Sir George Tressady Volume Ii Part 28

She shaded her eyes with her hand a moment, thinking. Then she said:

"Perhaps it is of no use for me to ask you to remember how full our minds--my husband's and mine--have been of one subject--one set of ideas. But, if I am not keeping you too long, I should like to give you an account, from my point of view, of the friendship between Sir George and myself. I think I can remember every talk of ours, from our first meeting in the hospital down to--down to this morning."

"This morning!" cried Letty, springing up. "This _morning_! He went to you to-day?"

The little face convulsed with pa.s.sion raised an intolerable distress in Marcella.

"Yes, he came to see me," she said, her dark eyes, full of pain, full, too, once more, of entreaty, fixed upon her interrogator. "But do let me tell you! I never saw anyone in deeper trouble--trouble about you--trouble about himself."

Letty burst into a wild laugh.

"Of course! No doubt he went to complain of me--that I flirted--that I ill-treated his mother--that I spent too much money--and a lot of other pleasant little things. Oh! I can imagine it perfectly. Besides that, I suppose he went to be thanked. Well, he deserved _that_. He has thrown away his career to please you; so if you didn't thank him, you ought!

Everybody says his position in Parliament now isn't worth a straw--that he must resign--which is delightful, of course, for his wife. And I saw it all from the beginning--I understood exactly what you _wanted_ to do at Castle Luton--only I couldn't believe then--I was only six weeks married--"

A wave of excitement and self-pity swept over her. She broke off with a sob.

Marcella's heart was wrung. She knew nothing of the real Letty Tressady.

It was the wife as such, slighted and set aside, that appealed to the imagination, the remorse of this happy, this beloved woman. She rose quickly, she held out her hands, looking down upon the little venomous creature who had been pouring these insults upon her.

"Don't--_don't_ believe such things," she said, with sobbing breath. "I never wronged you consciously for a moment. Can't you believe that Sir George and I became friends because we cared for the same kind of questions; because I--I was full of my husband's work and everything that concerned it; because I liked to talk about it, to win him friends. If it had ever entered my mind that such a thing could pain and hurt you--"

"Where have you sent him to-day?" cried Letty, peremptorily, interrupting her, while she drew her handkerchief fiercely across her eyes.

Instantly Marcella was conscious of the difficulty of explaining her own impulse and Maxwell's action.

"Sir George told me," she said, faltering, "that he must go away from London immediately, to think out some trouble that was oppressing him.

Only a few minutes after he left our house we heard from Mrs. Allison that she was in great distress about her son. She came, in fact, to beg us to help her find him. I won't go into the story, of course; I am sure you know it. My husband and I talked it over. It occurred to us that if Maxwell went to him--to Sir George--and asked him to do us and her this great kindness of going to Ancoats and trying to bring him back to his mother, it would put everything on a different footing. Maxwell would get to know him,--as I had got to know him. One would find a way--to silence the foolish, unjust things--that have been said--I suppose--I don't know--"

She paused, confused by the difficulties in her path, her cheeks hot and flushed. But the heart knew its own innocence. She recovered herself; she came nearer.

"--If only--at the same time--I could make you realise how truly--how bitterly--I had felt for any pain you might have suffered--if I could persuade you to look at it all--your husband's conduct and mine--in its true light, and to believe that he cares--he _must_ care--for nothing in the world so much as his home--as you and your happiness!"

The n.o.bleness of the speaker, the futility of the speech, were about equally balanced! Candour was impossible, if only for kindness' sake. And the story, so told, was not only unconvincing, it was hardly intelligible even, to Letty. For the two personalities moved in different worlds, and what had seemed to the woman who was all delicate impulse and romance the natural and right course, merely excited in Letty, and not without reason, fresh suspicion and offence. If words had been all, Marcella had gained nothing.

But a strange tumult was rising in Letty's breast. There was something in this mingling of self-abas.e.m.e.nt with an extraordinary moral richness and dignity, in these eyes, these hands that would have so gladly caught and clasped her own, which began almost to intimidate her. She broke out again, so as to hold her own bewilderment at bay:

"What right had you to send him away--to plan anything for _my_ husband without my consent? Oh, of course you put it very finely; I daresay you know about all sorts of things _I_ don't know about; I'm not clever, I don't talk politics. But I don't quite see the good of it, if it's only to take husbands away from their wives. All the same, I'm not a hypocrite, and I don't mean to pretend I'm a meek saint. Far from it.

