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Sir George Tressady — Volume I

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Title: Sir George Tressady — Volume I

Author: Mrs. Humphry Ward


        
Release date: January 1, 2006 [eBook #9633]
                Most recently updated: January 2, 2021

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Andrew Templeton, Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan, and Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIR GEORGE TRESSADY — VOLUME I ***




Produced by Andrew Templeton, Juliet Sutherland, Mary
Meehan, and Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders











SIR GEORGE TRESSADY, VOLUME I

IN TWO VOLUMES

BY

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

AUTHOR OF "MARCELLA," "THE HISTORY OF DAVID GRIEVE,"
"ROBERT ELSMEKE," ETC.






To my Brother and friend

WILLIAM THOMAS ARNOLD

I INSCRIBE THIS BOOK







VOLUME I.




PART I



CHAPTER I


"Well, that's over, thank Heaven!"

The young man speaking drew in his head from the carriage-window. But
instead of sitting down he turned with a joyous, excited gesture and
lifted the flap over the little window in the back of the landau,
supporting himself, as he stooped to look, by a hand on his companion's
shoulder. Through this peephole he saw, as the horses trotted away, the
crowd in the main street of Market Malford, still huzzaing and waving,
the wild glare of half a dozen torches on the faces and the moving forms,
the closed shops on either hand, the irregular roofs and chimneys
sharp-cut against a wintry sky, and in the far distance the little
lantern belfry and taller mass of the new town-hall.

"I'm much astonished the horses didn't bolt!" said the man addressed.
"That bay mare would have lost all the temper she's got in another
moment. It's a good thing we made them shut the carriage--it has turned
abominably cold. Hadn't you better sit down?"

And Lord Fontenoy made a movement as though to withdraw from the hand on
his shoulder.

The owner of the hand flung himself down on the seat, with a word of
apology, took off his hat, and drew a long breath of fatigue. At the same
moment a sudden look of disgust effaced the smile with which he had taken
his last glimpse at the crowd.

"All very well!--but what one wants after this business is _a moral tub_!
The lies I've told during the last three weeks--the bunkum I've
talked!--it's a feeling of positive dirt! And the worst of it is, however
you may scrub your mind afterwards, some of it must stick."

He took out a cigarette, and lit it at his companion's with a rather
unsteady hand. He had a thin, long face and fair hair; and one would have
guessed him some ten years younger than the man beside him.

"Certainly--it will stick," said the other. "Election promises nowadays
are sharply looked after. I heard no bunkum. As far as I know, our party
doesn't talk any. We leave that to the Government!"

Sir George Tressady, the young man addressed, shrugged his shoulders. His
mouth was still twitching under the influence of nervous excitement. But
as they rolled along between the dark hedges, the carriage-lamps shining
on their wet branches, green yet, in spite of November, he began to
recover a half-cynical self-control. The poll for the Market Malford
Division of West Mercia had been declared that afternoon, between two and
three o'clock, after a hotly contested election; he, as the successful
candidate by a very narrow majority, had since addressed a shouting mob
from the balcony of the Greyhound Hotel, had suffered the usual taking
out of horses and triumphal dragging through the town, and was now
returning with his supporter and party-leader, Lord Fontenoy, to the
great Tory mansion which had sent them forth in the morning, and had been
Tressady's headquarters during the greater part of the fight.

"Did you ever see anyone so down as Burrows?" he said presently, with a
little leap of laughter. "By George! it _is_ hard lines. I suppose he
thought himself safe, what with the work he'd done in the division and
the hold he had on the miners. Then a confounded stranger turns up, and
the chance of seventeen ignorant voters kicks you out! He could hardly
bring himself to shake hands with me. I had come rather to admire him,
hadn't you?"

Lord Fontenoy nodded.

"I thought his speeches showed ability," he said indifferently, "only of
a kind that must be kept out of Parliament--that's all. Sorry you have
qualms--quite unnecessary, I assure you! At the present moment, either
Burrows and his like knock under, or you and your like. This time--by
seventeen votes--Burrows knocks under. Thank the Lord! say I"--and the
speaker opened the window an instant to knock off the end of his cigar.

Tressady made no reply. But again a look, half-chagrined,
half-reflective, puckered his brow, which was smooth, white, and boyish
under his straight, fair hair; whereas the rest of the face was subtly
lined, and browned as though by travel and varied living. The nose and
mouth, though not handsome, were small and delicately cut, while the
long, pointed chin, slightly protruding, made those who disliked him say
that he was like those innumerable portraits of Philip IV., by and after
Velasquez, which bestrew the collections of Europe. But if the Hapsburg
chin had to be admitted, nothing could be more modern, intelligent,
alert, than the rest of him.

The two rolled along a while in silence. They were passing through an
undulating midland country, dimly seen under the stars. At frequent
intervals rose high mounds, with tall chimneys and huddled buildings
beside them or upon them which marked the sites of collieries; while the
lights also, which had begun to twinkle over the face of the land, showed
that it was thickly inhabited.

Suddenly the carriage rattled into a village, and Tressady looked out.

"I say, Fontenoy, here's a crowd! Do you suppose they know? Why,
Gregson's taken us another way round!"

Lord Fontenoy let down his window, and identified the small mining
village of Battage.

"Why did you bring us this way, Gregson?" he said to the coachman.

The man, a Londoner, turned, and spoke in a low voice. "I thought we
might find some rioting going on in Marraby, my lord. And now I see
there's lots o' them out here!"

Indeed, with the words he had to check his horses. The village street was
full from end to end with miners just come up from work. Fontenoy at once
perceived that the news of the election had arrived. The men were massed
in large groups, talking and discussing, with evident and angry
excitement, and as soon as the well-known liveries on the box of the new
member's carriage were identified there was an instant rush towards it.
Some of the men had already gone into their houses on either hand, but at
the sound of the wheels and the uproar they came rushing out again. A
howling hubbub arose, a confused sound of booing and groaning, and the
carriage was soon surrounded by grimed men, gesticulating and shouting.

"Yer bloated parasites, yer!" cried a young fellow, catching at the
door-handle on Lord Fontenoy's side; "we'll make a d----d end o' yer
afore we've done wi' yer. Who asked yer to come meddlin in
Malford--d----n yer!"

"Whativer do we want wi' the loikes o' yo representin us!" shouted
another man, pointing at Tressady. "Look at 'im; ee can't walk, ee can't;
mus be druv, poor hinnercent! When did yo iver do a day's work, eh? Look
at my 'ands! Them's the 'ands for honest men--ain't they, you fellers?"

There was a roar of laughter and approval from the crowd, and up went a
forest of begrimed hands, flourishing and waving.

George calmly put down the carriage-window, and, leaning his arms upon
it, put his head out. He flung some good-humoured banter at some of
the nearest men, and two or three responded. But the majority of the
faces were lowering and fierce, and the horses were becoming
inconveniently crowded.

"Get on, Gregson," said Fontenoy, opening the front window of the
brougham.

"If they'll let me, your lordship," said Gregson, rather pale,
raising his whip.

The horses made a sudden start forward. There was a yell from the crowd,
and three or four men had just dashed for the horses' heads, when a shout
of a different kind ascended.

"Burrows! 'Ere's Burrows! Three cheers for Burrows!"

And some distance behind them, at the corner of the village street,
Tressady suddenly perceived a tall dogcart drawing up with two men in it.
It was already surrounded by a cheering and tumultuous assembly, and one
of the men in the cart was shaking hands right and left.

George drew in his head, with a laugh. "This is dramatic. They've stopped
the horses, and here's Burrows!"

Fontenoy shrugged his shoulders. "They'll blackguard us a bit, I suppose,
and let us go. Burrows 'll keep them in order."

"What d'yer mean by it, heh, dash yer!" shouted a huge man, as he sprang
on the step of the carriage and shook a black fist in Tressady's
face--"thrustin yer d----d carkiss where yer ain't wanted? We wanted
'_im_, and we've worked for 'im. This is a workin-class district, an
we've a _right_ to 'im. Do yer 'ear?"

"Then you should have given him seventeen more votes," said George,
composedly, as he thrust his hands into his pockets. "It's the fortunes
of war--your turn next time. I say, suppose you tell your fellows to let
our man get on. We've had a long day, and we're hungry. Ah"--to
Fontenoy--"here's Burrows coming!"

Fontenoy turned, and saw that the dogcart had drawn up alongside them,
and that one of the men was standing on the step of it, holding on to the
rail of the cart.

He was a tall, finely built man, and as he looked down on the carriage,
and on Tressady leaning over the window, the light from a street-lamp
near showed a handsome face blanched with excitement and fatigue.

"Now, my friends," he said, raising his arm, and addressing the crowd,
"you let Sir George go home to his dinner. He's beaten us, and so far as
I know _he's_ fought fair, whatever some of his friends may have done for
him. I'm going home to have a bite of something and a wash. I'm done. But
if any of you like to come round to the club--eight o'clock--I'll tell
you a thing or two about this election. Now goodnight to you, Sir George.
We'll beat you yet, trust us. Fall back there!"

He pointed peremptorily to the men holding the horses. They and the crowd
instantly obeyed him.

The carriage swept on, followed by the hooting and groans of the whole
community, men, women, and children, who were now massed along the street
on either hand.

"It's easy to see this man Gregson's a new hand," said Fontenoy, with an
accent of annoyance, as they got clear of the village. "I believe the
Wattons have only just imported him, otherwise he'd never have avoided
Marraby, and come round by Battage."

"Battage has some special connection with Burrows, hasn't it? I had
forgotten."

"Of course. He was check-weigher at the Acme pit here for years, before
they made him district secretary of the union."

"That's why they gave me such a hot meeting here a fortnight ago!--I
remember now; but one thing drives another out of one's head. Well,
I daresay you and I'll have plenty more to do with Burrows before
we've done."

Tressady threw himself back in his corner with a yawn.

Fontenoy laughed.

"There'll be another big strike some time next year," he said
drily--"bound to be, as far as I can see. We shall all have plenty to do
with Burrows then."

"All right," said Tressady, indistinctly, pulling his hat over his eyes.
"Burrows or anybody else may blow me up next year, so long as they let me
go to sleep now."

However, he did not find it so easy to go to sleep. His pulses were still
tingling under the emotions of the day and the stimulus of the hubbub
they had just passed through. His mind raced backwards and forwards over
the incidents and excitements of the last six months, over the scenes of
his canvass--and over some other scenes of a different kind which had
taken place in the country-house whither he and Fontenoy were returning.

But he did his best to feign sleep. His one desire was that Fontenoy
should not talk to him. Fontenoy, however, was not easily taken in, and
no sooner did George make his first restless movement under the rug he
had drawn over him, than his companion broke silence.

"By the way, what did you think of that memorandum of mine on Maxwell's
bill?"

George fidgeted and mumbled. Fontenoy, undaunted, began to harangue on
certain minutiae of factory law with a monotonous zest of voice and
gesture which seemed to Tressady nothing short of amazing.

He watched the speaker a minute or two through his half-shut eyes. So
this was his leader to be--the man who had made him member for Market
Malford.

Eight years before, when George Tressady had first entered Christchurch,
he had found that place of tempered learning alive with traditions on the
subject of "Dicky Fontenoy." And such traditions--good Heavens!
Subsequently, at most race-meetings, large and small, and at various
clubs, theatres, and places of public resort, the younger man had had his
opportunities of observing the elder, and had used them always with
relish, and sometimes with admiration. He himself had no desire to follow
in Fontenoy's footsteps. Other elements ruled in him, which drew him
other ways. But there was a magnificence about the impetuosity, or rather
the doggedness with which Fontenoy had plunged into the business of
ruining himself, which stirred the imagination. On the last occasion,
some three and a half years before this Market Malford election, when
Tressady had seen Fontenoy before starting himself on a long Eastern
tour, he had been conscious of a lively curiosity as to what might have
happened to "Dicky" by the time he came back again. The eldest sons of
peers do not generally come to the workhouse; but there are aristocratic
substitutes which, relatively, are not much less disagreeable; and George
hardly saw how they were to be escaped.

And now--not four years!--and here sat Dicky Fontenoy, haranguing on the
dull clauses of a technical act, throat hoarse with the speaking of the
last three weeks, eyes cavernous with anxiety and overwork, the creator
and leader of a political party which did not exist when Tressady left
England, and now bade fair to hold the balance of power in English
government! The surprises of fate and character! Tressady pondered them a
little in a sleepy way; but the fatigue of many days asserted itself.
Even his companion was soon obliged to give him up as a listener. Lord
Fontenoy ceased to talk; yet every now and then, as some jolt of the
carriage made George open his eyes, he saw the broad-shouldered figure
beside him, sitting in the same attitude, erect and tireless, the same
half-peevish pugnacity giving expression to mouth and eye.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Come, wake up, Tressady! Here we are!"

There was a vindictive eagerness in Fontenoy's voice. Ease was no longer
welcome to him, whether in himself or as a spectacle in other men.
George, startled from a momentary profundity of sleep, staggered to his
feet, and clutched at various bags and rugs.

The carriage was standing under the pillared porch of Malford House, and
the great house-doors, thrown back upon an inner flight of marble steps,
gave passage to a blaze of light. George, descending, had just shaken
himself awake, and handed the things he held to a footman, when there was
a sudden uproar from within. A crowd of figures--men and women, the men
cheering, the women clapping and laughing--ran down the inner steps
towards him. He was surrounded, embraced, slapped on the back, and
finally carried triumphantly into the hall.

"Bring him in!" said an exultant voice; "and stand back, please, and let
his mother get at him."

The laughing group fell back, and George, blinking, radiant, and abashed,
found himself in the arms of an exceedingly sprightly and youthful dame,
with pale, frizzled hair, and the figure of seventeen.

"Oh, you dear, great, foolish thing!" said the lady, with the voice and
the fervour, moreover, of seventeen. "So you've got in--you've done it!
Well, I should never have spoken to you again if you hadn't! And I
suppose you'd have minded that a little--from your own mother. Goodness!
how cold he is!"

And she flew at him with little pecking kisses, retreating every now and
again to look at him, and then closing upon him again in ecstasy, till
George, at the end of his patience, held her off with a strong arm.

