Sir George Tressady Volume Ii Part 14

Her pale, small face contracted with a look of pain. Fontenoy, too, frowned as he looked across at Ancoats, who was leaning against the wall in an affected pose, and quoting bits from a new play to George Tressady.

After a pause, he said:

"I think if I were you I should cultivate Tressady. Ancoats likes him. It might be possible some time for you to work through him."

The mother a.s.sented eagerly, then said, with a smile:

"But I gather you don't find him much to be depended on in the House?"

Fontenoy shrugged his shoulders.

"Lady Maxwell has bedevilled him somehow. You're responsible!"

"Poor Castle Luton! You must tell me how it and I can make up. But you don't mean that there is any thought of his going over?"

"His vote's all safe--I suppose. He would make too great a fool of himself if he failed us there. But he has lost all heart for the business. And Harding Watton tells me it's all her doing. She has been taking him about in the East End--getting her friends to show him round."

"And _now_ you are in the mood to put the women down--to show them their place?"

She looked at him with gentle humour--a very delicate high-bred figure, in her characteristic black-and-white. Fontenoy's whole aspect changed as he caught the reference to their own relation. The look of premature old age, of harsh fatigue, was for the moment effaced by something young and ardent as he bent towards her.

"No--I take the rough with the smooth. Lady Maxwell may do her worst. We have the counter-charm."

A flush showed itself in her lined cheek. She was fourteen years older than he, and had refused a dozen times to marry him. But she would have found it hard to live without his devotion, and she had brought him by now into such good order that she dared to let him know it.

Half an hour later George and Letty mounted another palatial staircase, and at the top of it Letty put on fresh smiles for a new hostess. George, tired out with the drama of the day, could hardly stifle his yawns; but Letty had treated the notion of going home after one party when, they might, if they pleased, "do" four, with indignant amazement.

So here they were at the house of one of the greatest of bankers, and George stalked through the rooms in his wife's train, taking comparatively little part in the political buzz all about him, and thinking mostly of a hurried little talk with Mrs. Allison that had taken up his last few minutes in her drawing-room. Poor thing! But what could he do for her? The lad was as stage-struck as ever--could barely talk sense on any other subject, and not much on that.

But if he, owing to the clash of an inner struggle, was weary of politics, the world in general could think and speak of nothing else. The rooms were full of politicians and their wives, of members just arrived from the House, of Ministers smiling at each other with lifted eyebrows, like boys escaped from a birching. A tempest of talk surged through the rooms--talk concerned with all manner of great issues, with the fate of a Government, the rousing of a country, the fortunes of individual statesmen. Through it all the little host himself, a small fair-haired man, with the tired eyes and hot-house air of the financier, walked about from group to group, gossiping over the incidents of the division, and now and then taking up some newcomer to be introduced to his pretty and fashionable wife.

Somewhere in the din George stumbled across Lady Leven, who was talking merrily to young Bayle; and found her, notwithstanding, very ready to turn and chat with him.

"Of course we are all waiting for the Maxwells," she said to him. "Will they come, I wonder?"

"Why not?"

"Do people show on their way to disaster? I think I should stay at home if I were she."

"Why, they have to hearten their friends!"

"No good," said Betty, pursing her pretty lips; "and they have fought so hard."

"And may win yet," said George, an odd sparkle in his eye, as he stood looking over his tiny companion to the door. "n.o.body is sure of anything, I can tell you."

"I don't believe _you_ care," she said audaciously, shaking her golden head at him.

"Pray, why?"

"Oh! you don't seem at all desperate," she said coolly. "Perhaps you're like Frank--you think the other side make so much better points than you do. 'If Dowson makes another speech,' Frank said to me yesterday, 'I vow I shall rat!' There's a way of talking of your own chiefs. Oh! I shall have to take him out of politics."

And she unfurled her fan with a jerk half melancholy, half decided.

Then, suddenly, a laugh flashed over her face; she raised herself eagerly on tiptoe.

"Ah! bravo!" she said. "Here they are!"

George turned with the crowd, and saw them enter, Marcella first, in a blaze of diamonds; then the quiet face and square shoulders of her husband.

