Sir George Tressady Volume Ii Part 10

"Letty! I wasn't to tell you, but I choose to break my promise. Don't be too cruel, my dear, or too angry. My mother is dying!"

She scanned him deliberately, the flushed face--the signs of strongly felt yet strongly suppressed emotion. The momentary consciousness flew through her that he was at bottom a very human, impressionable creature--that if she could but have broken down and thrown herself on his neck, this miserable evening might open for both of them a new way.

But her white-heat of pa.s.sion was too strong. She pushed him away.

"She made you believe that this morning? Then I'd better hurry up at Ferth; for of course it only means that there will be a fresh list of debts directly!"

He let her go, and she heard him walk quickly back to his study and shut the door. She stared after him triumphantly for a moment, then rushed upstairs.

In her room her maid was waiting for her. Grier's sallow face and gloomy eyes showed considerable annoyance at being kept up so late. But she said nothing, and Letty, who in general was only too ready to admit the woman to a vulgar familiarity, for once held her tongue. Her state of excitement and exhaustion, however, was evident, and Grier bestowed many furtive, examining glances upon her mistress in the course of the undressing. She thought she had heard "them" quarrelling on the stairs.

What a pity she had been too tired and cross to listen!

Of course they must come to quarrelling! Grier's sympathies were tolerably impartial. She had no affection for her mistress, and she cordially disliked Sir George, knowing perfectly well that he thought ill of her. But she had a good place, and meant to keep it if she could. To which end she had done her best to strengthen a mean hold on Letty. Now, as she was brushing out Letty's brown hair, and silently putting two and two together the while, an idea occurred to her which pleased her.

After Grier had left her, Letty could not make up her mind to go to bed.

She was still pacing up and down the room in her dressing-gown, when she heard a knock--Grier's knock.

"Come in!"

"Please, my lady," said Grier, appearing with something in her hand, "doesn't this belong to your photograph box? I found it on the floor in Sir George's dressing-room this morning."

Letty hastily took it from her, and, in spite of an instant effort to control herself, the red flushed again into a cheek that had been very pale when Grier came in.

"Where did you find it?"

"It had tumbled off Sir George's table, I think," said Grier, with elaborate innocence; "someone must have took it out of your photo-box."

"Thank you," said Letty, shortly. "You may go, Grier."

The maid went, and Letty was left standing with the photograph in her hands.

Two days before Tressady had been in Edward Watton's room in St.

James's Street, and had seen this amateur photograph of Marcella Maxwell and her boy on Watton's table. The poetic charm of it had struck him so forcibly that he had calmly put it in his pocket, telling the protesting owner that he in his _role_ of great friend could easily procure another, and must beware of a grudging spirit. Watton had laughed and submitted, and Tressady had carried off the picture, honestly meaning to present it to Letty for a collection of contemporary "beauties" she had just begun to make.

Later in the day, as he was taking off his coat in the evening to dress for dinner, Tressady drew out the photograph. A sudden instinct, which he himself could hardly have explained, made him delay handing it over to Letty. He thrust it into the top tray of his collar-and-shirt wardrobe.

Two days later the butler, coming in a hurry before breakfast to put out his master's clothes, shook the photograph out of the folds of the shirt, where it had hidden itself, without noticing what he had done. The picture slipped between the wardrobe and the wall of the recess in which it stood, was discovered later in the day by the housemaid, and given to Lady Tressady's maid.

Letty laid the photograph down on the dressing-table, and stood leaning upon her hands, looking at it. Marcella was sitting under one of the cedars of Maxwell Court with her boy beside her. A fine corner of the old house made a background, and the photographer had so dealt with his picture as to make it a whole, full of significance, and culminating in the two faces--the sensitive, speaking beauty of the mother, the st.u.r.dy strength of the child. Marcella had never looked more wistful, more attaching. It was the expression of a woman at rest, in the golden moment of her life, yet conscious--as all happiness is conscious--of the common human doom that nothing escapes. Meanwhile the fine, lightly furrowed brow above the eyes spoke action and power; so did the strong waves of black hair blown back by the breeze. A n.o.ble, strenuous creature, yet quivering through and through with the simplest, most human instincts. So one must needs read her, as one looked from the eyes to the eager clasp of the arm about the boy.

Letty studied it, as though she would pierce and stab it with looking.

Then, with a sudden wild movement, she took up the picture, and tore it into twenty pieces. The pieces she left strewn on the floor, so that they must necessarily strike the eye of anyone coming into the room. And in a few more minutes she was in bed, lying still and wakeful, with her face turned away from the door.

About an hour afterwards there was a gentle knock at her door. She made no answer, and Tressady came in. He stepped softly, thinking she was asleep, and presently she heard him stop, with a stifled exclamation. She made no sound, but from his movement she guessed that he was picking up the litter on the floor. Then she heard it thrown into the basket under her writing-table, and she waited, holding her breath.

Tressady walked to a far window, drew a curtain back softly, and stood looking out at the starlight over the deserted street. Once, finding him so still, she ventured a hasty glance at him over the edge of the sheet.