"Now, mother, that's enough. Have the others been home long?" he
asked, addressing a smiling young man in knickerbockers who, with his
hands in his pockets, was standing beside the hero of the occasion
surveying the scene.

"Oh! about half an hour. They reported you'd have some difficulty
in getting out of the clutches of the crowd. We hardly expected
you so soon."

"How's Miss Sewell's headache? Does she know?"

The expression of the young man's eye, which was bent on Tressady,
changed ever so slightly as he replied:

"Oh yes, she knows. As soon as the others got back Mrs. Watton went up to
tell her. She didn't show at lunch."

"Mrs. Watton came to tell _me_--naughty man!" said the lady whom George
had addressed as his mother, tapping the speaker on the arm with her fan.
"Mothers first, if you please, especially when they're cripples like me,
and can't go and see their dear darlings' triumphs with their own eyes.
And _I_ told Miss Sewell."

She put her head on one side, and looked archly at her son. Her high
gown, a work of the most approved Parisian art, was so cut as to show
much more throat than usual, and, in addition, a row of very fine pearls.
Her very elegant waist and bust were defined by a sort of Empire sash;
her complexion did her maid and, indeed, her years, infinite credit.

George flushed slightly at his mother's words, and was turning away from
her when he was gripped by the owner of the house, Squire Watton, an
eloquent and soft-hearted old gentleman who, having in George's opinion
already overdone it greatly at the town-hall in the way of hand-shaking
and congratulations, was now most unreasonably prepared to overdo it
again. Lady Tressady joined in with little shrieks and sallies, the other
guests of the house gathered round, and the hero of the day was once
more lost to sight and hearing amid the general hubbub of talk and
laughter--for the young man in knickerbockers, at any rate, who stood a
little way off from the rest.

"I wonder when she'll condescend to come down," he said to himself,
examining his boots with a speculative smile. "Of course it was mere
caprice that she didn't go to Malford; she meant it to annoy."

"I say, do let me get warm," said Tressady at last, breaking from his
tormentors, and coming up to the open log fire, in front of which the
young man stood. "Where's Fontenoy vanished to?"

"Went up to write letters directly he had swallowed a cup of tea," said
the young man, whose name was Bayle; "and called Marks to go with him."
(Marks was Lord Fontenoy's private secretary.)

George Tressady threw up his hands in disgust.

"It's absurd. He never allows himself an hour's peace. If he expects me
to grind as he does, he'll soon regret that he lent a hand to put me into
Parliament. Well, I'm stiff all over, and as tired as a rat. I'll go and
have a warm bath before dinner."

But still he lingered, warming his hands over the blaze, and every now
and then scanning the gallery which ran round the big hall. Bayle chatted
to Mm about some of the incidents of the day. George answered at random.
He did, indeed, look tired out, and his expression was restless and
discontented.

Suddenly there was a cry from the group of young men and maidens who were
amusing themselves in the centre of the hall.

"Why, there's Letty! and as fresh as paint."

George turned abruptly. Bayle saw his manner stiffen and his eye kindle.

A young girl was slowly coming down the great staircase which led to the
hall. She was in a soft black dress with a blue sash, and a knot of blue
at her throat--a childish slip of a dress, which answered to her small
rounded form, her curly head, and the hand slipping along the marble
rail. She came down silently smiling, taking each step with great
deliberation, in spite of the outbreak of half-derisive sympathy with
which she was greeted from her friends below. Her bright eyes glanced
from face to face--from the mocking inquirers immediately beneath her to
George Tressady standing by the fire.

At the moment when she reached the last step Tressady found it necessary
to put another log on a fire already piled to repletion.

Meanwhile Miss Sewell went straight towards the new member and held
out her hand.

"I am so glad, Sir George; let me congratulate you."

George put down his log, and then looked at his fingers critically.

"I am very sorry, Miss Sewell, but I am not fit to touch. I hope your
headache is better."

Miss Sewell dropped her hand meekly, shot him a glance which was not
meek, and said demurely:

"Oh! my headaches do what they're told. You see, I was determined to come
down and congratulate you."

"I see," he repeated, making her a little bow. "I hope my ailments, when
I get them, will be as docile. So my mother told you?"

"I didn't want telling," she said placidly. "I knew it was all safe."

"Then you knew what only the gods knew--for I only got in by
seventeen votes."

"Yes, so I heard. I was very sorry for Burrows."

She put one foot on the stone fender, raised her pretty dress with one
hand, and leant the other lightly against the mantelpiece. The attitude
was full of grace, and the little sighing voice fitted the curves of a
mouth which seemed always ready to laugh, yet seldom laughed frankly.

As she made her remark about Burrows Tressady smiled.

"My prophetic soul was right," he said deliberately; "I knew you would be
sorry for Burrows."

"Well, it _is_ hard on him, isn't it? You can't deny you're a
carpet-bagger, can you?"

"Why should I? I'm proud of it."

Then he looked round him. The rest of the party--not without whispers and
smothered laughter--had withdrawn from them. Some of the ladies had
already gone up to dress. The men had wandered away into a little library
and smoking-room which opened on the hall. Only the squire, safe in a
capacious armchair a little way off, was absorbed in a local paper and
the last humours of the election.

Satisfied with his glance, Tressady put his hands into his pockets, and
leant back against the fireplace, in a way to give himself fuller command
of Miss Sewell's countenance.

"Do you never give your friends any better sympathy than you have given
me in this affair, Miss Sewell?" he said suddenly, as their eyes met.

She made a little face.

"Why, I've been an angel!" she said, poking at a prominent log
with her foot.

George laughed.

"Then our ideas of angels agree no better than the rest. Why didn't you
come and hear the poll declared, after promising me you would be there?"

"Because I had a headache, Sir George."

He responded with a little inclination, as though ceremoniously accepting
her statement.

"May I ask at what time your headache began?"

"Let me see," she said, laughing; "I think it was directly after
breakfast."

"Yes. It declared itself, if I remember right, immediately after certain
remarks of mine about a Captain Addison?"

He looked straight before him, with a detached air.

"Yes," said Letty, thoughtfully; "it was a curious coincidence,
wasn't it?"

There was a moment's silence. Then she broke into infectious laughter.

"Don't you know," she said, laying her hand on his shoulder--"don't you
know that you're a most foolish and wasteful person? We get along
capitally, you and I--we've had a rattling time all this week--and then
you will go and make uncivil remarks about my friends--in public, too!
You actually think I'm going to let you tell Aunt Watton how to manage
me! You get me into no end of a fuss--it'll take me weeks to undo the
mischief you've been making--and then you expect me to take it like a
lamb! Now, do I look like a lamb?"

All this time she was holding him tight by the arm, and her dimpled face,
alive with mirth and malice, was so close to his that a moment's wild
impulse flashed through him to kiss her there and then. But the impulse
passed. He and Letty Sewell had known each other for about three weeks.
They were not engaged--far from it. And these--the hand on the arm, and
the rest--were Letty Sewell's ways.

Instead of kissing her, then, he scanned her deliberately.

"_I_ never saw anyone more plainly given over to obstinacy and pride,"
he said quietly; "I told you some plain facts about the character of a
man whom I know, and you don't, whereupon you sulk all day, you break
all your promises about coming to Malford, and when I come back you call
me names."

She raised her eyebrows and withdrew her hand.

"Well, it's plain, isn't it? that I must have been in a great rage. It
was very dull upstairs, though I did write reams to my best friend all
about you--a very candid account--I shall have to soften it down. By the
way, are you ever going to dress for dinner?"

George started, and looked at his watch.

"Are we alone? Is anyone coming from outside?"

"Only a few 'locals,' just to celebrate the occasion. I know the
clergyman's wife's coming, for she told me she had been copying one of my
frocks, and wanted me to tell her what I thought."

George laughed.

"Poor lady!"

"I don't _think_ I shall be nice to her," said Letty, playing with a
flower on the mantelpiece. "Dowdy people make me feel wicked. Well, _I_
must dress."

It was now his turn to lay a detaining hand.

"Are you sorry?" he said, bending over to her. His bright grey eyes had
shaken off fatigue.

"For what? Because you got in?"

Her face overflowed with laughter. He let her go. She linked her arm in
that of the daughter of the house--Miss Florence Watton--who was crossing
the hall at the moment, and the two went upstairs together, she throwing
back one triumphant glance at him from the landing.

George stood watching them till they disappeared. His expression was
neither soft nor angry. There was in it a mocking self-possession which
showed that he too had been playing a part--mingled, perhaps, with a
certain perplexity.




CHAPTER II


George Tressady came down very late for dinner, and found his hostess on
the verge of annoyance. Mrs. Watton was a large, commanding woman, who
seldom thought it worth while to disguise any disapproval she might
feel--and she had a great deal of that commodity to expend, both on
persons and institutions.

George hastened to propitiate her with the usual futilities: he had
supposed that he was in excellent time, his watch had been playing
tricks, and so on.

Mrs. Watton, who, after all, on this great day beheld in the new member
the visible triumph of her dearest principles, received these excuses at
first with stiffness, but soon thawed.

"Oh, you _naughty_ boy, you naughty, mendacious boy!" said a
sprightly voice in Tressady's ear. "'Excellent time,' indeed! I saw
you--for shame!"

And Lady Tressady flounced away from her son, laughing over her
shoulder in one of her accustomed poses. She wore white muslin over
cherry-coloured silk. The display of neck and shoulders could hardly
have been more lavish; and the rouge on her cheeks had been overdone,
which rarely happened. George turned from her hurriedly to speak to
Lord Fontenoy.

"What a fool that woman is!" thought Mrs. Watton to herself, as her
sharp eye followed her guest. "She will make George positively dislike
her soon--and all the time she is bound to get him to pay her debts, or
there will be a smash. What! dinner? John, will you please take Lady
Tressady; Harding, will you take Mrs. Hawkins"--pointing her second son
towards a lady in black sitting stiffly on the edge of an ottoman; "Mr.
Hawkins takes Florence; Sir George"--she waved her hand towards Miss
Sewell. "Now, Lord Fontenoy, you must take me; and the rest of you sort
yourselves."

As the young people, mostly cousins, laughingly did what they were told,
Sir George held out his arm to Miss Sewell.

"I am very sorry for you," he said, as they passed into the dining-room.

"Oh! I knew it would be my turn," said Letty, with resignation. "You see,
you took Florrie last night, and Aunt Watton the night before."

George settled himself deliberately in his chair, and turned to study his
companion.

"Do you mind warning me, to begin with, how I can avoid giving you a
headache? Since this morning my nerve has gone--I want directions."

"Well--" said Letty, pondering, "let us lay down the subjects we _may_
talk about first. For instance, you may talk of Mrs. Hawkins."

She gave an imperceptible nod which directed his eyes to the thin woman
sitting opposite, to whom Harding Watton, a fashionable and fastidious
youth, was paying but scant attention.

George examined her.

"I don't want to," he said shortly; "besides, she would last us no
time at all."

"Oh!--on the contrary," said Letty, with malice sparkling in her brown
eye, "she would last me a good twenty minutes. She has got on my gown."

"I didn't recognise it," said George, studying the thin lady again.

"I wouldn't mind," said Letty, in the same tone of reflection, "if Mrs.
Hawkins didn't think it her duty to lecture me in the intervals of
copying my frocks. If I disapproved of anybody, I don't think I should
send my nurse to ask their maid for patterns."

"I notice you take disapproval very calmly."

"Callously, you mean. Well, it is my misfortune. I always feel myself so
much more reasonable than the people who disapprove."

"This morning, then, you thought me a fool?"

"Oh no! Only--well--I _knew_, you see, that I knew better. _I_ was
reasonable, and--"

"Oh! don't finish," said George, hastily; "and don't suppose that I shall
ever give you any more good advice."

"Won't you?"

Her mocking look sent a challenge, which he met with outward firmness.
Meanwhile he was inwardly haunted by a phrase he had once heard a woman
apply to the mental capacities of her best friend. "Her _mind_?--her
mind, my dear, is a shallow chaos!" The words made a neat label, he
scoffingly thought, for his own present sensations. For he could not
persuade himself that there was much profundity in his feelings towards
Miss Sewell, whatever reckless possibilities life might seem to hold at
times; when, for instance, she wore that particular pink gown in which
she was attired to-night, or when her little impertinent airs suited her
as well as they were suiting her just now. Something cool and critical in
him was judging her all the time. Ten years hence, he made himself
reflect, she would probably have no prettiness left. Whereas now, what
with bloom and grace, what with small proportions and movements light as
air, what with an inventive refinement in dress and personal adornment
that never failed, all Letty Sewell's defects of feature or expression
were easily lost in a general aspect which most men found dazzling and
perturbing enough. Letty, at any rate within her own circle, had never
yet been without partners, or lovers, or any other form of girlish
excitement that she desired, and had been generally supposed--though she
herself was aware of some strong evidence to the contrary--to be capable
of getting anything she had set her mind upon. She had set her mind, as
the spectators in this particular case had speedily divined, upon
enslaving young George Tressady. And she had not failed. For even during
these last stirring days it had been tolerably clear that she and his
election had divided Tressady's mind between them, with a balance,
perhaps, to her side. As to the _measure_ of her success, however, that
was still doubtful--to herself and him most of all.

To-night, at any rate, he could not detach himself from her. He tried
repeatedly to talk to the girl on his left, a noble-faced child fresh out
of the schoolroom, who in three years' time would be as much Letty
Sewell's superior in beauty as in other things. But the effort was too
great. The strenuous business of the day had but left him--in fatigue and
reaction--the more athirst for amusement and the gratification of another
set of powers. He turned back to Letty, and through course after course
they chattered and sparred, discussing people, plays and books, or
rather, under cover of these, a number of those topics on the borderland
of passion whereby men and women make their first snatches at
intimacy--till Mrs. Watton's sharp grey eyes smiled behind her fan, and
the attention of her neighbour, Lord Fontenoy--an uneasy attention--was
again and again drawn to the pair.

Meanwhile, during the first half of dinner, a chair immediately opposite
to Tressady's place remained vacant. It was being kept for the eldest son
of the house, his mother explaining carelessly to Lord Fontenoy that she
believed he was "Out parishing somewhere, as usual."

