Sir George Tressady Volume Ii Part 25

"We have settled it, I think; Maxwell will do all he can. It seems hard to trust so much to a stranger like Sir George Tressady, but if he will go--if Ancoats likes him? We must do the best, mustn't we?"

She raised to him her delicate, small face, in a most winning dependence.

Fontenoy did not even attempt resistance.

"Certainly--it is not a chance to lose. May I suggest also"--he looked at Maxwell--"that there is no time to lose?"

"Give me ten minutes, and I am off," said Maxwell, hurriedly carrying a bundle of unopened letters to a distance. He looked through them, to see if anything especially urgent required him to give instructions to his secretary before leaving the house.

"Shall I take you home?" said Fontenoy to Mrs. Allison.

She drew her thick veil round her head and face, and said some tremulous words, which unconsciously deepened the gloom on Fontenoy's face.

Apparently they were to the effect that before going home she wished to see the Anglican priest in whom she especially confided, a certain Father White, who was to all intents and purposes her director. For in his courtship of this woman of fifty, with her curious distinction and her ethereal charm, which years seemed only to increase, Fontenoy had not one rival, but two--her son and her religion.

Fontenoy's fingers barely touched those of Maxwell and his wife. As he closed the door behind Mrs. Allison, leaving the two together, he said to himself contemptuously that he pitied the husband.

When the latch had settled, Maxwell threw down his letters and crossed the room to his wife.

"I only half understood you," he said, a flush rising in his face. "You really mean that we, on this day of all days--that I--am to personally ask this kindness of George Tressady?"

"I do!" she cried, but without attempting any caress. "If I could only go and ask it myself!" "That would be impossible!" he said quickly.

"Then you, dear husband--dear love!--go and ask it for me! Must we not--oh! do see it as I do!--must we not somehow make it possible to be friends again, to wipe out that--that half-hour once for all?"--she threw out her hand in an impetuous gesture. "If you go, he will feel that is what we mean--he will understand us at once--there is nothing vile in him--nothing! Dear, he never said a word to me I could resent till this morning. And, alack, alack! was it somehow my fault?" She dropped her face a moment on the back of the chair she held. "How I am to play my own part--well! I must think. But I cannot have such a thing on my heart, Aldous--I cannot!"

He was silent a moment; then he said:

"Let me understand, at least, what it is precisely that we are doing. Is the idea that it should be made possible for us all to meet again as though nothing had happened?"

She shrank a moment from the man's common sense; then replied, controlling herself:

"Only not to leave the open sore--to help him to forget! He must know--he does know"--she held herself proudly--"that I have no secrets from you.

So that when the time comes for remembering, for thinking it over, he will shrink from you, or hate you. Whereas, what I want"--her eyes filled with tears--"is that he should _know_ you--only that! I ought to have brought it about long ago."

"Are you forgetting that I owe him this morning my political existence?"

The voice betrayed the inner pa.s.sion.

"He would be the last person to remember it!" she cried. "Why not take it quite, quite simply?--behave so as to say to him, without words, 'Be our friend--join with us in putting out of sight what hurts us no less than you to think of. Shut the door upon the old room--pa.s.s with us into a new!'--oh! if I could explain!"

She hid her face in her hands again.

"I understand," he said, after a long pause. "It is very like you. I am not quite sure it is very wise. These things, to my mind, are best left to end themselves. But I promised Mrs. Allison; and what you ask, dear, you shall have. So be it."

She lifted her head hastily, and was dismayed by the signs of agitation in him as he turned away. She pursued him timidly, laying her hand on his arm.

"And then--"

Her voice sank to its most pleading note. He caught her hand; but she withdrew herself in haste.

"And then," she went on, struggling for a smile, "then you and I have things to settle. Do you think I don't know that I have made all your work, and all your triumph, gall and bitterness to you--do you think I don't know?"

She gazed at him with a pa.s.sionate intensity through her tears, yet by her gesture forbidding him to come near her. What man would not have endured such discomforts a thousand times for such a look?

He stooped to her.

"We are to talk that out, then, when I come back?--Please give these letters to Saunders--there is nothing of importance. I will go first to Tressady's house."

Maxwell drove away through the sultry streets, his mind running on his task. It seemed to him that politics had never put him to anything so hard. But he began to plan it with his usual care and precision. The butler who opened the door of the Upper Brook Street house could only say that his master was not at home.

"Shall I find him, do you imagine, at the House of Commons?"