I've no doubt that George thinks he's been perfectly justified from the beginning, and that I have brought everything upon myself. Well! I don't care to argue about it. Don't imagine, please, that I have been playing the deserted wife all the time. If people injure me, it's not my way to hold my tongue, and I imagine that, after all, I do understand my own husband, in spite of Lord Maxwell's kind remarks!" She pointed scornfully to Maxwell's letter on the table. "But as soon as I saw that nothing I said mattered to George, and that his whole mind was taken up with your society, why, of course, I took my own measures! There are other men in the world--and one of them happens to amuse me particularly at this moment. It's your doing and George's, you see, if he doesn't like it!"

Marcella recoiled in sudden horror, staring at her companion with wide, startled eyes. Letty braved her defiantly, her dry lips drawn into a miserable smile. She stood, looking very small and elegant, beside her writing-table, her hand, blazing with rings, resting lightly upon it, the little, hot withered face alone betraying the nerve tension behind.

The situation lasted a few seconds, then with a quick step Marcella hurried to a chair on the further side of the room, sank into it, and covered her face with her hands.

Letty's heart seemed to dip, as it were, into an abyss. But there was a frenzied triumph in the spectacle of Marcella's grief and tears.

_Marcella Maxwell_--thus silenced, thus subdued! The famous name, with all that it had stood for in Letty's mind, of things to be envied and desired, echoed in her ear, delighted her revenge. She struggled to maintain her att.i.tude.

"I don't know why what I said should make you so unhappy," she said coldly, after a pause.

Marcella did not reply. Presently Letty saw that she was resting her cheek on her hand and gazing before her into vacancy. At last she turned round, and Letty could satisfy herself that in truth her eyes were wet.

"Is there no one," asked the full, tremulous voice, "whom you care for, whom you would send for now to advise and help you?"

"Thank you!" said Letty, calmly, leaning against the little writing-table, and beating the ground slightly with her foot. "I don't want them. And I don't know why you should trouble yourself about it."

But for the first time, and against its owner's will, the hard tone wavered.

Marcella rose impetuously again, and came towards her.

"When one thinks of all the long years of married life," she said, still trembling, "of the children that may come--"

Letty lifted her eyebrows.

"If one happened to wish for them. But I don't happen to wish for them, never did. I daresay it sounds horrid. Anyway, one needn't take that into consideration."

"And your husband? Your husband, who must be miserable, whose great gifts will be all spoiled unless you will somehow give up your anger and make peace. And instead of that, you are only thinking of revenging yourself, of making more ruin and pain. It breaks one's heart! And it would need such a _little_ effort on your part, only a few words written or spoken, to bring him back, to end all this unhappiness!"

"Oh! George can take care of himself," said Letty, provokingly; "so can I. Besides, you have sent him away."

Marcella looked at her in despair. Then silently she turned away, and Letty saw that she was searching for some gloves and a handkerchief she had been carrying in her hand when she came in.

Letty watched her take them up, then said suddenly, "Are you going away?"

"It is best, I think. I can do nothing."

"I wish I knew why you came to see me at all! They say, of course, you are very much in love with Lord Maxwell. Perhaps--that made you sorry for me?"

Marcella's pride leapt at the mention by those lips of her own married life. Then she drove her pride down.

"You have put it better than I have been able to do, all the time." Her mouth parted in a slight, sad smile--"Good-night."

Letty took no notice. She sat down on the arm of a chair near her. Her eyes suddenly blazed, her face grew dead-white.