However, with the appearance of the pheasants the door from the
drawing-room opened, and a slim dark-haired man slipped in. He took his
place noiselessly, with a smile of greeting to George and his
neighbour, and bade the butler in a whisper aside bring him any course
that might be going.

"Nonsense, Edward!" said his mother's loud voice from the head of the
table; "don't be ridiculous. Morris, bring back that hare _entrée_ and
the mutton for Mr. Edward."

The newcomer raised his eyebrows mildly, smiled, and submitted.

"Where have you been, Edward?" said Tressady; "I haven't seen you since
the town-hall."

"I have been at a rehearsal. There is a parish concert next week, and I
conduct these functions."

"The concerts are always bad," said Mrs. Watton, curtly.

Edward Watton shrugged his shoulder. He had a charming timid air,
contradicted now and then by a look of enthusiastic resolution in the
eyes.

"All the more reason for rehearsal," he said. "However, really, they
won't do badly this time."

"Edward is one of the persons," said Mrs. Watton in a low aside to Lord
Fontenoy, "who think you can make friends with people--the lower
orders--by shaking hands with them, showing them Burne-Jones's pictures,
and singing 'The Messiah' with them. I had the same idea once. Everybody
had. It was like the measles. But the sensible persons have got over it."

"Thank you, mamma," said Watton, making her a smiling bow.

Lady Tressady interrupted her talk with the squire at the other end of
the table to observe what was going on. She had been chattering very
fast in a shrill, affected voice, with a gesticulation so free and
French, and a face so close to his, that the nervous and finicking
squire had been every moment afraid lest the next should find her white
fingers in his very eyes. He felt an inward spasm of relief when he saw
her attention diverted.

"Is that Mr. Edward talking his Radicalism?" she asked, putting up a
gold eyeglass--"his dear, wicked Radicalism? Ah! we all know where Mr.
Edward got it."

The table laughed. Harding Watton looked particularly amused.

"Egeria was in this neighbourhood last week," he said, addressing Lady
Tressady. "Edward rode over to see her. Since then he has joined two new
societies, and ordered six new books on the Labour Question."

Edward flushed a little, but went on eating his dinner without any other
sign of disturbance.

"If you mean Lady Maxwell," he said good-humouredly, "I can only be sorry
for the rest of you that you don't know her."

He raised his handsome head with a bright air of challenge that became
him, but at the same time exasperated his mother.

"That _woman!_" said Mrs. Watton with ponderous force, throwing up her
hands as she spoke. Then she turned to Lord Fontenoy. "Don't _you_ regard
her as the source of half the mischievous work done by this precious
Government in the last two years?" she asked him imperiously.

A half-contemptuous smile crossed Lord Fontenoy's worn face.

"Well, really, I'm not inclined to make Lady Maxwell the scapegoat. Let
them bear their own misdeeds."

"Besides, what worse can you say of English Ministers than that they
should be led by a woman?" said Mr. Watton, from the bottom of the table,
in a piping voice. "In my young days such a state of things would have
been unheard of. No offence, my dear, no offence," he added hastily,
glancing at his wife.

Letty glanced at George, and put up a handkerchief to hide her own
merriment.

Mrs. Watton looked impatient.

"Plenty of English Cabinet Ministers have been led by women before now,"
she said drily; "and no blame to them or anybody else. Only in the old
days you knew where you were. Women were corrupt--as they were meant to
be--for their husbands and brothers and sons. They wanted something for
somebody--and got it. Now they are corrupt--like Lady Maxwell--for what
they are pleased to call 'causes,' and it is that which will take the
nation to ruin."

At this there was an incautious protest from Edward Watton against the
word "corrupt," followed by a confirmatory clamour from his mother and
brother which seemed to fill the dining-room. Lady Tressady threw in
affected comments from time to time, trying hard to hold her own in the
conversation by a liberal use of fan and Christian names, and little
personal audacities applied to each speaker in turn. Only Edward Watton,
however, occasionally took civil or smiling notice of her; the others
ignored her. They were engaged in a congenial task, the hunting of the
one disaffected and insubordinate member of their pack, and had for the
moment no attention to spare for other people.

"I shall see the great lady, I suppose, in a week or two," said George to
Miss Sewell, under cover of the noise. "It is curious that I should never
have seen her."

"Who? Lady Maxwell?"

"Yes. You remember I have been four years out of England. She was in
town, I suppose, the year before I left, but I never came across her."

"I prophesy you will like her enormously," said Letty, with decision. "At
least, I know that's what happens to me when Aunt Watton abuses anybody.
I couldn't dislike them afterwards if I tried."

"That, allow me to impress upon you, is _not_ my disposition! I am a
human being--I am influenced by my friends."

He turned round towards her so as to appropriate her again.

"Oh! you are not at all the poor creature you paint yourself!" said
Letty, shaking her head. "In reality, you are the most obstinate
person I know--you can never let a subject alone--you never know when
you're beaten."

"Beaten?" said George, reflectively; "by a headache? Well, there is no
disgrace in that. One will probably 'live to fight another day.' Do you
mean to say that you will take no notice--no notice--of all that array of
facts I laid before you this morning on the subject of Captain Addison?"

"I shall be kind to you, and forget them. Now, do listen to Aunt Watton!
It is your duty. Aunt Watton is accustomed to be listened to, and you
haven't heard it all a hundred times before, as I have."

Mrs. Watton, indeed, was haranguing her end of the table on a subject
that clearly excited her. Contempt and antagonism gave a fine energy to a
head and face already sufficiently expressive. Both were on a large
scale, but without commonness. The old-lace coif she wore suited her
waved and grizzled hair, and was carried with conscious dignity; the
hand, which lay beside her on the table, though long and bony, was full
of nervous distinction. Mrs. Watton was, and looked, a tyrant--but a
tyrant of ability.

"A neighbour of theirs in Brookshire," she was saying, "was giving me
last week the most extraordinary account of the doings at Mellor. She was
the heiress of that house at Mellor"--here she addressed young Bayle,
who, as a comparative stranger in the house, might be supposed to be
ignorant of facts which everybody else knew--"a tumbledown place with an
income of about two thousand a year. Directly she married she put a
Socialist of the most unscrupulous type--so they tell me--into
possession. The man has established what they call a 'standard rate' of
wages for the estate--practically double the normal rate--coerced all the
farmers, and made the neighbours furious. They say the whole district is
in a ferment. It used to be the quietest part of the world imaginable,
and now she has set it all by the ears. _She_, having married thirty
thousand a year, can afford her little amusements; other people, who must
live by their land, have their lives worried out of them."

"She tells me that the system works on the whole extremely well," said
Edward Watton, whose heightened colour alone betrayed the irritation of
his mother's chronic aggression, "and that Maxwell is not at all unlikely
to adopt it on his own estate."

Mrs. Watton threw up her hands again.

"The _idiocy_ of that man! Till he married her he was a man of sense. And
now she leads him by the nose, and whatever tune he calls, the Government
must dance to, because of his power in the House of Lords."

"And the worst of it is," said Harding Watton, with an unpleasant laugh,
"that if she were not a handsome woman, her influence would not be half
what it is. She uses her beauty in the most unscrupulous way."

"I believe that to be _entirely_ untrue," said Edward Watton, with
emphasis, looking at his brother with hostility.

George Tressady interrupted. He had an affection for Edward Watton, and
cordially disliked Harding. "Is she really so handsome?" he asked,
bending forward and addressing his hostess.

Mrs. Watton scornfully took no notice.

"Well, an old diplomat told me the other day," said Lord Fontenoy--but
with a cold unwillingness, as though he disliked the subject--"that she
was the most beautiful woman, he thought, that had been seen in London
since Lady Blessington's time."

"Lady Blessington! dear, dear!--Lady Blessington!" said Lady Tressady
with malicious emphasis--an unfortunate comparison, don't you think? Not
many people would like to be regarded as Lady Blessington's successor."

"In any other respect than beauty," said Edward Watton, haughtily, with
the same tension as before, "the comparison, of course, would be
ridiculous."

Harding shrugged his shoulders, and, tilting his chair back, said in the
ear of a shy young man who sat next him:

"In my opinion, the Count d'Orsay is only a question of time! However,
one mustn't say that to Edward."

Harding read memoirs, and considered himself a man of general
cultivation. The young man addressed, who read no printed matter outside
the sporting papers that he could help, and had no idea as to who Lady
Blessington and Count d'Orsay might be, smiled vaguely, and said nothing.

"My dear," said the squire, plaintively, "isn't this room extremely hot?"

There was a ripple of meaning laughter from all the young people, to many
of whom this particular quarrel was already tiresomely familiar. Mr.
Watton, who never understood anything, looked round with an inquiring
air. Mrs. Watton condescended to take the hint and retire.

In the drawing-room afterwards Mrs. Watton first allotted a
duty-conversation of some ten minutes in length, and dealing strictly
with the affairs of the parish, to Mrs. Hawkins, who, as clergyman's
wife, had a definite official place in the Malford House circle, quite
irrespective of any individuality she might happen to possess. Mrs.
Hawkins was plain, self-conscious, and in no way interesting to Mrs.
Watton, who never took the smallest trouble to approach her in any other
capacity than that upon which she had entered by marrying the incumbent
of the squire's home living. But the civilities and respects that were
recognised as belonging to her station she received.

This however, alas! was not enough for Mrs. Hawkins, who was full of
ambitions, which had a bad manner, a plague of shyness, and a narrow
income, were perpetually thwarting. As soon as the ten minutes were over,
and Mrs. Watton, who was nothing if not political, and saw no occasion to
make a stranger of the vicar's wife, had plunged into the evening papers
brought her by the footman, Mrs. Hawkins threw herself on Letty Sewell.
She was effusively grateful--too grateful--for the patterns lent her by
Miss Sewell's maid.

"Did she lend you some patterns?" said Letty, raising her brows. "Dear
me; I didn't know."

And her eyes ran cooly over Mrs. Hawkins's attire, which did, indeed,
present a village imitation of the delicate gown in which Miss Sewell had
robed herself for the evening.

Mrs. Hawkins coloured.

"I specially told my nurse," she said hastily, "that of course your leave
must be asked. But my nurse and your maid seem to have made friends. Of
course my nurse has plenty of time for dressmaking with only one child of
four to look after, and--and--one really gets no new ideas in a poky
place like this. But I would not have taken a liberty for the world."

Her pride and _mauvaise honte_ together made both voice and manner
particularly unattractive. Letty was seized with the same temper that
little boys show towards flies.

"Of course I am delighted!" she said indifferently. "It's so nice and
good to have one's things made at home. Your nurse must be a treasure."

All the time her gaze was diligently inspecting every ill-cut seam and
tortured trimming of the homemade triumph before her. The ear of the
vicar's wife, always morbidly sensitive in that particular drawing-room,
caught a tone of insult in every light word. A passionate resentment
flamed up in her, and she determined to hold her own.

"Are you going in for more visits when you leave here?" she inquired.

"Yes, two or three," said Letty, turning her delicate head unwittingly.
She had been throwing blandishments to Mrs. Watton's dog, a grey Aberdeen
terrier, who stood on the rug quietly regarding her.

"You spend most of the year in visits, don't you?"

"Well, a good deal of it," said Letty.

"Don't you find it dreadfully time-wasting? Does it leave you leisure
for _any_ serious occupations at all? I am afraid it would make _me_
terribly idle!"

Mrs. Hawkins laughed, attempting a tone of banter.

Letty put up a small hand to hide a sudden yawn, which, however, was
visible enough.

"Would it?" she said, with an impertinence which hardly tried to
conceal itself. "Evelyn, do look at that dog. Doesn't he remind you of
Mr. Bayley?"

She beckoned to the handsome child of sixteen who had sat on George
Tressady's left hand at dinner, and, taking up a pinch of rose-leaves
that had dropped from a vase beside her, she flung them at the dog,
calling him to her. Instead of going to her, however, the dog slowly
curled himself up on the rug, and, laying his nose along his front paws,
stared at her steadily with the expression of one mounting guard.

"He never will make friends with you, Letty. Isn't it odd?" said Evelyn,
laughing, and stooping to stroke the creature.

"Never mind; other dogs will. Did you see that adorable black Spitz of
Lady Arthur's? She has promised to give me one."

The two cousins fell into a chatter about their county neighbours, mostly
rich and aristocratic people, of whom Mrs. Hawkins knew little or
nothing. Evelyn Watton, whose instincts were quick and generous, tried
again and again to draw the vicar's wife into the conversation. Letty was
determined to exclude her. She lay back against the sofa, chatting her
liveliest, the whiteness of her neck and cheek shining against the red of
the damask behind, one foot lightly crossed over the other, showing her
costly little slippers with their paste buckles. She sparkled with jewels
as much as a girl may--more, indeed, in Mrs. Hawkins's opinion, than a
girl should. From head to foot she breathed affluence, seduction,
success--only the seduction was not for Mrs. Hawkins and her like.

The vicar's wife sat flushed and erect on her chair, disdaining after a
time to make any further effort, but inwardly intolerably sore. She could
not despise Letty Sewell, unfortunately, since Letty's advantages were
just those that she herself most desired. But there was something else in
her mind than small jealousy. When Letty had been a brilliant child in
short frocks, the vicar's wife, who was scarcely six years older, had
opened her heart, had tried to make herself loved by Mrs. Watton's niece.
There had been a moment when they had been "Madge" and "Letty" to each
other, even since Letty had "come out." Now, whenever Mrs. Hawkins
attempted the Christian name, it stuck in her throat; it seemed, even to
herself, a familiarity that had nothing to go upon; while with every
succeeding visit to Malford, Letty had dropped her former friend more
decidedly, and "Madge" was heard no more.

The gentlemen, deep in election incident and gossip, were, in the view
chiefly of the successful candidate, unreasonably long in leaving the
dining-room. When they appeared at last, George Tressady once more
made an attempt to talk to someone else than Letty Sewell, and once
more failed.

"I want you to tell me something about Miss Sewell," said Lord Fontenoy
presently in Mrs. Watton's ear. He had been sitting silent beside her on
the sofa for some little time, apparently toying with the evening papers,
which Mrs. Watton had relinquished to him.

