly. Her eyes seemed to be riveted to his. He was silent a moment, the colour dyeing his pale face deep. Then she heard his long breath.
"Well, we seem to be about quits," he said, in a bitter voice. "Have you seen him since?"
"No. That"s Grier knocking--you"d better go and dress."
He paused irresolutely. But Letty said, "Come in," and he retreated into his dressing-room.
Husband and wife hurried down together, without another word to each other. When George at last found himself at table between Lady Leven and Mr. Bayle"s new and lively wife, he had never been so grateful before to the ease of women"s tongues. In his mental and physical fatigue, he could scarcely bear even to let himself feel the strangeness of his presence in this room--at her table, in Maxwell"s splendid house. _Not_ to feel!--somehow to recover his old balance and coolness--that was the cry of the inner man.
But the situation conquered him. _Why_ was he here? It was barely a month since in her London drawing-room he had found words for an emotion, a confession it now burnt him to remember. And here he was, breaking bread with her and Maxwell, a few weeks afterwards, as though nothing lay between them but a political incident. Oh! the smallness, the triviality of our modern life!
Was it only four weeks, or nearly? What he had suffered in that time! An instant"s shudder ran through him, during an interval, while Betty"s unwilling occupation with her left-hand neighbour left memory its chance.
All the flitting scenes of the past month, Ancoats"s half-vicious absurdities, the humours of the Trouville beach, the waves of its grey sea, his mother"s whims and plaints, the crowd and heat of the little German watering-place where he had left her--was it he, George Tressady, that had been really wrestling with these things and persons, walking among them, or beside them? It seemed hardly credible. What was real, what remained, was merely the thought of some hours of solitude, beside the Norman sea, or among the great beech-woods that swept down the hills about Bad Wildheim. Those hours--they only--had stung, had penetrated, had found the shrinking core of the soul.
What in truth was it that had happened to him? After weeks of a growing madness he had finally lost his self-command, had spoken pa.s.sionately, as only love speaks, to a married woman, who had no thought for any man in the world but her husband, a woman who had immediately--so he had always read the riddle of Maxwell"s behaviour--reported every incident of his conversation with her to the husband, and had then tried her best, with an exquisite kindness and compunction, to undo the mischief her own charm had caused. For that effort, in the first instance, George, under the shock of his act and her pain, had been, at intervals, speechlessly grateful to her; all his energies had gone into pitiful, eager response. Now, her attempt, and Maxwell"s share in it, seemed to have laid him under a weight he could no longer bear. His acceptance of Maxwell"s invitation had finally exhausted his power of playing the superhuman part to which she had invited him. He wished with all his heart he had not accepted it! From the moment of her greeting--with its mixture of shrinking and sweetness--he had realised the folly, the humiliation even, of his presence in her house. He could not rise--it was monstrous, ludicrous almost, that she should wish it--to what she seemed to ask of him.
What had he been in love with? He looked at her once or twice in bewilderment. Had not she herself, her dazzling, unconscious purity, debarred him always from the ordinary hopes and desires of the sensual man? His very thought had moved in awe of her, had knelt before her.
Throughout there had been this half-bitter glorying in the strangeness of his own case. The common judgment in its common vileness mattered nothing to him. He had been in love with love, with grace, with tenderness, with delight. He had seen, too late, a vision of the _best_; had realised what things of enchantment life contains for the few, for the chosen--what woman at her richest can be to man. And there had been a cry of personal longing--personal anguish.
Well!--it was all done with. As for friendship, it was impossible, grotesque. Let him go home, appease Letty, and mend his life. He constantly realised now, with the same surprise, as on the night before his confession, the emergence within himself, independent as it were of his ordinary will, and parallel with the voice of pa.s.sion or grief, of some new moral imperative. Half scornfully he discerned in his own nature the sort of paste that a man inherits from generations of decent dull forefathers who have kept the law as they understood it. He was conscious of the same "ought" vibrating through the moral sense as had governed their narrower lives and minds. It is the presence or the absence indeed of this dumb compelling power that in moments of crisis differentiates one man from another. He felt it; wondered perhaps that he should feel it; but knew, nevertheless, that he should obey it. Yes, let him go home, make his wife forgive him, rear his children--he trusted to G.o.d there would be children!--and tame his soul. How strange to feel this tempest sweeping through him, this iron stiffening of the whole being, amid this scene, in this room, within a few feet of that magic, that voice--
"Thank goodness I have got rid of my man at last!" said Betty"s laughing whisper in his ear. "Three successive packs of hounds have I followed from their cradles to their graves. Make it up to me, Sir George, at once! Tell me everything I want to know!"
George turned to her smiling.
"About Ancoats?"
"Of course. Now don"t be discreet!--I know too much already. How did he receive you?"
George laughed--not noticing that instead of laughing with him, little Betty was staring at him open-eyed over her fan.
"To begin with, he invited me to fight--coffee and pistols before eight, on the following morning, in the garden of his chalet, which would not have been at all a bad place, for he is magnificently installed. I came from his enemies, he said. They had prevented the woman he loved from joining him, and covered him with ridicule. As their representative I ought to be prepared to face the consequences like a man. All this time he was storming up and down, in a marvellous blue embroidered smoking suit--"
"Of course, to go with the hair," put in Betty.
