Sir George Tressady Volume I Part 15

"Well, I don't understand--I really _don't!_" she interrupted sharply. "I thought you were all against the Government--I thought you didn't believe a word they say!"

He laughed.

"The difference between them and us, darling, is only that _they_ think the world can be mended by Act of Parliament, and _we_ think it can't. Do what you will, _we_ say the world is, and must be, a wretched hole for the majority of those that live in it; _they_ suppose they can cure it by quack meddlings and tyrannies."

He looked straight before him, absorbed, and she was struck with the harsh melancholy of his face.

What on earth had he kept her here for to talk this kind of talk!

"George, I really _must_ go!" she began, flushing, and drawing her hand away.

Instantly he turned to her, his look brightening and melting.

"Must you? Well, the world sha'n't be a wretched hole for us, shall it, darling? We'll make a little nest in it--we'll forget what we can't help--we'll be happy as long as the fates let us--won't we, Letty?"

His arm slipped round behind her. He caught her hands.

He had recollected himself. Nevertheless Letty was keenly conscious that it was all most absurd, this sitting on a seat in a public thoroughfare late at night, and behaving like any 'Arry and 'Arriet.

"Why, of course we shall be happy," she said, rising with decision as she spoke; "only somehow I don't always understand you, George. I wish I knew what you were really thinking about."

"_You!_" he said, laughing, and drawing her hand within his arm, as they turned backwards towards the bridge.

She shook her head doubtfully. Whereupon he awoke fully to the situation, and during the short remainder of their walk he wooed and flattered her as usual. But when he had put her safely into a hansom at the corner of the bridge, and smiled good-bye to her, he turned to walk back to the House in much sudden flatness of mood. Her little restless egotisms of mind and manner had chilled him unawares. Had Fontenoy's speech been so fine, after all? Were politics--was anything--quite worth while? It seemed to him that all emotions were small, all crises disappointing.

CHAPTER VI

The following Sunday, somewhere towards five o'clock, George rang the bell of the Maxwells' house in St. James's Square. It was a very fine house, and George's eye, as he stood waiting, ran over the facade with an amused, investigating look.

He allowed himself the same expression once or twice in the hall, as one mute and splendid person relieved him of his coat, and another, equally mute and equally unsurpa.s.sable, waited for him on the stairs, while across a pa.s.sage beyond the hall he saw two red-liveried footmen carrying tea.

"When one is a friend of the people," he pondered as he went upstairs, "is one limited in horses but not in flunkeys? These things are obscure."

He was ushered first into a stately outer drawing-room, filled with old French furniture and fine pictures; then the butler lifted a velvet curtain, p.r.o.nounced the visitor's name with a voice and emphasis as perfectly trained as the rest of him, and stood aside for George to enter.

He found himself on the threshold of a charming room looking west, and lit by some last beams of February sun. The pale-green walls were covered with a medley of prints and sketches. A large writing-table, untidily heaped with papers, stood conspicuous on the blue self-coloured carpet, which over a great part of the floor was pleasantly void and bare. Flat earthenware pans, planted with hyacinths and narcissus, stood here and there, and filled the air with spring scents. Books ran round the lower walls, or lay piled where-ever there was a s.p.a.ce for them; while about the fire at the further end was gathered a circle of chintz-covered chairs--chairs of all shapes and sizes, meant for talking. The whole impression of the pretty, disorderly place, compared with the stately drawing-room behind it, was one of intimity and freedom; the room made a friend of you as you entered.

Half a dozen people were sitting with Lady Maxwell when Tressady was announced. She rose to meet him with great cordiality, introduced him to little Lady Leven, an elfish creature in a cloud of fair hair, and with a pleasant "You know all the rest," offered him a chair beside herself and the tea-table.

"The rest" were Frank Leven, Edward Watton, Bayle, the Foreign Office private secretary who had been staying at Malford House at the time of Tressady's election, and Bennett, the "small, dark man" whom George had pointed out to Letty in the House as a Labour member, and one of the Maxwells' particular friends.