Mrs. Watton looked up, followed the direction of his eyes towards a
settee in a distant corner of the room, and showed a half-impatient
amusement.

"Letty? Oh! Letty's my niece--the daughter of my brother, Walter Sewell,
of Helbeck. They live in Yorkshire. My brother has my father's place--a
small estate, and rents very irregular. I often wonder how they manage to
dress that child as they do. However, she has always had her own way
since she was a foot high. As for my poor brother, he has been an
invalid for the last ten years, and neither he nor his wife--oh! such a
stupid woman!"--Mrs. Watton's energetic hands and eyes once more, called
Heaven to witness--"have ever counted for much, I should say, in Letty's
career. There is another sister, a little delicate, silent thing, that
looks after them. Oh! Letty isn't stupid; I should think not. I suppose
you're alarmed about Sir George. You needn't be. She does it with
everybody."

The candid aunt pursued the conversation a little further, in the same
tone of a half-caustic indulgence. At the end of it, however, Lord
Fontenoy was still uneasy. He had only migrated to Malford House for the
declaration of the poll, having spent the canvassing weeks mainly in
another part of the division. And now, on this triumphant evening, he was
conscious of a sudden sense of defective information, which was
disagreeable and damping.

       *       *       *       *       *

When bedtime came, Letty lingered in the drawing-room a little behind the
other ladies, on the plea of gathering up some trifles that belonged to
her. So that when George Tressady went out with her to light her candle
for her in the gallery, they found themselves alone.

He had fallen into a sudden silence, which made her sweep him a look of
scrutiny as she took her candlestick. The slim yet virile figure drawn to
its full height, the significant, long-chinned face, pleased her senses.
He might be plain--she supposed he was--but he was, nevertheless,
distinguished, and extraordinarily alive.

"I believe you are tired to death," she said to him. "Why don't you
go to bed?"

She spoke with the freedom of one accustomed to advise all her male
acquaintance for their good. George laughed.

"Tired? Not I. I was before dinner. Look here, Miss Sewell, I've got a
question to ask."

"Ask it."

"You don't want to spoil my great day, do you? You do repent that
headache?"

They looked at each other, dancing laughter in each pair of eyes,
combined in his with an excited insistence.

"Good-night, Sir George," she said, holding out her hand.

He retained it.

"You do?" he said, bending over her.

She liked the situation, and made no immediate effort to change it.

"Ask me a month hence, when I have proved your statements."

"Then you admit it was all pretence?"

"I admit nothing," she said joyously. "I protected my friend."

"Yes, by injuring and offending another friend. Would it please you if I
said I missed you _very_ much at Malford to-day?"

"I will tell you to-morrow--it is so late! Please let me have my hand."

He took no notice, and they went hand-in-hand, she drawing him, to the
foot of the stairs.

"George!" said a shrill, hesitating voice from overhead.

George looked up, and saw his mother. He and Letty started apart, and in
another second Letty had glided upstairs and disappeared.

"Yes, mother," said George, impatiently.

"Will you come here?"

He mounted, and found Lady Tressady a little discomposed, but as
affected as usual.

"Oh, George! it was so dark--I didn't see--I didn't know. George, will
you have half an hour's talk with me after breakfast to-morrow? Oh,
George, my dear boy, my _dear_ boy! Your poor mammy understands!"

She laid one hand on his shoulder and, lifting her feather fan in the
other, shook it with playful meaning in the direction whither Letty
had departed.

George hastily withdrew himself. "Of course I will have a talk with you,
mother. As for anything else, I don't know what you mean. But you really
must let me go to bed; I am much too tired to talk now. Good-night."

Lady Tressady went back to her room, smiling but anxious.

"She has caught him!" she said to herself; "barefaced little flirt! It is
not altogether the best thing for me. But it may dispose him to be
generous, if--if I can play my cards."

Letty Sewell meanwhile had reached the quiet of a luxurious bedroom, and
summoned her maid to her assistance. When the maid departed, the mistress
held long counsel with herself over the fire: the general position of her
affairs; what she desired; what other people intended; her will, and the
chances, of getting it. Her thoughts dealt with these various problems in
a skilled and business-like way. To a particular form of self-examination
Letty was well accustomed, and it had become by now a strong agent in the
development of individuality, as self-examination of another sort is said
to be by other kinds of people.

She herself was pleasantly conscious of real agitation. George Tressady
had touched her feelings, thrilled her nerves, more than--Yes! she said
to herself decidedly, more than anybody else, more than "the rest." She
thought of "the rest," one after the other--thought of them
contemptuously. Yet, certainly few girls in her own set and part of the
country had enjoyed a better time--few, perhaps, had dared so many
adventures. Her mother had never interfered with her; and she herself had
not been afraid to be "talked about." Dances, picnics, moonlight walks;
the joys of outrageous "sitting-out," and hot rivalries with prettier
girls; of impertinences towards the men who didn't matter, and pretty
flatteries towards the men who did--it was all pleasant enough to think
of. She could not reproach herself with having missed any chances, any
opportunities her own will might have given her.

And yet--well, she was tired of it!--out of love altogether with her
maiden state and its opportunities. She had come to Malford House in a
state of soreness, which partly accounted, perhaps, for such airs as she
had been showing to poor Mrs. Hawkins. During the past year a particular
marriage--the marriage of her neighbourhood--had seemed intermittently
within her reach. She had played every card she knew--and she had failed!
Failed, too, in the most humiliating way. For the bride, indeed, was
chosen; but it was not Letty Sewell, but one of Letty's girl-neighbours.

To-night, almost for the first time, she could bear to think of it; she
could even smile at it. Vanity and ambition alone had been concerned, and
to-night these wild beasts of the heart were soothed and placable.

Well, it was no great match, of course--if it came off. All that Aunt
Watton knew about the Tressadys had been long since extracted from her by
her niece. And with Tressady himself Letty's artless questions had been
very effective. She knew almost all that she wished to know. No doubt
Ferth was a very second-rate "place"; and, since those horrid miners had
become so troublesome, his income as a coal-owner could not be what his
father's had been--three or four thousand a year, she supposed--more,
perhaps, in good years. It was not much.

Still--she pressed her hands on her eyes--he was _distinguished_; she saw
that plainly already. He would be welcome anywhere.

"And we are _not_ distinguished--that is just it. We are small people, in
a rather dull set. And I have had hard work to make anything of it. Aunt
Watton was very lucky to marry as she did. Of course, she _made_ Uncle
Watton marry her; but that was a chance--and papa always says nobody else
could have done it!"

She fell happily thinking of Tressady's skirmishes with her, her face
dimpling with amusement. Captain Addison! How amazed he would be could he
know the use to which she had put his name and his very hesitating
attentions. But he would never know; and meanwhile Sir George had been
really pricked--really jealous! She laughed to herself--a low laugh of
pure pleasure.

Yes--she had made up her mind. With a sigh, she put away from her all
other and loftier ambitions. She supposed that she had not money or
family enough. One must face the facts. George Tressady would take her
socially into another _milieu_ than her own, and a higher one. She told
herself that she had always pined for Parliament, politics, and eminent
people. Why should she not succeed in that world as well as in the
Helbeck world? Of course she would succeed!

There was his mother--silly, painted old lady! She was naturally the
_great_ drawback; and Aunt Watton said she was absurdly extravagant, and
would ruin Tressady if it went on. All the more reason why he should be
protected. Letty drew herself sharply together in her pretty white
dressing-gown, with the feeling that mothers of that kind must and could
be kept in their place.

A house in town, of course--and _not_ in Warwick Square, where,
apparently, the Tressadys owned a house, which had been let, and was now
once more in Sir George's hands. That might do for Lady Tressady--if,
indeed, she could afford it when her son had married and taken other
claims upon him.

Letty allowed her thoughts to wander dreamily on, envisaging the London
life that was to be: the young member, Lord Fontenoy's special friend and
_protégé_--the young member's wife making her way among great people,
giving charming little parties at Ferth--

All very well! But what, please, were the facts on his side? She buried
her small chin deep in her hands as she tried, frowning, to think it out.
Certainly he was very much drawn, very much taken. She had watched him,
sometimes, trying to keep away from her--and her lips parted in a broad
smile as she recalled the triumph of his sudden returns and submissions.
She believed he had a curious temper--easily depressed, for all his
coolness. But he had never been depressed in her company.

Still, _nothing_ was certain. All that had happened might melt away into
nothingness with the greatest ease if--well! if the right steps were not
taken. He was no novice, any more than she; he must have had scores of
"affairs" by now, with that manner of his. Such men were always capable
of second thoughts, of tardy retreats--and especially if there were the
smallest thought of persecution, of pursuit.

She believed--she was nearly certain--he would have a reaction to-morrow,
perhaps because his mother had caught them together. Next morning he
would be just a little bored by the thought of it--a little bored by
having to begin again where he had left off. Without great tact and skill
the whole edifice might tumble together like a house of cards. Had she
the courage to make difficulties--to put a water-ditch across his path?

It was close on midnight when Letty at last raised her little chin from
the hands that held it and rang the bell that communicated with her
maid's room, but cautiously, so as not to disturb the rest of the
sleeping house.

"If Grier _is_ asleep, she must wake up, that's all!"

Two or three minutes afterwards a dishevelled maid startled out of her
first slumber appeared, to ask whether her mistress was ill.

"No, Grier, but I wanted to tell you that I have changed my mind about
staying here till Saturday. I am going to-morrow morning by the 9.30
train. You can order a fly first thing, and bring me my breakfast early."

The maid, groaning at the thought of the boxes that would have to be
packed in this inconceivable hurry, ventured to protest.

"Never mind, you can get the housemaid to help you," said Miss Sewell,
decidedly. "I don't mind what you give her. Now go to bed, Grier. I'm
sorry I woke you up; you look as tired as an owl."

Then she stood still, looking at herself--hands clasped lightly before
her--in the long glass.

"'Letty went by the nine o'clock train,'" she said aloud, smiling, and
mocking her own white reflection. "'Dear me! How sudden! how
extraordinary! Yes, but that's like her. H'm--' Then he must write to me,
for I shall write _him_ a civil little note asking for that book I lent
him. Oh! I _hope_ Aunt Watton and his mother will bore him to death!"

She broke out into a merry laugh; then, sweeping her mass of pretty hair
to one side, she began rapidly to coil it up for the night, her fingers
working as fast as her thoughts, which were busy with one ingenious plan
after another for her next meeting with George Tressady.




CHAPTER III


During this same space of time, which for Miss Sewell's maid ended so
disagreeably, George Tressady was engaged in a curious conversation.

He had excused himself from smoking, on the ground of fatigue,
immediately after his parting from Letty. But he had only nominally gone
to bed. He too found it difficult to tear himself from thinking and the
fire, and had not begun to undress when he heard a knock at his door. On
his reply, Lord Fontenoy entered.

"May I come in, Tressady?"

"By all means."

George, however, stared at his invader in some astonishment. His
relations with Fontenoy were not personally intimate.

"Well, I'm glad to find you still up, for I had a few words on my mind to
say to you before I go off to-morrow. Can you spare me ten minutes?"

"Certainly; do sit down. Only--well, I'm afraid I'm pretty well done. If
it's anything important, I can't promise to take it in."

Lord Fontenoy for a moment made no reply. He stood by the fire, looking
at the cigarette he still held, in silence. George watched him with
repressed annoyance.

"It's been a very hot fight, this," said Fontenoy at last, slowly, "and
you've won it well. All our band have prospered in the matter of
elections. But this contest of yours has been, I think, the most
conspicuous that any of us have fought. Your speeches have made a
mark--one can see that from the way in which the Press has begun to take
them, political beginner though you are. In the House you will be, I
think, our best speaker--of course with time and experience. As for me,
if you give me a fortnight to prepare in, I can make out something.
Otherwise I am no use. _You_ will take a good debating place from the
beginning. Well, it is only what I expected."

The speaker stopped. George, fidgeting in his chair, said nothing; and
presently Fontenoy resumed:

"I trust you will not think what I am going to say an intrusion, but--you
remember my letters to you in India?"

George nodded.

"They put the case strongly, I think," Fontenoy went on, "but, in my
opinion, not strongly enough. This wretched Government is in power by the
help of a tyranny--a tyranny of Labour. They call themselves
Conservatives--they are really State Socialists, and the mere catspaws of
the revolutionary Socialists. You and I are in Parliament to break down
that tyranny, if we can. This year and next will be all-important. If we
can hold Maxwell and his friends in check for a time--if we can put some
backbone into the party of freedom--if we can rally and call up the
forces we have in the country, the thing will be done. We shall have
established the counterpoise--we shall very likely turn the next
election, and liberty--or what still remains of it!--will be saved for a
generation. But to succeed, the effort, the sacrifice, from each one of
us, will have to be _enormous_."

Fontenoy paused, and looked at his companion. George was lying back in
an armchair with his eyes shut. Why on earth--so he was
thinking--should Fontenoy have chosen this particular hour and this
particular night to _débiter_ these very stale things, that he had
already served up in innumerable speeches and almost every letter that
George had received from him?

"I don't suppose it will be child's-play," he said, stifling a
yawn--"hope I shall feel keener after a night's rest!" He looked up
with a smile.

Fontenoy dropped his cigarette into the fender and stood silent a moment,
his hands clasped behind his back.

"Look here, Tressady!" he said at last, turning to his companion; "you
remember how affairs stood with me when you left England? I didn't know
much of you, but I believe, like many of my juniors, you knew a great
deal about me?"

George made the sign of assent expected of him.

"I knew something about you, certainly," he said, smiling; "it was not
difficult."

Fontenoy smiled too, though without geniality. Geniality had become
impossible to a man always overworked and on edge.

"I was a fool," he said quickly--"an open and notorious fool. But I
enjoyed my life. I don't suppose anyone ever enjoyed life more. Every day
of my former existence gave the lie to the good people who tell you that
to be happy you must be virtuous. I was idle, extravagant, and vicious,
and I was one of the happiest of men. As to my racing and my horses, they
were a constant delight to me. I can't think now of those mornings on the
Heath--the gallops of my colts--the change and excitement of it all,
without longing for it to come back again. Yet I have never owned a
horse, or seen a race, or made a bet, for the last three years. I never
go into society, except for political purposes; and I scarcely ever touch
wine. In fact, I have thrown overboard everything that once gave _me_
pleasure and amusement so completely that I have, perhaps, some right to
press upon the party that follows me my conviction that unless each and
all of us give up private ease and comfort as I have done--unless we are
contented, as the Parnellites were, to be bores in the House and
nuisances to ourselves--to peg away in season and out of season--to give
up everything for the cause, we may just as well not go into the fight at
all--for we shall do nothing with it."