"I said I thought he"d better give me some dinner before we talked it out. Then he looked embarra.s.sed and said there were friends coming. I replied, "_Tant mieux."_ He inquired fiercely whether it was the part of a gentleman to thrust himself where he wasn"t wanted. I kept my temper, and said I was too famished to consider. Then he haughtily left the room, and presently a servant came and asked for my luggage, which I had left at the station, and showed me a bedroom. Ancoats, however, appeared again to invite me to withdraw, and to suggest the names of two seconds who would, he a.s.sured me, be delighted to act for me. I pointed out to him that I was unpacked, and that to turn me out dinnerless would be simply barbarous. Then, after fidgeting about a little, he burst out laughing in an odd way, and said, "Very well--only, mind, I didn"t ask you." Sure enough, of course I found a party."
George paused.
"You needn"t tell me much about the party," said Betty, nervously, "unless it"s necessary."
"Well, it wasn"t a very reputable affair, and two young women were present."
"No need to talk about the young women," said Betty, hastily.
George bowed submission.
"I only mentioned them because they are rather necessary to the story.
Anyway, by the time the company was settled Ancoats suddenly threw off his embarra.s.sment, and, with some defiant looks at me, behaved himself, I imagine, much as he would have done without me. When all the guests were gone, I asked him whether he was going to keep up the farce of a _grande pa.s.sion_ any more. He got in a rage and vowed that if "she" had come, of course all those creatures, male and female, would be packed off. I didn"t suppose that he would allow the woman he loved to come within a mile of them? I shrugged my shoulders and declined to suppose anything about his love affairs, which seemed to me too complicated. Then, of course, I had to come to plain speaking, and bring in his mother."
"That she should have produced such a being!" cried Betty; "that he should have any right in her at all!"
"That she should keep such a heart for him!" said George, raising his eyebrows. "He turned rather white, I was relieved to see, when I told him from her that she would leave his house if the London affair went on.
Well, we walked up and down in his garden, smoking, the greater part of the night, till I could have dropped with fatigue. Every now and then Ancoats would make a dash for the brandy and soda on the verandah; and in between I had to listen to tirades against marriage, English prudery, and English women,--quotations from Gautier and Renan,--and Heaven knows what. At last, when we were both worn out, he suddenly stood still and delivered his ultimatum. "Look here--if you think I"ve no grievances, you"re much mistaken. Go back and tell my mother that if she"ll marry Fontenoy straight away I"ll give up Marguerite!" I said I would deliver no such impertinence. "Very well," he said; "then I will. Tell her I shall be in Paris next week, and ask her to meet me there. When are you going?" "Well," I said, rather taken aback, "there is such an inst.i.tution as the post. Now I"ve come so far, suppose you show me Trouville for a few days?" He muttered something or other, and we went to bed.
Afterwards, he behaved to me quite charmingly, would not let me go, and I ended by leaving him at the door of an hotel in Paris where he was to meet his mother. But on the subject of Fontenoy it is an _idee fixe_. He chafes under the whole position, and will yield nothing to a man who, as he conceives, has no _locus standi_. But if his pride were no longer annoyed by its being said that his mother had sacrificed her own happiness to him, and if the situation were defined, I _think_ he might be more amenable. I think they might marry him."
"That"s how the man puts it!" said Betty, tightening her lip. "Of course _any_ marriage is desirable for _any_ woman!"
"I was thinking of Mrs. Allison," said George, defensively. "One can"t think of a Lady Ancoats till she exists."
"_Merci!_ Never mind. Don"t apologise for the masculine view. It has to be taken with the rest of you. Do you understand that matrimony is in the air here to-night? Have you been talking to Lady Madeleine?"
"No, not yet. But how handsome she"s grown! I see Naseby"s not far off."
George turned smiling to his companion. But, as he did so, again something cold and lifeless in his own face and in the expression underlying the smile p.r.i.c.ked little Betty painfully. Marcella had made her no confidences, but there had been much gossip, and Letty Tressady"s mere presence at the Court set the intimate friend guessing very near the truth.
She did her best to chatter on, so as to keep him at least superficially amused. But both became more and more conscious of two figures, and two figures only, at the crowded table--Letty Tressady, who was listening absently to Edward Watton with oppressed and indrawn eyes, and Lady Maxwell.
George, indeed, watched his wife constantly. He hungered to know more of that first scene between her and Lady Maxwell, or he thought with bitter repulsion of the letter she had confessed to him. Had he known of it,--in spite of that strange, that compelling letter of Maxwell"s, so reticent, and yet in truth so plain,--he could hardly have come as a guest to Maxwell"s house. As for her revelations about Cathedine, he felt little resentment or excitement. For the future a noxious brute had to be kept in order--that was all. It was his own fault, he supposed, much more than hers. The inward voice, as before, was clear enough. "I must just take her home and be good to her. _She_ shirked nothing--now, no doubt, she expects me to do my part."
"Do you notice those jewels that Lady Maxwell is wearing to-night?" said Betty at last, unable to keep away from the name.
"I imagine they are a famous set?"
"They belonged to Marie Antoinette. At last Maxwell has made her have them cleaned and reset. What a pity to have such desperate scruples as she has about all your pretty things!"
"Must diamonds and rubies, then, perish out of the world?" he asked her, absently, letting his eyes rest again upon the beautiful head and neck.
Betty made some flippant rejoinder, but as she watched him, she was not gay.