"Well, if you want to know--" she said--"no, don't go--I don't mean to let you go just yet--I _am_ about the most miserable wretch going! There, you may take it or leave it; it's true. I don't suppose I cared much about George when I married him; plenty of girls don't. But as soon as he began to care about _you_,--just contrariness, I suppose,--I began to feel that I could kill anybody that took him from me, and kill myself afterwards! Oh, good gracious! there was plenty of reason for his getting tired of me. I'm not the sort of person to let anyone get the whip-hand of me, and I _would_ spend his money as I liked, and I _would_ ask the persons I chose to the house; and, above all, I wasn't going to be pestered with looking after and giving up to his _dreadful_ mother, who made my life a burden to me. Oh! why do you look so white? Well, I daresay it does sound atrocious. I don't care. Perhaps you'll be still more horrified when you know that they came round this afternoon, when I was out and George was gone, to tell me that Lady Tressady was frightfully ill--dying, I think my maid said. And I haven't given it another thought since--not one--till now"--she struck one hand against the other--"because directly afterwards the butler told me of your visit this afternoon, and that you were coming again--and I wasn't going to think of anything else in the world but you, and George. No, don't look like that, don't come near me--I'm not mad. I a.s.sure you I'm not mad! But that's all by the way. What was I saying? Oh! that George had cause enough to stop caring about me. Of course he had; but if he's lost to me--I shall give him a good deal more cause before we've done. That other man--you know him--Cathedine--gave me a kiss this afternoon, when we were in a wood together"--the same involuntary shudder overtook her, while she still held her companion at arm's length. "Oh, he is a brute--a _brute_! But what do I care what happens to me? It's so strange I don't--rather creditable, I think--for after all I like parties, and being asked about. But now George hates me--and let you send him away from me--why, of course, it's all simple enough! I--Don't--don't come. I shall never, never forgive--it's just being tired--"

But Marcella sprang forward. Mercifully, there is a limit to nerve endurance, and Letty in her raving had overpa.s.sed it. She sank gasping on a sofa, still putting out her hand as though to protect herself. But Marcella knelt beside her, the tears running down her cheeks. She put her arms--arms formed for tenderness, for motherliness--round the girl's slight frame. "Don't--don't repulse me," she said, with trembling lips, and suddenly Letty yielded. She found herself sobbing in Lady Maxwell's embrace, while all the healing, all the remorse, all the comfort that self-abandonment and pity can pour out on such a plight as hers, descended upon her from Marcella's clinging touch, her hurried, fragmentary words. a.s.surances that all could be made right entreaties for gentleness and patience--revelations of her own inmost heart as a wife, far too sacred for the ears of Letty Tressady--little phrases and s.n.a.t.c.hes of autobiography steeped in an exquisite experience: the nature Letty had rained her blows upon, kept nothing back, gave her all its best. How irrelevant much of it was!--chequered throughout by those oblivions, and optimisms, and foolish hopes by which such a nature as Marcella's protects itself from the hard facts of the world. By the time she had ranged through every note of entreaty and consolation, Marcella had almost persuaded herself and Letty that George Tressady had never said a word to her beyond the commonplaces of an ordinary friendship; she had pa.s.sionately determined that this blurred and spoiled marriage could and should be mended, and that it lay with her to do it; and in the spirit of her audacious youth she had taken upon herself the burden of Letty's character and fate, vowing herself to a moral mission, to a long patience. The quality of her own nature, perhaps, made her bear Letty's violences and frenzies more patiently than would have been possible to a woman of another type; generous remorse and regret, combined with her ignorance of Letty's history and the details of Letty's life, led her even to look upon these violences as the effects of love perverted, the anguish of a jealous heart. Imagination, keen and loving, drew the situation for her in rapid strokes, draped Letty in the subtleties and powers of her own heart, and made forbearance easy.

As for Letty, her whole being surrendered itself to a mere ebb and flow of sensations. That she had been able thus to break down the barriers of Marcella's stateliness filled her all through, in her pa.s.sion as in her yielding, with a kind of exultation. A vision of a tall figure in a white and silver dress, sitting stiff and unapproachable beside her in the Castle Luton drawing-room, fled through her mind now and then, only to make the wonder of this pleading voice, these confidences, this pity, the more wonderful. But there was more than this, and better than this. Strange up-wellings of feelings long trampled on and suppressed--momentary awakenings of conscience, of repentance, of regret--sharp realisations of an envy that was no longer ign.o.ble but moral, softer thoughts of George, the suffocating, unwilling recognition of what love meant in another woman's life--these messengers and forerunners of diviner things pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed through the s.p.a.ces of Letty's soul as she lay white and pa.s.sive under Marcella's yearning look.

There was a marvellous relief besides, much of it a physical relief, in this mere silence, this mere ceasing from angry railing and offence.

Marcella was still sitting beside her, holding her hands, and talking in the same low voice, when suddenly the loud sound of a bell clanged through the house. Letty sprang up, white and startled.

"What can it be? It's past ten o'clock. It can't be a telegram."

Then a guilty remembrance struck her. She hurried to the door as Kenrick entered.

"Lady Tressady's maid would like to see you, my lady. They want Sir George's address. The doctors think she will hardly live over to-morrow."