George clasped his hands round his knee, and stared stubbornly into the
fire. Sermonising was all very well, but Fontenoy did too much of it;
nobody need suppose that he would have done what he had done, unless, on
the whole, it had given him more pleasure to do it than not to do it.

"Well," he said, looking up at last with a laugh, "I wonder what you
_mean_--really. Do you mean, for instance, that I oughtn't to get
myself married?"

His offhand manner covered a good deal of irritation. He made a shrewd
guess at the idea in Fontenoy's mind, and meant to show that he would not
be dictated to.

Fontenoy also laughed, with as little geniality as before. Then he
applied himself to a deliberate answer.

"_This_ is what I mean. If you, just elected--at the beginning of this
critical session--were to give your best mind to anything else in the
world than the fight before us, I should regard you as, for the time, at
any rate, lost to us--as, so far, betraying us."

The colour rushed into George's cheeks.

"Upon my word!" he said, springing up--"upon my word, you are a
taskmaster!"

Fontenoy hastened to reply, in a different tone, "I only want to keep the
machine in order."

George paced up and down for a few moments without speaking. Presently
he paused.

"Look here, Fontenoy! I cannot look at the matter as you do, and we may
as well understand each other. To me, this election of mine is, after
all, an ordinary affair. I take it, and what is to come after it, just as
other men do. I have accepted your party and your programme, and I mean
to stick to them. I see that the political situation is difficult and
exciting, and I don't intend to shirk. But I am no more going to slay my
private life and interests at the altar of politics than my father did
when he was in Parliament. If the revolution is coming, it will come in
spite of you and me. And, moreover--if you will let me say so--I am
convinced that your modes of procedure are not even profitable to the
cause in the long run. No man can work as you do, without rest and
without distraction. You will break down, and then, where will the
'cause' be?"

Lord Fontenoy surveyed the speaker with a curious, calculating look. It
was as though, with as much rapidity as his mind was capable of, he
balanced a number of pros and cons against each other, and finally
decided to let the matter drop, perhaps not without some regret for
having raised it.

"Ah! well," he said, "I have no doubt that what I have said appears to
you mere meddlesomeness. If so, you will change your view, and you will
forgive me. I must trust the compulsion of the situation. You will
realise it, as I have done, when you get well into the fight. There is
something in this Labour tyranny which rouses all a man's passions, bad
and good. If it does not rouse yours, I have been much mistaken in my
estimate of you. As for me, don't waste your concern. There are few
stronger men than I. You forget, too--"

There was a pause. Of late years, since his transformation in fact, Lord
Fontenoy's stiff reserve about himself had been rarely broken through. At
this moment, however, George, looking up, saw that his companion was in
some way moved by a kind of sombre and personal emotion.

"You forget," the speaker resumed, "that I learnt nothing either at
school or college, and that a man who wants to lead a party must, some
time or other, pay for that precious privilege. When you left England,
the only financial statement I could understand was a betting-book. I
knew no history except what one gets from living among people who have
been making it, and even that I was too lazy to profit by. I couldn't
understand the simplest economical argument, and I _hated_ trouble of all
kinds. Nothing but the toil of a galley-slave could have enabled me to do
what I have done. You would be astonished sometimes if you could look in
upon me at night and see what I am doing--what I am obliged to do to keep
up the most elementary appearances."

George was touched. The tone of the speaker had passed suddenly into one
of plain dignity, in spite of, perhaps because of, the half-bitter
humility that mingled with it.

"I know you make one ashamed," he said sincerely, though awkwardly.
"Well, don't distrust me; I'll do my best."

"Good-night," said Lord Fontenoy, and held out his hand. He had gained no
promises, and George had shown and felt annoyance. Yet the friendship
between the two men had sensibly advanced.

       *       *       *       *       *

George shut the door upon him, and came back to the fire to ponder this
odd quarter of an hour.

His experience certainly contained no more extraordinary fact than this
conversion of a gambler and a spendthrift into the passionate leader of
an arduous cause. Only one quality linked the man he remembered with the
politician he had now pledged himself to follow--the quality of
intensity. Dicky Fontenoy in his follies had been neither gay nor
lovable, but his fierce will, his extravagant and reckless force, had
given him the command of men softer than himself. That will and that
force were still there, steeled and concentrated. But George Tressady was
sometimes restlessly doubtful as to how far he himself was prepared to
submit to them.

His personal acquaintance with Fontenoy was of comparatively recent date.
He himself had been for some four years away from England, to which he
had only returned about three months before the Market Malford election.
A letter from Fontenoy had been the immediate cause of his return; but
before it arrived the two men had been in no direct communication.

The circumstances of Tressady's long absence concern his later story, and
were on this wise. His father, Sir William, the owner of Ferth Place, in
West Mercia, died in the year that George, his only surviving child and
the son of his old age, left college. The son, finding his father's debts
considerable and his own distaste for the law, to which he had been
destined, amazingly increased by his newly acquired freedom to do what he
liked with himself, turned his mind at once towards travelling. Travel he
must if he was ever to take up public and parliamentary life, and for no
other profession--so he announced--did he feel the smallest vocation.
Moreover, economy was absolutely necessary. During his absence the London
house could be let, and Lady Tressady could live quietly at Ferth upon an
allowance, while his uncles looked after the colliery property.

Lady Tressady made no difficulty, except as to the figure first named for
the proposed allowance, which she declared was absurd. The uncles,
elderly business men, could not understand why the younger generation
should not go into harness at once without indulgences, as they
themselves had done; but George got his way, and had much reason to show
for it. He had not been idle at college, though perhaps at no time
industrious enough. Influenced by natural ambition and an able tutor, he
had won some distinction, and he was now a man full of odds and ends of
ideas, of nascent interests, curiosities, and opinions, strongly
influenced moreover already, though he said less about it than about
other things, by the desire for political distinction. While still at
college he had been especially attracted--owing mainly to the chances of
an undergraduate friendship--by a group of Eastern problems bearing upon
England's future in Asia; and he was no sooner free to govern himself and
his moderate income than there flamed up in him the Englishman's passion
to see, to touch, to handle, coupled with the young man's natural desire
to go where it was dangerous to go, and where other men were not going.
His friend--the son of an eminent geographer, possessed by inheritance of
the explorer's instincts--was just leaving England for Asia Minor,
Armenia, and Persia. George made up his mind, hastily but firmly, to go
with him, and his family had to put up with it.

The year, however, for which the young fellow had stipulated went by; two
others were added to it; and a fourth began to run its course--still
George showed but faint signs of returning. According to his letters
home, he had wandered through Persia, India, and Ceylon; had found
friends and amusement everywhere; and in the latter colony had even
served eight months as private secretary to the Governor, who had taken
a fancy to him, and had been suddenly bereft by a boating accident of the
indispensable young man who was accustomed to direct the hospitalities of
Government House before Tressady's advent. Thence he went to China and
Japan, made a trip from Pekin into Mongolia, landed on Formosa, fell in
with some French naval officers at Saigon, spending with them some of the
gayest and maddest weeks of his life; explored Siam, and finally returned
by way of Burmah to Calcutta, with the dim intention this time of some
day, before long, taking ship for home.

Meanwhile during the last months of his stay in Ceylon he had written
some signed articles for an important English newspaper, which, together
with the natural liking felt by the many important persons he had come to
know in the East for an intelligent and promising young fellow, endowed
with brains, family, and good manners, served to bring him considerably
into notice. The tone of the articles was strongly English and
Imperialist. The first of them came out immediately before his visit to
Saigon, and Tressady thanked his lucky stars that the foreign reading of
his French friends was, perhaps, not so extensive as their practical
acquaintance with life. He was, however, proud of his first literary
achievement, and it served to crystallise in him a number of ideas and
sentiments which had previously represented rather the prejudices of a
traveller accustomed to find his race in the ascendant, and to be well
received by its official class than any reasoned political theory. As he
went on writing, conviction, grew with statement, became a faith,
ultimately a passion--till, as he turned homewards, he seemed to himself
to have attained a philosophy sufficient to steer the rest of life by. It
was the common philosophy of the educated and fastidious observer; and it
rested on ideas of the greatness of England and the infinity of England's
mission, on the rights of ability to govern as contrasted with the
squalid possibilities of democracy, on the natural kingship of the higher
races, and on a profound personal admiration for the virtues of the
administrator and the soldier.

Now, no man in whom these perceptions take strong root early, need expect
to love popular government. Tressady read his English newspapers with
increasing disgust. On that little England in those far seas all
depended, and England meant the English working-man with his flatteries
of either party. He blundered and blustered at home, while the Empire,
its services and its defences, by which alone all this pullulating
"street folk" existed for a day, were in danger of starvation and
hindrance abroad, to meet the unreasonable fancies of a degenerate race.
A deep hatred of mob-rule rooted itself in Tressady, passing gradually,
during his last three months in India, into a growing inclination to
return and take his place in the fight--to have his say. "Government to
the competent--_not_ to the many," might have been the summary of his
three years' experience.

Nor were private influences wanting. He was a West Mercian landowner in a
coal-mining district, and owned a group of pits on the borders of his
estate. His uncles, who had shares in the property, reported to him
periodically during his absence. With every quarter it seemed to Tressady
that the reports grew worse and the dividends less. His uncles' letters,
indeed, were full of anxieties and complaints. After a long period of
peace in the coal-trade, it looked as though a time of hot war between
masters and men was approaching. "We have to thrash them every fifteen
years," wrote one of the uncles, "and the time is nearly up."

The unreason, brutality, and extravagance of the men; the tyranny of the
Union; the growing insolence of the Union officials--Tressady's letters
from home after a time spoke of little else. And Tressady's bankbook
meanwhile formed a disagreeable comment on the correspondence. The pits
were almost running at a loss; yet neither party had made up their minds
to the trial of strength.

Tressady was still lingering in Bombay--though supposed to be on his way
home--when Lord Fontenoy's letter reached him.

The writer referred slightly to their previous acquaintance, and to a
remote family connection between himself and Tressady; dwelt in
flattering terms on the reports which had reached him from many quarters
of Tressady's opinions and abilities; described the genesis and aims of
the new Parliamentary party, of which the writer was the founder and
head; and finally urged him to come home at once, and to stand for
Parliament as a candidate for the Market Malford division, where the
influence of Fontenoy's family was considerable. Since the general
election, which had taken place in June, and had returned a moderate
Conservative Government to power, the member for Market Malford had
become incurably ill. The seat might be vacant at any moment. Fontenoy
asked for a telegram, and urged the next steamer.

Tressady had already--partly from private talk, partly from the
newspapers--learnt the main outlines of Lord Fontenoy's later story. The
first political speech of Fontenoy's he had ever read made a
half-farcical impression on him--let Dicky stick to his two-year-olds!
The second he read twice over, and alike in it, in certain party
manifestoes from the same hand printed in the newspapers, and in the
letter he had now received, there spoke something for which it seemed to
him he had been waiting. The style was rough and halting, but Tressady
felt in it the note and power of a leader.

He took an hour's walk through the streets of Bombay to think it
over, then sent his telegram, and booked his passage on his way home
to luncheon.

Such, in brief outline, had been the origin of the two men's
acquaintance. Since George's return they had been constantly together.
Fontenoy had thrown his whole colossal power of work into the struggle
for the Market Malford seat, and George owed him much.

       *       *       *       *       *

After he was left to himself on this particular night, Tressady was for
long restless and wakeful. In spite of resistance, Fontenoy's talk and
Fontenoy's personality had nevertheless restored for the moment an
earlier balance of mind. The interests of ambition and the intellect
returned in force. Letty Sewell had, no doubt, made life very agreeable
to him during the past three weeks; but, after all--was it worth while?

Her little figure danced before the inward eye as his fire sank into
darkness; fragments of her chatter ran through his mind. He began to be
rather ashamed of himself. Fontenoy was right. It was not the moment. No
doubt he must marry some day; he had come home, indeed, with the vague
intention of marrying; but the world was wide, and women many. That he
had very little romance in his temperament was probably due to his
mother. His childish experiences of her character, and of her relations
to his father, had left him no room, alas! for the natural childish
opinion that all grown-ups, and especially all mothers, are saints. In
India he had amused himself a good deal; but his adventures had, on the
whole, confirmed his boyish bias. If he had been forced to put his inmost
opinions about women into words, the result would have been
crude--perhaps brutal; which did not prevent him from holding a very
strong and vivid conviction of the pleasure to be got from their society.

Accordingly, he woke up next morning precisely in the mood that Letty,
for her own reasons, had foreseen. It worried him to think that for two
or three days more he and Letty Sewell must still be thrown together in
close relations. He and his mother were waiting on at Malford for a day
or two till some workmen should be out of his own house, which lay
twenty miles away, at the farther edge of the Market Malford division.
Meanwhile a couple of shooting-parties had been arranged, mainly for
his entertainment. Still, was there no urgent business that required
him in town?

He sauntered in to breakfast a little before ten. Only Evelyn Watton and
her mother were visible, most of the men having already gone off to a
distant meet.

"Now sit down and entertain us, Sir George," said Mrs. Watton, holding
out her hand to him with an odd expression. "We're as dull as ditch
water--the men have all gone--Florrie's in bed with a chill--and Letty
departed by the 9.30 train."

George's start, as he took his coffee from her, did not escape her.

"Miss Sewell gone? But why this suddenness?" he inquired. "I thought Miss
Letty was to be here to the end of the week."

Mrs. Watton raised her shoulders. "She sent a note in to me at half-past
eight to say her mother wasn't well, and she was wanted at home. She just
rushed in to say good-bye to me, chattered a great deal, kissed everybody
a great deal--and I know no more. I hear she had breakfast and a fly,
which is all I troubled myself about. I never interfere with the modern
young woman."