Nothing, he thought, could have been better than the manner in which both bore themselves as they pa.s.sed through the throng, answering the greetings of friend and foe, and followed by the keen or hostile scrutiny of hundreds. There was no bravado, no attempt to disguise the despondency that must naturally follow on a division so threatening and in many ways so wounding. Maxwell looked grey with fatigue and short nights, while her black eyes pa.s.sed wistfully from friend to friend, and had never been more quick, more responsive. Their cause was in danger; nevertheless, the impression on Tressady's mind was of two people consciously in the grip of forces infinitely greater than they--forces that would hold on their path whatever befell their insignificant mortal agents.

I steadier step when I recall, Howe'er I slip, thou canst not fall.

So cries the thinker to his mistress, Truth. And in the temper of that cry lies the secret of brave living. One looker-on, at least,--and that an opponent,--recalled the words as he watched Marcella and her husband taking their way through the London crowd, amid the doubts of their friends and the half-concealed triumph of their foes.

It seemed to him that he could have no chance of speech with her. But presently, from the other side of the room, he saw that she had recognised and was greeting him, and, do what he would, he must needs make his way to her.

She welcomed him with great friendliness, and without a word of small reproach on the score of the weeks he had let pa.s.s without coming to see her. They fell into talk about the speeches of the evening. George thought he could see that she, or Maxwell speaking through her, was dissatisfied with Dowson's conduct of the Bill in the House, and chafing under the const.i.tutional practice that made it necessary to give him so large a share in the matter. But she said nothing ungenerous; nor was there any bitterness towards the many false friends who had deserted them that night in the division-lobby. She spoke with eager hope of a series of speeches Maxwell was about to make in the North, and then she turned upon her companion.

"You haven't spoken since the second reading--on any of the fighting points, at least. I have been wondering what you thought of many things."

George threw his head back against the wall beside her, and was silent a moment. At last he said, looking down upon her:

"Perhaps, very often I haven't known what to think."

She started--reddened ever so little. "Does that mean"--she hesitated for a phrase--"that you have moved at all on the main question?"

"No," he said deliberately--"no! I think as I always did, that you are calling in law to do what law can't do. But perhaps I appreciate better than I once did what provokes you to it. It seems to me difficult now to meet the case your side is putting forward by a mere _non possumus_. One wants to stop the machine a bit and think it out. So much I admit."

She met his smile with a curious, tremulous look. Instinctively he guessed that this partial triumph in him of her cause--of Maxwell's cause--had let flow some inner font of feeling.

"If you only knew," she said, "how all this Parliamentary rush and clatter seem to me beside the mark. People talk to me of divisions and votes. I think all the time of persons I know--of faces of children--sick-beds, horrible rooms--"

She had turned her face from the crowd towards the open window, in whose recess they were standing. As she spoke they both fell back a little into comparative solitude, and he drew her on to talk--trying in a young eager way to make her rest in his kindness, to soothe her weariness and disappointment. And as she spoke, he clutched at the minutes; he threw more and more sympathy at her feet to keep her talking, to enchain her there beside him, in her lovely whiteness and grace. And, mingled with it all, was the happy guess that she liked to linger with him--that amid all this hard clamour of public talk and judgment she felt him a friend in a peculiar sense--a friend whose loyalty grew with misfortune. As for this wild-beast world, that was thwarting and libelling her, he began to think of it with a blind, up-swelling rage--a desire to fight and win for her--to put down--

"Tressady, your wife sent me to find you. She wishes to go home."

The voice was Harding Watton's. That observant young man advanced bowing, and holding out his hand to Lady Maxwell.

When Marcella had drifted once more into the fast-melting crowd, George found himself face to face with Letty. She was very white, and stared at him with wide, pa.s.sionate eyes.

And on the way home George, with all his efforts, could not keep the peace. Letty flung at him a number of bitter and insulting things that he found very hard to bear.

"What do you want me to do?" he said to her at last, impatiently. "I have hardly spoken six sentences to Lady Maxwell, since the meeting, till tonight--I suppose because you wished it. But neither you nor anyone else shall make me rude to her. Don't be such a fool, Letty! Make friends with her, and you will be ashamed of saying or even thinking such things."

Whereat Letty burst into hysterical tears, and he soon found himself involved in all the remorseful, inconsequent speeches to which a man in such a plight feels himself driven. She allowed herself to be calmed, and they had a dreary making-up. When it was over, however, George was left with the uneasy conviction that he knew very little of his wife. She was not of a nature to let any slight to her go unpunished. What was she planning? What would she do?