The butler could not say. But Lady Tressady was in, though just on the point of going out. Should he inquire?

But the visitor made it plain that he had no intention of disturbing Lady Tressady, and would find out for himself. He left his card in the butler's hands.

"Who was that, Kenrick?" said a sharp voice behind the man as the hansom drove away. Letty Tressady, elaborately dressed, with a huge white hat and lace parasol, was standing on the stairs, her pale face peering out of the shadows. The butler handed her the card, and telling him to get her a cab at once, she ran up again to the drawing-room.

Meanwhile Maxwell sped on towards Westminster, frowning over his problem.

As he drove down Whitehall the sun brightened to a naked midday heat, throwing its cloak of mists behind it. The gilding on the Clock Tower sparkled in the light; even the dusty, airless street, with its withered planes, was on a sudden flooded with gaiety. Two or three official or Parliamentary acquaintances saluted the successful minister as he pa.s.sed; and each was conscious of a certain impatience with the gravity of the well-known face. That a great man should not be content to look victory, as well as win it, seemed a kind of hypocrisy.

In the House of Commons, a few last votes and other oddments of the now dying session were being pushed through to an accompaniment of empty benches. Tressady was not there, nor in the library. Maxwell made his way to the upper lobby, where writing-tables and materials are provided in the window-recesses for the use of members.

He had hardly entered the lobby before he caught sight at its further end of the long straight chin and fair head of the man he was in quest of.

And almost at the same moment, Tressady, who was sitting writing amid a pile of letters and papers, lifted his eyes and saw Lord Maxwell approaching.

He started, then half rose, scattering his papers. Maxwell bowed as he neared the table, then stopped beside it, without offering his hand.

"I fear I may be disturbing you," he said, with simple but cold courtesy.

"The fact is I have come down here on an urgent matter, which may perhaps be my excuse. Could you give me twenty minutes, in my room?"

"By all means," said Tressady. He tried to put his papers together, but to his own infinite annoyance his hand shook. He seemed hardly to know what to do with them.

"Do not let me hurry you," said Maxwell, in the same manner. "Will you follow me at your leisure?"

"I will follow you immediately," said Tressady; "as soon as I have put these under lock and key."

His visitor departed. Tressady remained standing a moment by the table, his blue eyes, unusually wide open, fixed absently on the river, a dark red flush overspreading the face. Then he rapidly threw his papers together into a black bag that stood near, and walked with them to his locker in the wall.

For an hour after he left Marcella Maxwell he had wandered blindly up and down the Green Park; at the end of it a sudden impulse had driven him to the House, as his best refuge both from Letty and himself. There he found waiting for him a number of letters, and a sheaf of telegrams besides from his const.i.tuency, with which he had just begun to grapple when Maxwell interrupted him. Some hours of hard writing and thinking might, he thought, bring him by reaction to some notion of what to do with the next days and nights--how to take up the business of his private life again.

Now, as he withdrew his key from the lock, in a corridor almost empty of inhabitants, abstraction seized him once more. He leant against the wall a moment, with his hands in his pockets, seeing her face--the tears on her cheek--feeling the texture of her dress against his lips. Barely two hours ago! No doubt she had confided all to Maxwell in the interval. The young fellow burnt with mingled rage and shame. This interview with the husband seemed to transform it all to vaudeville, if not to farce. How was he to get through it with any dignity and self-command? Moreover, a pa.s.sionate resentment towards Maxwell developed itself. His telling of his secret had been no matter for a common scandal, a vulgar jealousy.

_She_ knew that--she could not have so misrepresented him. A sense of the situation to which he had brought himself on all sides made his pride feel itself in the grip of something that asked his submission. Yet why, and to whom?

He walked along through the interminable corridors towards Maxwell's room in the House of Lords, a prey to what afterwards seemed to him the meanest moment of his life. Little knowing the pledges that a woman had given for him, he did say to himself that Maxwell owed him much--that he was not called upon to bear everything from a man he had given back to power. And all the time his thoughts built a thorn-hedge about her face, her pity. Let him see them no more, not even in the mirror of the mind.

Great heaven! what harm could such as he do to her?

By the time he reached Maxwell's door he seemed to himself as hard and cool as usual. As he entered, the minister was standing by an oriel window, overlooking the river, turning over the contents of a despatch-box that had just been brought him. He advanced at once; and Tressady noticed that he had already dismissed his secretary.