Then she raised her eyeglass, and looked hard and curiously at Tressady.
His face told her nothing, however, and as she was the least sympathetic
of women, she soon forgot her own curiosity.

Evelyn Watton, a vision of fresh girlhood in her morning frock, glanced
shyly at him once or twice as she gave him scones and mustard. She was
passing through a moment of poetry and happy dreams. All human beings
walked glorified in her eyes, especially if they were young. Letty was
not wholly to her taste, and had never been a particular friend. But she
thought ill of no one, and her little heart must needs flutter tenderly
in the presence of anything that suggested love and marriage. It had
delighted her to watch George and Letty together. Now, why had Letty
rushed away like this? _She_ thought with concern, thrilling all the
time, that Sir George looked grave and depressed.

George, however, was not depressed--or thought he was not. He walked into
the library after breakfast, whistling, and quoting to himself:

And there be they
Who kissed his wings which brought him yesterday,
And thank his wings to-day that he is flown.

He prided himself on his memory of some modern poets, and the lines
pleased him particularly.

He had no sooner done quoting, however, than his mother peered into the
room, claiming the business talk that had been promised. From that talk
George emerged irritable and silent. His mother's extravagance was really
preposterous!--not to be borne. For four years now he had been free from
the constant daily friction of money troubles which had spoilt his youth
and robbed him of all power of respecting his mother. And he had hugged
his freedom. But all the time it seemed he had been hugging illusion, and
the troubles had been merely piling up for his return! Her present
claims--and he knew very well that they were not the whole--would exhaust
all his available balance at his bankers'.

Lady Tressady, for her part, thought, with indignant despair, that he had
not behaved at all as an only son should--especially an only son just
returned to a widowed mother after four years' absence. How could anyone
suppose that in four years there would be no debts--on such a pittance of
an income? Some money, indeed, he had promised her; but not nearly
enough, and not immediately. He "must look into things at home." Lady
Tressady was enraged with herself and him that she had not succeeded
better in making him understand how pressing, how _urgent_, matters were.

She _must_, indeed, bring it home to him that there might be a scandal at
any moment. That odious livery-stable man, two or three dressmakers--in
these directions every phase and shift of the debtor's long _finesse_ had
been exhausted long ago. Even _she_ was at her wits' end.

As for other matters--But from these her thoughts turned hurriedly away.
Luck would change, of course, sometime; it must change! No need to say
anything about _that_ just yet, especially while George's temper was in
such a queer state.

It was very odd--most annoying! As a baby even he had never been
caressing or sweet like other people's babies. And now, really!--why
_her_ son should have such unattractive ways!

But, manoeuvre as she would, George would not be drawn into further
discussion. She could only show him offended airs, and rack her brains
morning and night as to how best to help herself.

Meanwhile George had never been so little pleased with living as
during these few days. He was overwhelmed with congratulations; and,
to judge from the newspapers, "all England," as Lady Tressady said,
"was talking of him." It seemed to him ridiculous that a man should
derive so little entertainment from such a fact. Nevertheless, his
dulness remained, and refused to be got rid of. He discussed with
himself, of course, for a new set of reasons, the possibility of
evading the shooting-parties, and departing. But he was deeply pledged
to stay; and he was under considerable obligations to the Wattons. So
he stayed; but he shot so as to increase his own dissatisfaction with
the universe, and to make the other men in the house wonder what might
be the general value of an Indian sporting reputation when it came to
dealing with the British pheasant.

Then he turned to business. He tried to read some Parliamentary reports
bearing on a coming measure, and full of notes by Fontenoy, which
Fontenoy had left with him. But it only ended in his putting them hastily
aside, lest in the mood of obscure contradiction that possessed him he
should destroy his opinions before he had taken his seat.

On the day before the last "shoot," among the letters his servant brought
him in the early morning, was one that he tore open in a hurry, tossing
the rest aside.

It was from Miss Sewell, requesting, prettily, in as few words as
possible, that he would return her a book she had lent him.

"My mother," she wrote, "has almost recovered from her sudden attack of
chill. I trust the shooting-parties have amused you, and that you have
read _all_ Lord Fontenoy's Blue Books."

George wrote a reply before he went down to breakfast--a piece of
ordinary small-talk, that seemed to him the most wretched stuff
conceivable. But he pulled two pens to pieces before he achieved it.

Then he went out for a long walk alone, pondering what was the matter
with him. Had that little witch dropped the old familiar poison into his
veins after all? Certainly some women made life vivacity and pleasure,
while others--his mother or Mrs. Watton, for instance--made it fatigue
or tedium.

Ever since his boyhood Tressady had been conscious of intermittent
assaults of melancholy, fits of some inner disgust, which hung the world
in black, crippled his will, made him hate himself and despise his
neighbours. It was, possibly, some half-conscious dread lest this morbid
speck in his nature should gain upon the rest that made him so hungry for
travel and change of scene after he left college. It explained many
surprises, many apparent ficklenesses in his life. During the three weeks
that he had spent in the same house with Letty Sewell he had never once
been conscious of this lurking element of his life. And now, after four
days, he found himself positively pining for her voice, the rustle of her
delicate dress, her defiant, provocative ways that kept a man on the
alert--still more, her smiling silences that seemed to challenge all his
powers, the touch of her small cool hand that crushed so easily in his.

What had she left the house for in that wilful way? He did not believe
her excuses. Yet he was mystified. Did she realise that things were
becoming serious, and did she not mean them to be serious? If so, who or
what hindered?

As for Fontenoy--

Tressady quickened his step impatiently as he recalled that harassed and
toiling figure. Politics or no politics, _he_ would live his life!
Besides, it was obviously to his profit to marry. How could he ever make
a common household with his mother? He meant to do his duty by her, but
she annoyed and abashed him twenty times a day. He would be far happier
married, far better able to do his work. He was not passionately in
love--not at all. But--for it was no good fencing with himself any
longer--he desired Letty Sewell's companionship more than he had desired
anything for a long time. He wanted the right to carry off the little
musical box, with all its tunes, and set it playing in his own house, to
keep him gay. Why not? He could house it prettily, and reward it well.

As for the rest, he decided, without thinking about it, that Letty Sewell
was well born and bred. She had, of course, all the little refinements a
fastidious taste might desire in a woman. She would never discredit a man
in society. On the contrary, she would be a great strength to him there.
And she must be sweet-tempered, or that pretty child Evelyn Watton would
not be so fond of her.

That pretty child, meanwhile, was absorbed in the excitement of her own
small _rôle_. Tressady, who had only made duty-conversation with her
before, had found out somehow that she was sympathetic--that she would
talk to him charmingly about Letty. After a very little pretending, he
let himself go; and Evelyn dreamt at night of his confidences, her heart,
without knowing it, leaping forward to the time when a man would look at
her so, for her own sake--not another's. She forgot that she had ever
criticised Letty, thought her vain or selfish. Nay, she made a heroine of
her forthwith; she remembered all sorts of delightful things to say of
her, simply that she might keep the young member talking in a corner,
that she might still enjoy the delicious pride of feeling that she
knew--she was helping it on.

After the big "shoot," for instance, when all the other gentlemen were
stiff and sleepy, George spent the whole evening in chattering to Evelyn,
or, rather, in making her chatter. Lady Tressady loitered near them once
or twice. She heard the names "Letty," "Miss Sewell," passing and
repassing--one talker catching up the other. Over any topic that included
Miss Sewell they lingered; when anything was begun that did not concern
her, it dropped at once, like a ball ill thrown. The mother went away
smiling rather sourly.

She watched her son, indeed, cat-like all these days, trying to discover
what had happened--what his real mind was. She did not wish for a
daughter-in-law at all, and she had even a secret fear of Letty Sewell
in that capacity. But somehow George must be managed, her own needs must
be met. She felt that she might be undoing the future; but the present
drove her on.

On the following morning, from one of Mrs. Watton's numerous letters
there dropped out the fact that Letty Sewell was expected immediately at
a country house in North Mercia whereof a certain Mrs. Corfield was
mistress--a house only distant some twenty miles from the Tressadys'
estate of Ferth Place.

"My sister-in-law has recovered with remarkable rapidity," said Mrs.
Watton, raising a sarcastic eye. "Do you know anything of the Corfields,
Sir George?"

"Nothing at all," said George. "One hears of them sometimes from
neighbours. They are said to be very lively folk. Miss Sewell will have a
gay time."

"Corfield?" said Lady Tressady, her head on one side and her cup balanced
in two jewelled hands. "What! _Aspasia Corfield_! Why, my dear
George--one of my oldest friends!"

George laughed--the short, grating laugh his mother so often evoked.

"Beg pardon, mother; I can only answer for myself. To the best of my
belief I never saw her, either at Ferth or anywhere else."

"Why, Aspasia Corfield and I," said Lady Tressady with languid
reflectiveness--"Aspasia Corfield and I copied each other's dresses,
and bought our hats at the same place, when we were eighteen. I haven't
seen her for an eternity. But Aspasia used to be a _dear_ girl--and so
fond of me!"

She put down her cup with a sigh, intended as a reproach to George.
George only buried himself the deeper in his morning's letters.

Mrs. Watton, behind her newspaper, glanced grimly from the mother
to the son.

"I wonder if that woman has a single real old friend in the world. How
is George Tressady going to put up with her?"

The Wattons themselves had been on friendly terms with Tressady's father
for many years. Since Sir William's death and George's absence, however,
Mrs. Watton had not troubled herself much about Lady Tressady, in which
she believed she was only following suit with the rest of West Mercia.
But now that George had reappeared as a promising politician, his
mother--till he married--had to be to some extent accepted along with
him. Mrs. Watton accordingly had thought it her duty to invite her for
the election, not without an active sense of martyrdom. "She always has
bored me to tears since I first saw Sir William trailing her about," she
would remark to Letty. "Where did he pick her up? The marvel is that she
has kept respectable. She has never looked it. I always feel inclined to
ask her at breakfast why she dresses for dinner twelve hours too soon!"

Very soon after the little conversation about the Corfields Lady Tressady
withdrew to her room, sat thoughtful for a while, with her writing-block
on her knee, then wrote a letter. She was perfectly aware of the fact
that since George had come back to her she was likely to be welcome once
more in many houses that for years had shown no particular desire to
receive her. She took the situation very easily. It was seldom her way to
be bitter. She was only determined to amuse herself, to enjoy her life in
her own way. If people disapproved of her, she thought them fools, but it
did not prevent her from trying to make it up with them next day, if she
saw an opening and it seemed worth while.

"There!" she said to herself as she sealed the letter, and looked at it
with admiration, "I really have a knack for doing those things. I should
think Aspasia Corfield would ask him by return--me, too, if she has any
decency, though she _has_ dropped me for fifteen years. She has a tribe
of daughters.--_Why_ I should play Miss Sewell's game like this I don't
know! Well, one must try something."

That same afternoon mother and son took their departure for Ferth Place.

George, who had only spent a few weeks at Ferth since his return from
India, should have found plenty to do both indoors and out. The house
struck him as singularly dingy and out of order. Changes were
imperatively demanded in the garden and in the estate. His business as a
colliery-owner was in a tangled and critical condition. And meanwhile
Fontenoy plied him incessantly with a political correspondence which of
itself made large demands upon intelligence and energy.

Nevertheless he shuffled out of everything, unless it were the
correspondence with Fontenoy. As to the notion that all the languor could
be due merely to an unsatisfied craving for Letty Sewell's society, when
it presented itself he still fought with it. The Indian climate might
have somehow affected him. An English winter is soon forgotten, and has
to be re-learnt like a distasteful lesson.

About a week after their arrival at Ferth George was sitting at his
solitary breakfast when his mother came floating into the room, preceded
by a rattle of bangles, a flutter of streamers, and the barking of
little dogs.

She held various newly opened letters, and, running up to him, she laid
her hands on his shoulders.

"Now"--thought George to himself with annoyance, "she is going to be
arch!"

"Oh! you silly boy!" she said, holding him, with her head on one side.
"Who's been cross and nasty to his poor old mammy? Who wants cheering up
a bit before he settles down to his horrid work? Who would take his
mammy to a nice party at a nice house, if he were prettily asked--eh?
who would?"

She pinched his cheek before he could escape.

"Well, mother, of course you will do what you like," said George, walking
off to supply himself with ham. "I shall not leave home again, just yet."

Lady Tressady smiled.

"Well, anyhow, you can read Aspasia Corfield's letter," she said, holding
it out to him. "You know, really, that house isn't bad. They took over
the Dryburghs' _chef_, and Aspasia knows how to pick her people."

"Aspasia!" The tone of patronising intimacy! George blushed, if his
mother did not.

Yet he took the letter. He read it, then put it down, and walked to the
window to look at a crowd of birds that had been collecting round a plate
of food he had just put out upon the snow.

"Well, will you go?" said his mother.

"If you particularly wish it," he said, after a pause, in an
embarrassed voice.

Lady Tressady's dimples were in full play as she settled herself into her
seat and began to gather a supply of provisions. But as he returned to
his place, and she glanced at him, she saw that he was not in a mood to
be bantered, and understood that he was not going to let her force his
confidence, however shrewdly she might guess at his affairs. So she
controlled herself, and began to chatter about the Corfields and their
party. He responded, and by the end of breakfast they were on much better
terms than they had been for some weeks.

That morning also he wrote a cheque for her immediate necessities, which
made her--for the time--a happy woman; and she overwhelmed him with
grateful tears and embraces, which he did his best to bear.

Early in December he and she became the Corfields' guests. They found a
large party collected, and Letty Sewell happily established as the spoilt
child of the house. At the first touch of her hand, the first glance of
her eyes, George's cloud dispersed.

"Why did you run away?" George asked her on the first possible occasion.

Letty laughed, fenced with the question for four days, during which
George was never dull for a single instant, and then capitulated. She
allowed him to propose to her, and was graciously pleased to accept him.

The following week Tressady went down with Letty to her home at Helbeck.
He found an invalid father, a remarkably foolish, inconsequent mother,
and a younger sister, Elsie, on whom, as it seemed to him, the burdens of
the house mainly rested.