But she could see nothing. And after a time he turned and came to his accustomed place beside her. In twenty minutes at latest, she knew, much to her chagrin, that he was asleep.

She herself had no sleep. She was stung to wakefulness by that recurrent sense of the irrevocable which makes us say to ourselves in wonder, "How can it have happened? Two hours ago--such a little while--it had not happened!" And the mind clutches at the bygone hour, so near, so eternally distant--clutches at its ghost, in vain.

Yet it seemed to her now that she had been jealous from the first moment when she and George had come into contact with Marcella Maxwell. During the long hours of this night her jealousy burnt through her like a hot pain--jealousy, mixed with reluctant memory. Half consciously she had always a.s.sumed that it had been a piece of kindness on her part to marry George Tressady at all. She had almost condescended to him. After all, she had played with ambitions so much higher! At any rate, she had taken for granted that he would always admire and be grateful to her--that in return for her pretty self she might at least dispose of him and his as she pleased.

And now, what galled her intolerably was this discernment of the way in which--at least since their honeymoon--he must have been criticising and judging her--judging her by comparison with another woman. She seemed to see at a glance, the whole process of his mind, and her vanity writhed under it.

How much else than vanity? As she turned restlessly from side to side, possessed by plans for punishing George, for humiliating Lady Maxwell, and avenging herself, she said to herself that she did not care,--that it was not worth caring about,--that she would either bring George to his senses, or manage to amuse herself without him.

But in reality she was held tortured and struggling all the time in the first grip of that masterful hold wherewith the potter lifts his clay when he lays it on the eternal whirring of the wheel.

CHAPTER XVI

The newspapers of the morning following these events--that is to say, of Sat.u.r.day, July 5--gave very lively accounts of the East End meeting, at which, as some put it, Lady Maxwell "had got her answer" from the East End mob. The stone-throwing, the blow, the woman, and the cause were widely discussed that same day throughout the clubs and drawing-rooms of Mayfair and Belgravia, no less than among the clubs and "publics" of the East End; and the guests at country-house parties as they hurried out of town for the Sunday, carried the gossip of the matter far and wide. The Maxwells went down alone to Brookshire, and the curious visitors who called in St. James's Square "to inquire" came away with nothing to report.

"A put-up thing, the whole business," said Mrs. Watton, indignantly, to her son Harding, as she handed him the "Observer," on the Sunday morning, in the dining-room of the family house in Tilney Street. "Of course, a little martyrdom just now suits her book excellently. How that man _can_ let her make him a laughing-stock in this way--"

"A laughing-stock?" said Harding, smiling. "Not at all. Don't spoil your first remark, mother. For, of course, it is all practical politics. The handsomest woman in England doesn't give her temple to be gashed for nothing. You will see what her friends will make out of it!--and out of the brutal violence of our mob."

"Disgusting!" said Mrs. Watton, playing severely with the lid of the mustard-pot that stood beside her.

She and Harding were enjoying a late breakfast _tete-a-tete._ The old Squire had finished long before, and was already doing his duty with a volume of sermons in the library upstairs, preparatory to going to church. Mrs. Watton and Harding, however, would accompany him thither presently; for Harding was a great supporter of the Establishment.

The son raised his shoulders at his mother's adjective.

"What I want to know," he said, "is whether Lady Maxwell is going to bag George Tressady, or not. He brought her home from the meeting on Friday."

"Brought her home from the meeting?--_George Tressady?_"

Mrs. Watton raised her masculine head and frowned at her son, as though he were, in some sense, personally responsible for this unseemly fact.

"He has been haunting her in the East End for weeks. I got that out of Edward. But, of course, one knew that was going to happen as soon as one saw them together at Castle Luton. She throws her flies cleverly, that woman!"

"All I can say is," observed Mrs. Watton, ponderously, "that in any decent state of society such a woman would be banned!"

Harding rose, and stood by the open window caressing his moustache. It was a perception of long standing with him, that life would have been better worth living had his mother possessed a sense of humour.

"It seems to me," his mother resumed after a pause, "that someone at least should give Letty a hint."

"Oh! Letty can take care of herself," said Watton, laughing. He might have said, if he had thought it worth while, that somebody had already given Letty a hint. Tressady, it appeared, disliked him. Well, people that disliked you were fair game. However, in spite of Tressady's dislike, he had been able to amuse himself a good deal with Letty and Letty's furnishing during the last few months. Harding, who prided himself on the finest of tastes, liked to be consulted; he liked anything, also, that gave him importance, if it were only with the master of a curiosity shop, and, under cover of Letty's large dealings, he had carried off various spoils of his own for his rooms in the Temple--spoils which were not to be despised--at a very moderate price indeed.

"Who could have thought George Tressady would turn out such a weak creature," said his mother, rising, "when one remembers how Lord Fontenoy believed in him?"

"And does still believe in him, more or less," said Harding; "but Fontenoy will have to be warned."

He looked at the clock, to see if there was time for a cigarette before church, lit it, and, leaning against the window, gazed towards the hazy park with a meditative air.

"Do you mean there is any question of his ratting?" said his mother.

Harding raised his eyebrows.