Sir George Tressady Volume Ii Part 20

Letty's pale cheeks flamed into red. She stopped. She turned upon her comforter with eyes of hot resentment and dislike.

"And they dare to say that he did it for her! What right has anybody to say it?"

Mrs. Watton stared. Harding slowly and compa.s.sionately shook his head.

"I am afraid the world dares to say a great many unpleasant things--don't you know? One has to put up with it. Lady Maxwell has a characteristic way of doing things. It's like a painter: one can't miss the touch."

"No more than one can mistake a saying of Harding Watton's," said a vibrating voice behind them.

And there in the open doorway stood Tressady, pale, spent, and hollow-eyed, yet none the less the roused master of the house, determined to a.s.sert himself against a couple of intruders.

Letty looked at him in silence, one foot beating the ground. Harding started, and turned aside to search for his opera-hat, which he had deposited upon the sofa. Mrs. Watton was quite unabashed.

"We did not expect you so soon," she said, holding out a chilly hand.

"And I daresay you will misunderstand our being here. I cannot help that.

It seemed to me my duty, as Letty's nearest relative in London, to come here and condole with her to-night on this deplorable event."

"I don't know what you mean," said Tressady, coolly, his hand on his side. "Are you speaking of the division?"

Mrs. Watton threw up her hands and her eyebrows. Then, gathering up her dress, she marched across the room to Letty.

"Good-night, Letty. I should have been glad to have had a quiet talk with you, but as your husband's come in I shall go. Oh! I'm not the person to interfere between husband and wife. Get him to tell you, if you can, _why_ he has disappointed the friends and supporters who got him into Parliament; why he has broken all his promises, and given everybody the right to pity his unfortunate young wife! Oh! don't alarm yourself, Sir George! I say my mind, but I'm going. I know very well that I am intruding. Good-night. Letty understands that she will always find sympathy in _my_ house."

And the fierce old lady swept to the door, holding the culprit with her eyes. Harding, too, stepped up to Letty, who was standing now by the mantelpiece, with her back to the room. He took the hand hanging by her side, and folded it ostentatiously in both of his.

"Good-night, dear little cousin," he said, in his most affected voice.

"If you have any need of us, command us."

"Are you going?" said Tressady. His brow was curiously wrinkled.

Harding made him a bow, and walked with rather sidling steps to the door.

Tressady followed him to the landing, called to the butler, who was still up, and ceremoniously told him to get Mrs. Watton a cab. Then he walked back to the drawing-room, and shut the door behind him.

"Letty!"

His tone startled her. She looked round hastily.

"Letty! you were defending me as I came in."

He was extraordinarily pale--his blue eyes flashed. Every trace of the hauteur with which he had treated the Wattons had disappeared.

Letty recovered herself in an instant. The moment he showed softness she became the tyrant.

"Don't come!--don't touch me!" she said pa.s.sionately, putting out her hand as he approached her. "If I defended you, it was just for decency's sake. You _have_ disgraced us both. It is perfectly true what Aunt Watton says. I don't suppose we shall ever get over it. Oh! don't try to bully me"--for Tressady had turned away with an impatient groan. "It's no use.

I know you think me a little fool! _I'm_ not one of your great political ladies, who pretend to know everything that they may keep men dangling after them. I don't pose and play the hypocrite, as some--some people do.

But, all the same, I know that you have done for yourself, and that people will say the most disgraceful things. Of course they will! And you can't deny them--you know you can't. Why did you never tell me a thing?

_Who_ made you change over? Ah! you can't answer--or you won't!"

Tressady was walking up and down with folded arms. He paused at her challenge.

"Why didn't I tell you? Do you remember that I wanted to talk to you yesterday morning--that I suggested you should come and hear my speech--and you wouldn't have it? You didn't care about politics, you said, and weren't going to pretend.--What made me go over? Well--I changed my mind--to some extent," he said slowly.

"To some extent?" She laughed scornfully, mimicking his voice. "_To some extent_! Are you going to try and make me believe there was nothing else?"

"No. As I walked home to-night I determined not to conceal the truth from you. Opinions counted for something. I voted--yes, taking all things together, I think it may be said that I voted honestly. But I should never have taken the part I did but--" he hesitated, then went on deliberately--"but that I had come to have a strong--wish--to give Lady Maxwell her heart's desire. She has been my friend. I repaid her what I could."