The father, who was suffering from a slow but incurable disease, had the
remains of much natural ability and acuteness. He was well content with
Tressady as a son-in-law; though in the few interviews that Tressady was
able to have with him on the question of settlements the young man took
pains to state his money affairs as carefully and modestly as possible.
Letty was not often in her father's room, and Mr. Sewell treated her,
when she did come, rather like an agreeable guest than a daughter. But he
was evidently extremely proud of her--as also was the mother--and he
would talk much to George, when his health allowed it, of her good looks
and her social success.

With the younger sister Tressady did not find it easy to make friends.

She was plain, sickly, and rather silent. She seemed to have scientific
tastes and to be a great reader. And, so far as he could judge, the two
sisters were not intimate.

"Don't hate me for taking her away!" he said, as he was bidding good-bye
to Elsie, and glancing over her shoulder at Letty on the stairs.

The girl's quiet eyes were crossed by a momentary look of amusement. Then
she controlled herself, and said gently:

"We didn't expect to keep her! Good-bye."




CHAPTER IV


"Oh, Tully, look at my cloak! You've let it fall! Hold my fan, please,
and give me the opera-glasses."

The speaker was Miss Sewell. She and an elderly lady were sitting side by
side in the stalls, about halfway down St. James's Hall. The occasion was
a popular concert, and, as Joachim was to play, every seat in the hall
was rapidly filling up.

Letty rose as she asked for the opera-glasses, and scanned the crowds
streaming in through the side-doors.

"No--no signs of him! He must have been kept at the House, after all,"
she said, with annoyance. "Really, Tully, I do think you might have got a
programme all this time! Why do you leave everything to me?"

"My dear!" said her companion, protesting, "you didn't tell me to."

"Well, I don't see why I should _tell_ you everything. Of course I want a
programme. Is that he? No! What a nuisance!"

"Sir George must have been detained," murmured her companion, timidly.

"What a very original thing to say, wasn't it, Tully?" remarked Miss
Sewell, with sarcasm, as she sat down again.

The lady addressed was silent, instinctively waiting till Letty's nerves
should have quieted down. She was a Miss Tulloch, a former governess of
the Sewells, and now often employed by Letty, when she was in town, as a
convenient chaperon. Letty was accustomed to stay with an aunt in
Cavendish Square, an old lady who did not go out in the evenings. A
chaperon therefore was indispensable, and Maria Tulloch could always be
had. She existed somewhere in West Kensington, on an income of seventy
pounds a year. Letty took her freely to the opera and the theatre, to
concerts and galleries, and occasionally gave her a dress she did not
want. Miss Tulloch clung to the connection as her only chance of relief
from the boarding-house routine she detested, and was always abjectly
ready to do as she was told. She saw nothing she was not meant to see,
and she could be shaken off at a moment's notice. For the rest, she came
of a stock of gentlefolk; and her invariable black dress, her bits of
carefully treasured lace, the weak refinement of her face, and her timid
manner did no discredit to the brilliant creature beside her.

When the first number of the programme was over, Letty got up once more,
opera-glass in hand, to search among the late-comers for her missing
lover. She nodded to many acquaintances, but George Tressady was not to
be seen; and she sat down finally in no mood either to listen or to
enjoy, though the magician of the evening was already at work.

"There's something very special, isn't there, you want to see Sir George
about to-night?" Tully inquired humbly when the next pause occurred.

"Of course there is!" said Letty, crossly. "You do ask such
foolish questions, Tully. If I don't see him to-night, he may let
that house in Brook Street slip. There are several people after
it--the agents told me."

"And he thinks it too expensive?"

"Only because of _her_. If she makes him pay her that preposterous
allowance, of course it will be too expensive. But I don't mean him
to pay it."

"Lady Tressady is terribly extravagant," murmured Miss Tulloch.

"Well, so long as she isn't extravagant with his money--_our_ money--I
don't care a rap," said Letty; "only she sha'n't spend all her own and
all ours too, which is what she has been doing. When George was away he
let her live at Ferth, and spend almost all the income, except five
hundred a year that he kept for himself. And _then_ she got so shamefully
into debt that he doesn't know when he shall ever clear her. He gave her
money at Christmas, and again, I am _sure_, just lately. Well! all I know
is that it must be _stopped_. I don't know that I shall be able to do
much till I'm married, but I mean to make him take this house."

"Is Lady Tressady nice to you? She is in town, isn't she?"

"Oh yes! she's in town. Nice?" said Letty, with a little laugh. "She
can't bear me, of course; but we're quite civil."

"I thought she tried to bring it on?" said the confidante, anxious, above
all things, to be sympathetic.

"Well, she brought him to the Corfields, and let me know she had. I don't
know why she did it. I suppose she wanted to get something out of him.
Ah! _there_ he is!"

And Letty stood up, smiling and beckoning, while Tressady's tall thin
figure made its way along the central passage.

"Horrid House! What made you so late?" she said, as he sat down between
her and Miss Tulloch.

George Tressady looked at her with delight. The shrewish contractions in
the face, which had been very evident to Tully a few minutes before, had
all disappeared, and the sharp slight lines of it seemed to George the
height of delicacy. At sight of him colour and eyes had brightened. Yet
at the same time there was not a trace of the raw girl about her. She
knew very well that he had no taste for _ingénues_, and she was neither
nervous nor sentimental in his company.

"Do you suppose I should have stayed a second longer than I was obliged?"
he asked her, smiling, pressing her little hand under pretence of taking
her programme.

The first notes of a new Brahms quartette mounted, thin and sweet, into
the air. The musical portion of the audience, having come for this
particular morsel, prepared themselves eagerly for the tasting and trying
of it. George and Letty tried to say a few things more to each other
before yielding to the general silence, but an old gentleman in front
turned upon them a face of such disdain and fury they must needs laugh
and desist.

Not that George was unwilling. He was tired; and silence with Letty
beside him was not only repose, but pleasure. Moreover, he derived a
certain honest pleasure of a mixed sort from music. It suggested literary
or pictorial ideas to him which stirred him, and gave him a sense of
enjoyment. Now, as the playing flowed on, it called up delightful images
in his brain: of woody places, of whirling forms, of quiet rivers, of
thin trees Corot-like against the sky--scenes of pleading, of frolic,
reproachful pain, dissolving joy. With it all mingled his own story, his
own feeling; his pride of possession in this white creature touching him;
his sense of youth, of opening life, of a crowded stage whereon his "cue"
had just been given, his "call" sounded. He listened with eagerness,
welcoming each fancy as it floated past, conscious of a grain of
self-abandonment even--a rare mood with him. He was not absorbed in love
by any means; the music spoke to him of a hundred other kindling or
enchanting things. Nevertheless it made it doubly pleasant to be there,
with Letty beside him. He was quite satisfied with himself and her; quite
certain that he had done everything for the best. All this the music in
some way emphasised--made clear.

When it was over, and the applause was subsiding, Letty said in his ear:
"Have you settled about the house?"

He smiled down upon her, not hearing what she said, but admiring her
dress, its little complication and subtleties, the violets that perfumed
every movement, the slim fingers holding the fan. Her mere ways of
personal adornment were to him like pleasant talk. They surprised and
amused him--stood between him and ennui.

She repeated her question.

A frown crossed his brow, and the face changed wholly.

"Ah!--it is so difficult to see one's way," he said, with a little sigh
of annoyance.

Letty played with her fan, and was silent.

"Do you so much prefer it to the others?" he asked her.

Letty looked up with astonishment.

"Why, it is a house!" she said, lifting her eyebrows; "and the others--"

"Hovels? Well, you are about right. The small London house is an
abomination. Perhaps I can make them take less premium."

Letty shook her head.

"It is not at all a dear house," she said decidedly.

He still frowned, with the look of one recalled to an annoyance he had
shaken off.

"Well, darling, if you wish it so much, that settles it. Promise to be
still nice to me when we go through the Bankruptcy Court!"

"We will let lodgings, and I will do the waiting," said Letty, just
laying her hand lightly against his for an instant. "Just think! That
house would draw like anything. Of course, we will only take the eldest
sons of peers. By the way, do you see Lord Fontenoy?"

They were in the middle of the "interval," and almost everyone about
them, including Miss Tulloch, was standing up, talking or examining their
neighbours.

George craned his neck round Miss Tulloch, and saw Fontenoy sitting
beside a lady, on the other side of the middle gangway.

"Who is the lady?" Letty inquired. "I saw her with him the other night at
the Foreign Office."

George smiled.

"_That_--if you want to know--is Fontenoy's story!"

"Oh, but tell me at once!" said Letty, imperiously. "But he hasn't got a
story, or a heart. He's only stuffed with blue-book."

"So I thought till a few weeks ago. But I know a good deal more now about
Master Fontenoy than I did."

"But who is she?"

"She is a Mrs. Allison. Isn't that white hair beautiful? And her
face--half saint, I always think--you might take her for a
mother-abbess--and half princess. Did you ever see such diamonds?"

George pulled his moustaches, and grinned as he looked across at
Fontenoy.

"Tell me quick!" said Letty, tapping him on the arm--"Is she a
widow?--and is he going to marry her? Why didn't you tell me before?--why
didn't you tell me at Malford?"

"Because I didn't know," said George, laughing. "Oh! it's a strange
story--too long to tell now. She is a widow, but he is not going to marry
her, apparently. She has a grown-up son, who hasn't yet found himself a
wife, and thinks it isn't fair to him. If Fontenoy wants to introduce
her, don't refuse. She is the mistress of Castle Luton, and has
delightful parties. Yes!--if I'd known at Malford what I know now!"

And he laughed again, remembering Fontenoy's nocturnal incursion upon
him, and its apparent object. Who would have imagined that the preacher
of that occasion had ever given one serious thought to woman and woman's
arts--least of all that he was the creation and slave of a woman!

Letty's curiosity was piqued, and she would have plied George with
questions, but that she suddenly perceived that Fontenoy had risen, and
was coming across to them.

"Gracious!" she said; "here he comes. I can't think why; he
doesn't like me."

Fontenoy, however, when he had made his way to them, greeted Miss Sewell
with as much apparent cordiality as he showed to anyone else. He had
received George's news of the marriage with all decorum, and had since
sent a handsome wedding-present to the bride-elect. Letty, however, was
never at ease with him, which, indeed, was the case with most women.

He stood beside the _fiances_ for a minute or two, exchanging a few
commonplaces with Letty on the performers and the audience; then he
turned to George with a change of look.

"No need for us to go back to-night, I think?"

"What, to the House? Dear, no! Grooby and Havershon may be trusted to
drone the evening out, I should hope, with no trouble to anybody but
themselves. The Government are just keeping a house, that's all. Have you
been grinding at your speech all day?"

Fontenoy shrugged his shoulders.

"I sha'n't get anything out that I want to say. Are you coming to the
House on Friday, Miss Sewell?"

"Friday?" said Letty, looking puzzled.

George laughed.

"I told you. You must plead trousseau if you want to save yourself!"

Amusement shone in his blue eyes as they passed from Letty to Fontenoy.
He had long ago discovered that Letty was incapable of any serious
interest in his public life. It did not disturb him at all. But it
tickled his sense of humour that Letty would have to talk politics all
the same, and to talk them with people like Fontenoy.

"Oh! you mean your Resolution!" cried Letty. "Isn't it a Resolution? Yes,
of course I'm coming. It's very absurd, for I don't know anything about
it. But George says I must, and till I promise to obey, you see, I don't
mind being obedient!"

Archness, however, was thrown away on Fontenoy. He stood beside her,
awkward and irresponsive. Not being allowed to be womanish, she could
only try once more to be political.

"It's to be a great attack on Mr. Dowson, isn't it?" she asked him. "You
and George are mad about some things he has been doing? He's Home
Secretary, isn't he? Yes, of _course_! And he's been driving trade away,
and tyrannising over the manufacturers? I _wish_ you'd explain it to me!
I ask George, and he tells me not to talk shop."

"Oh, for goodness' sake," groaned George, "let it alone! I came to meet
you and hear Joachim. However, I may as well warn you, Letty, that I
sha'n't have time to be married once Fontenoy's anti-Maxwell campaign
begins; and it will go on till the Day of Judgment."

"Why anti-Maxwell," said Letty, puzzled. "I thought it was Mr. Dowson you
are going to attack?"

George, a little vexed that she should require it, began to explain that
as Maxwell was "only a miserable peer," he could have nothing to do with
the House of Commons, and that Dowson was the official mouthpiece of the
Maxwell group and policy in the Lower House. "The hands were the hands of
Esau," etc. Letty meanwhile, conscious that she was not showing to
advantage, flushed, began to play nervously with her fan, and wished that
George would leave off.

Fontenoy did nothing to assist George's political lesson. He stood
impassive, till suddenly he tried to look across his immediate
neighbours, and then said, turning to Letty:

"The Maxwells, I see, are here to-night." He nodded towards a group on
the left, some two or three benches behind them. "Are you an admirer of
Lady Maxwell's, Miss Sewell?--you've seen her, of course?"

"Oh yes, _often_!" said Letty, annoyed by the question, standing,
however, eagerly on tiptoe. "I know her, too, a little; but she never
remembers me. She was at the Foreign Office on Saturday, with such a
_hideous_ dress on--it spoilt her completely."

"Hideous!" said Fontenoy, with a puzzled look. "Some artist--I forget
who--came and raved to me about it; said it was like some Florentine
picture--I forget what--don't think I ever heard of it."

Letty looked contemptuous. Her expression said that in this matter, at
any rate, she knew what she was talking about. Nevertheless her eyes
followed the dark head Fontenoy had pointed out to her.

Lady Maxwell was at the moment the centre of a large group of people,
mostly men, all of whom seemed to be eager to get a word with her, and
she was talking with great animation, appealing from time to time to a
tall, broad-shouldered gentleman, with greyish hair, who stood, smiling
and silent, at the edge of the group. Letty noticed that many glasses
from the balcony were directed to this particular knot of persons; that
everybody near them, or rather every woman, was watching Lady Maxwell, or
trying to get a better view of her. The girl felt a secret pang of envy
and dislike.

The figure of a well-known accompanist appeared suddenly at the head of
the staircase leading from the artists' room. The interval was over, and
the audience began to subside into attention.

Fontenoy bowed and took his leave.