"Well?" said Lady Maxwell, turning to her new visitor as she handed him some tea, "were you as much taken with the grandmother as the grandmother was taken with you? She told me she had never seen a 'more haffable gentleman, nor one as she'd a been more willin to ha done for'!"

George laughed. "I see," he said, "that my report has been antic.i.p.ated."

"Yes--I have been there. I have found a 'case' in them indeed--alack! The granny--I am afraid she is an unseemly old woman--and the elder girl both work for the Jew son-in-law on the first floor--homework of the most abominable kind--that girl will be dead in a year if it goes on."

George was rapidly conscious of two contradictory impressions--one of pleasure, one of annoyance--pleasure in her tall, slim presence, her white hand, and all the other flashing points of a beauty not to be denied--and irritation that she should have talked "shop" to him with her first breath. Could one never escape this altruistic chatter?

But he was not left to grapple with it alone, for Lady Leven looked up quickly.

"Mr. Watton, will you please take Lady Maxwell's tea away if she mentions the word 'case' again? We gave her fair warning."

Lady Maxwell hastily clasped both her hands round her tea-cup.

"Betty, we have discussed the opera for at least twenty minutes."

"Yes--at peril of our lives!" said Lady Leven. "I never talked so fast before. One felt as though one _must_ say everything one had to say about Melba and the de Reszkes, all in one breath--before one's poor little subject was torn from one--one would never have such a chance again."

Lady Maxwell laughed, but coloured too.

"Am I such a nuisance?" she said, dropping her hands on her knee with a little sigh. Then she turned to Tressady.

"But Lady Leven really makes it out worse than it is. We haven't even _approached_ a Factory Act all the afternoon."

Lady Leven sprang forward in her chair. "Because! _because_, my dear, we simply declined to let you. We made a league--didn't we, Mr.

Bennett?--even you joined it."

Bennett smiled.

"Lady Maxwell overworks herself--we all know that," he said, his look, at once kind, honest, and perennially embarra.s.sed, pa.s.sing from Lady Leven to his hostess.

"Oh, don't sympathise, for Heaven's sake!" cried Betty. "Wage war upon her--it's our only hope."

"Don't you think Sunday at least ought to be frivolous?" said Tressady, smiling, to Lady Maxwell.

"Well, personally, I like to talk about what interests me on Sunday as well as on other days," she said with a frank simplicity; "but I know I ought to be kept in order--I become a terrible bore."

Frank Leven roused himself from the sofa on which he had languidly subsided.

"Bores?" he said indignantly, "we're all bores. We all have been bores since people began to think about what they're pleased to call 'social work.' Why should I love my neighbour?--I'd much rather hate him. I generally do."

"Doesn't it all depend," said Tressady, "on whether he happens to be able to make it disagreeable for you in return?"

"That's just it," said Betty Leven, eagerly. "I agree with Frank--it's all so stupid, this 'loving' everybody. It makes one positively hot. We sit under a clergyman, Frank and I, who talks of nothing every Sunday but love--_love_--like that, long-drawn-out--how our politics should be 'love,' and our shopping should be 'love'--till we long simply to bastinado somebody. I want to have a little real nice cruelty--something sharp and interesting. I should like to stick pins into my maid, only unfortunately, as she has more than once pointed out to me, it would be so much easier for her to stick them into me!"

"You want the time of Miss Austen's novels back again," said young Bayle, stooping to her, with his measured and agreeable smile--"before even the clergy had a mission."

"Ah! but it would be no good," said Lady Leven, sighing, "if _she_ were there!"

She threw out her small hand towards her hostess, and everybody laughed.

Up to the moment of the laugh, Lady Maxwell had been lying back in her chair listening, the beautiful mouth absently merry, and the eyes speaking--Tressady thought--of quite other things, of some hidden converse of her own, going on in the brain behind the eyes. A certain prophetess-air seemed natural to her. Nevertheless, that first impression of her he had carried away from the hospital scene was being somehow blurred and broken up.