Letty, half beside herself, flung at him a shower of taunts hysterical and hardly intelligible. He showed no emotion. "Of course," he said disdainfully, "if you choose to repeat this to others you will do us both great damage. I suppose I can't help it. For anybody else in the world--for Mrs. Watton and her son, for instance--I have a perfectly good political defence, and I shall defend myself stoutly. I have no intention whatever of playing the penitent in public."

And what, she asked him, striving with all her might to regain the self-command which could alone enable her to wound him, to get the mastery--what was to be her part in this little comedy? Did he expect _her_ to put up with this charming situation--to take what Marcella Maxwell left?

"No," he said abruptly. "You have no right to reproach me or her in any vulgar way. But I recognise that the situation is impossible. I shall probably leave Parliament and London."

She stared at him in speechless pa.s.sion, then suddenly gathered up her fan and gloves and fled past him.

He caught at her, and stopped her, holding her satin skirt.

"My poor child!" he cried in remorse; "bear with me, Letty--and forgive me!"

"I hate you!" she said fiercely, "and I will never forgive you!"

She wrenched her dress away; he heard her quick steps across the floor and up the stairs.

Tressady fell into a chair, broken with exhaustion. His day in the House of Commons alone would have tried any man's nervous strength; this final scene had left him in a state to shrink from another word, another sound.

He must have dozed as he sat there from pure fatigue, for he found himself waking suddenly, with a sense of chill, as the August dawn was penetrating the closed windows and curtains.

He sprang up, and pulled the curtains back with a stealthy hand, so as to make no noise. Then he opened the window and stepped out upon the balcony, into a misty haze of sun.

The morning air blew upon him, and he drew it in with delight. How blessed was the sun, and the silence of the streets, and the dappled sky there to the east, beyond the Square!

After those long hours of mental tension in the crowd and heat of the House of Commons, what joy! what physical relief! He caught eagerly at the sensation of bodily pleasure, driving away his cares, letting the morning freshness recall to him a hundred memories--the memories of a traveller who has seen much, and loved Nature more than man. Blue surfaces of rippling sea, cool steeps among the mountains, streams brawling over their stones, a thousand combinations of gra.s.s and trees and sun--these things thronged through his brain, evoked by the wandering airs of this pale London sunrise and the few dusty plains which he could see to his right, behind the Park railings. And, like heralds before the presence, these various images flitted, pa.s.sed, drew to one side, while memory in trembling revealed at last the best she had--an English river flowing through June meadows under a heaven of flame, a woman with a child, the scents of gra.s.s and hawthorn, the plashing of water.

He hung over the balcony, dreaming.

But before long he roused himself, and went back into the house. The gaudy drawing-room looked singularly comfortless and untidy in the delicate purity of the morning light. The flowers Letty had worn in her dress the night before were scattered on the floor, and the evening paper lay on the chair, where she had flung it down.

He stood in the centre of the room, his head raised, listening. No sound.

Surely she was asleep. In spite of all the violence she had shown in their after-talk, the memory of her speech to Mrs. Watton lingered in the young fellow's mind. It astonished him to realise, as he stood there, in this morning silence, straining to hear if his wife were moving overhead, how, _pari pa.s.su_ with the headlong progress of his act of homage to the one woman, certain sharp perceptions with regard to the other had been rising in his mind.

His life had been singularly lacking till now in any conscious moral strain. That a man's desires should outrun his conscience had always seemed to him, on the whole, the normal human state. But all sorts of new standards and ideals had begun to torment him since the beginning of his friendship with Marcella Maxwell, and a hundred questions that had never yet troubled him were even now pressing through his mind as to his relations to his wife, and the inexorableness of his debt towards her.

Moreover, he had hardly left the House of Commons and its uproar--his veins were still throbbing with the excitement of the division--when a voice said to him, "This is the end! You have had your 'moment'--now leave the stage before any mean anti-climax comes to spoil it all. Go.

Break your life across. Don't wait to be dismissed and shaken off--take her grat.i.tude with you, and go!"

Ah! but not yet--not yet! He sat down before his wife's little writing-table, and buried his face in his hands, while his heart burnt with longing. One day--then he would accept his fate, and try and mend both his own life and Letty's.

Would it be generous to drop out of her ken at once, leave the gift in her lap, and say nothing? Ah! but he was not capable of it. His act must have its price. Just one half hour with her--face to face.

Then, shut the door--and, good-bye! What was there to fear? He could control himself. But after all these weeks, after their conversation of the night before, to go away without a word would be discourteous--unkind even--almost a confession to her of the whys and wherefores of what he had done.