"You see, he _didn't_ introduce me," said Letty, not without chagrin,
as she settled down. "And how plain he is! I think him uglier every
time I see him."

George made a vague sound of assent, but did not really agree with her in
the least. Fontenoy's air of overwork was more decided than ever; his
eyes had almost sunk out of sight; the complexion of his broad strong
face had reddened and coarsened from lack of exercise and sleep; his
brown hair was thinning and grizzling fast. Nevertheless a man saw much
to admire in the ungainly head and long-limbed frame, and did not think
any the better of a woman's intelligence for failing to perceive it.

After the concert, as George and Letty stood together in the crowded
vestibule, he said to her, with a smile:

"So I take that house?"

"If you want to do anything disagreeable," she retorted, quickly, "don't
_ask_ me. Do it, and then wait till I am good-tempered again!"

"What a tempting prospect! Do you know that when you put on that
particular hood that I would take Buckingham Palace to please you? Do you
know also that my mother will think us very extravagant?"

"Ah, we can't all be economical!" said Letty.

He saw the little toss of the head and sharpening of the lips. They only
amused him. Though he had never, so far, discussed his mother and her
affairs with Letty in any detail, he understood perfectly well that her
feeling about this particular house in some way concerned his mother, and
that Letty and Lady Tressady were rapidly coming to dislike each other.
Well, why should Letty pretend? He liked her the better for not
pretending.

There was a movement in the crowd about them, and Letty, looking up,
suddenly found herself close to a tall lady, whose dark eyes were
bent upon her.

"How do you do, Miss Sewell?"

Letty, a little fluttered, gave her hand and replied. Lady Maxwell
glanced across her at the tall young man, with the fair, irregular face.
George bowed involuntarily, and she slightly responded. Then she was
swept on by her own party.

"Have you sent for your carriage?" George heard someone say to her.

"No; I am going home in a hansom. I've tired out both the horses
to-day. Aldous is going down to the club to see if he can hear anything
about Devizes."

"Oh! the election?"

She nodded, then caught sight of her husband at the door beckoning, and
hurried on.

"What a head!" said George, looking after her with admiration.

"Yes," said Letty, unwillingly. "It's the hair that's so splendid, the
long black waves of it. How ridiculous to talk of tiring out her
horses--that's just like her! As though she mightn't have fifty horses if
she liked! Oh, George, there's our man! Quick, Tully!"

They made their way out. In the press George put his arm half round
Letty, shielding her. The touch of her light form, the nearness of her
delicate face, enchanted him. When their carriage had rolled away, and he
turned homewards along Piccadilly, he walked absently for a time,
conscious only of pulsing pleasure.

It was a mild February night. After a long frost, and a grudging thaw,
westerly winds were setting in, and Spring could be foreseen. It had been
pouring with rain during the concert, but was now fair, the rushing
clouds leaving behind them, as they passed, great torn spaces of blue,
where the stars shone.

Gusts of warm moist air swept through the street. As George's moment of
intoxication gradually subsided, he felt the physical charm of the soft
buffeting wind. How good seemed all living!--youth and capacity--this
roaring multitudinous London--the future with its chances! This common
pleasant chance of marriage amongst them--he was glad he had put out his
hand to it. His wife that was to be was no saint and no philosopher. He
thanked the fates! He at least asked for neither--on the hearth. "Praise,
blame, love, kisses"--for all of those, life with Letty would give scope;
yet for none of them in excess. There would be plenty of room left for
other things, other passions--the passion of political power, for
instance, the art of dealing with and commanding other men. He, the
novice, the beginner, to talk of "commanding!" Yet already he felt his
foot upon the ladder. Fontenoy consulted him, and confided in him more
and more. In spite of his engagement, he was informing himself rapidly on
a hundred questions, and the mental wrestle of every day was
exhilarating. Their small group in the House, compact, tireless,
audacious, was growing in importance and in the attention it extorted
from the public. Never had the whole tribe of factory inspectors shown a
more hawk-like, a more inquisitorial, a more intolerable vigilance than
during the past twelve months. All the persons concerned with matches and
white-lead, with certain chemical or metal-working industries, with
"season" dressmaking or tailoring, were up in arms, rallying to
Fontenoy's support with loud wrath and lamentations, claiming to speak
not only for themselves, but for their "hands," in the angry protest
that things had gone and were going a great deal too far, that trade was
simply being harassed out of the country. A Whiggish group of
manufacturers on the Liberal side were all with Fontenoy; while the
Socialists, on whom the Government should have been able in such a matter
to count to the death, had a special grievance against the Cabinet at the
moment, and were sulking in their tents. The attack and defence would
probably take two nights; for the Government, admitting the gravity of
the assault, had agreed, in case the debate should not be concluded on
Friday, to give up Monday to it. Altogether the affair would make a
noise. George would probably get in his maiden speech on the second
night, and was, in truth, devoting a great deal of his mind to the
prospect; though to Letty he had persistently laughed at it and belittled
it, refusing altogether to let her come and hear him.

Then, after Easter would come Maxwell's Bill, and the fat in the fire!
Poor little Letty!--she would get but few of the bridal observances due
to her when _that_ struggle began. But first would come Easter and their
wedding; that one short fortnight, when he would carry her off--soft,
willing prey!--to the country, draw a "wind-warm space" about himself and
her, and minister to all her whims.

He turned down St. James's Street, passed Marlborough House, and
entered the Mall, on the way to Warwick Square, where he was living
with his mother.

Suddenly he became aware of a crowd, immediately in front of him, in the
direction of Buckingham Palace. A hansom and horse were standing in the
roadway; the driver, crimson and hatless, was bandying words with one of
the policemen, who had his notebook open, and from the middle of the
crowd came a sound of wailing.

He walked up to the edge of the circle.

"Anybody hurt?" he said to the policeman, as the man shut his notebook.

"Little girl run over, sir."

"Can I be of any assistance? Is there an ambulance coming?"

"No, sir. There was a lady in the hansom. She's just now bandaging the
child's leg, and says she'll take it to the hospital."

George mounted on one of the seats under the trees that stood handy, and
looked over the heads of the crowd to the space in the centre which the
other policeman was keeping clear. A little girl lay on the ground, or
rather on a heap of coats; another girl, apparently about sixteen, stood
near her, crying bitterly, and a lady--

"Goodness!" said Tressady; and, jumping down, he touched the policeman on
the shoulder.

"Can you get me through? I think I could be some help. That lady"--he
spoke a word in the policeman's ear.

The man touched his hat.

"Stand back, please!" he said, addressing the crowd, "and let this
gentleman through."

The crowd divided unwillingly. But at the same moment it parted from the
inside, and a little procession came through, both policemen joining
their energies to make a free passage for it. In front walked the
policeman carrying the little girl, a child apparently of about twelve
years old. Her right foot lay stiffly across his arm, held straight and
still in an impromptu splint of umbrellas and handkerchiefs. Immediately
behind came the lady whom George had caught sight of, holding the other
girl's hand in hers. She was bareheaded and in evening dress. Her
opera-cloak, with its heavy sable collar, showed beneath it a dress of
some light-coloured satin, which had already suffered deplorably from the
puddles of the road, and, as she neared the lamp beneath which the cab
had stopped, the diamonds on her wrists sparkled in the light. During her
passage through the crowd, George perceived that one or two people
recognised her, and that a murmur ran from mouth to mouth.

Of anything of the sort she herself was totally unconscious. George saw
at once that she, not the policeman, was in command. She gave him
directions, as they approached the cab, in a quick, imperative voice
which left no room for hesitation.

"The driver is drunk," he heard her say; "who will drive?"

"One of us will drive, ma'am."

"What--the other man? Ask him to take the reins at once, please, before I
get in. The horse is fresh, and might start. That's right. Now, when I
say the word, give me the child."

She settled herself in the cab. George saw the policeman somewhat
embarrassed, for a moment, with his burden. He came forward to his help,
and between them they handed in the child, placing her carefully on her
protector's knee.

Then, standing at the open door of the cab, George raised his hat. "Can I
be of any further assistance to you, Lady Maxwell? I saw you just now at
the concert."

She turned in some astonishment as she heard her name, and looked at the
speaker. Then, very quickly, she seemed to understand.

"I don't know," she said, pondering. "Yes! you could help me. I am going
to take the child to hospital. But there is this other girl. Could you
take her home--she is very much upset? No!--first, could you bring her
after me to St. George's? She wants to see where we put her sister."

"I will call another cab, and be there as soon as you."

"Thank you. Just let me speak to the sister a moment, please."

He put the weeping girl forward, and Lady Maxwell bent across the burden
on her knee to say a few words to her--soft, quick words in another
voice. The girl understood, her face cleared a little, and she let
Tressady take charge of her.

One of the policemen mounted the box of the hansom, amid the "chaff" of
the crowd, and the cab started. A few hats were raised in George's
neighbourhood, and there was something of a cheer.

"I tell yer," said a voice, "I knowed her fust sight--seed her picture
lots o' times in the papers, and in the winders too. My word, ain't she
good-lookin! And did yer see all them diamonds?"

"Come along!" said George, impatiently, hurrying his charge into the
four-wheeler the other policeman had just stopped for them.

In a few more seconds he, the girl, and the policeman were pursuing Lady
Maxwell's hansom at the best speed of an indifferent horse. George tried
to say a few consoling things to his neighbour; and the girl, reassured
by his kind manner, found her tongue, and began to chatter in a tearful
voice about the how and when of the accident: about the elder sister in a
lodging in Crawford Street, Tottenham Court Road, whom she and the little
one had been visiting; the grandmother in Westminster with whom they
lived; poor Lizzie's place in a laundry, which now she must lose; how the
lady had begged handkerchiefs and umbrellas from the crowd to tie up
Lizzie's leg with--and so on through a number of other details incoherent
or plaintive.

George heard her absently. His mind all the time was absorbed in the
dramatic or ironic aspects of what he had just seen. For dramatic they
were--though perhaps a little cheap. Could he, could anyone, have made
acquaintance with this particular woman in more characteristic fashion?
He laughed to think how he would tell the story to Fontenoy. The
beautiful creature in her diamonds, kneeling on her satin dress in the
mud, to bind up a little laundrymaid's leg--it was so extravagantly in
keeping with Marcella Maxwell that it amused one like an overdone
coincidence in a clumsy play.

What made her so beautiful? The face had marked defects; but in colour,
expression, subtlety of line incomparable! On the other hand, the
manner--no!--he shrugged his shoulders. The remembrance of its
mannish--or should it be, rather, boyish?--energy and assurance somehow
set him on edge.

In the end, they were not much behind the hansom; for the hospital porter
was only just in the act of taking the injured child from Lady Maxwell as
Tressady dismounted and went forward again to see what he could do.

But, somewhat to his chagrin, he was not wanted. Lady Maxwell and the
porter did everything. As they went into the hospital, George caught a
few of the things she was saying to the porter as she supported the
child's leg. She spoke in a rapid, professional way, and the man
answered, as the policeman had done, with a deference and understanding
which were clearly not due only to her "grand air" and her evening dress.
George was puzzled.

He and the elder sister followed her into the waiting-room. The
house-surgeon and a nurse were summoned, and the injured leg was put into
a splint there and then. The patient moaned and cried most of the time,
and Tressady had hard work to keep the sister quiet. Then nurse and
doctor lifted the child.

"They are going to put her to bed," said Lady Maxwell, turning to George.
"I am going up with them. Would you kindly wait? The sister"--she dropped
her business tone, and, smiling, touched the elder girl on the arm--"can
come up when the little one is undressed."

The little procession swept away, and George was left with his charge. As
soon as the small sister was out of sight, the elder one began to
chatter again out of sheer excitement, crying at intervals. George did
not heed her much. He walked up and down, with his hands in his pockets,
conscious of a curious irritability. He did not think a woman should take
a strange man's service quite so coolly.

At the end of another quarter of an hour a nurse appeared to summon the
sister. Tressady was told he might come too if he would, and his charge
threw him a quick, timid look, as though asking him not to desert her in
this unknown and formidable place. So they followed the nurse up white
stone stairs, and through half-lit corridors, where all was silent, save
that once a sound of delirious shrieking and talking reached them
through a closed door, and made the sister's consumptive little face
turn whiter still.

At last the nurse, putting her finger on her lip, turned a handle, and
George was conscious of a sudden feeling of pleasure.

They were standing on the threshold of a children's ward. On either hand
was a range of beds, bluish-white between the yellow picture-covered
walls and the middle-way of spotless floor. Far away, at the other end, a
great fire glowed. On a bare table in the centre, laden with bottles and
various surgical necessaries, stood a shaded lamp, and beside it the
chair where the night-nurse had been sitting. In the beds were sleeping
children of various ages, some burrowing, face downward, animal-like,
into their pillows; others lying on their backs, painfully straight and
still. The air was warm, yet light, and there was the inevitable smell of
antiseptics. Something in the fire-lit space and comfort of the great
room, its ordered lines and colours, the gentleness of the shaded light
as contrasted with the dim figures in the beds, seemed to make a poem of
it--a poem of human tenderness.

Two or three beds away to the right, Lady Maxwell was standing with the
night-nurse of the ward. The little girl had been undressed, and was
lying quiet, with a drawn, piteous face that turned eagerly as her sister
came in. The whole scene was new and touching to Tressady. Yet, after the
first impression, his attention was perforce held by Lady Maxwell, and he
saw the rest only in relation to her. She had slipped off her heavy
cloak, in order, perhaps, that she might help in the undressing of the
child. Beneath, she wore a little shawl or cape of some delicate lace
over her low dress. The dress itself was of a pale shade of green; the
mire and mud with which it was bedabbled no longer showed in the half
light; and the satin folds glistened dimly as she moved. The poetic
dignity of the head, so finely wreathed with its black hair, of the full
throat and falling shoulders, received a sort of special emphasis from
the wide spaces, the pale colours and level lines of the ward. Tressady
was conscious again of the dramatic significant note as he watched her,
yet without any softening of his nascent feeling of antagonism.

She turned and beckoned to the sister as they entered:

"Come and see how comfortable she is! And then you must give this lady
your name and address."

The girl timidly approached. Whilst she was occupied with her sister and
with the nurse, Lady Maxwell suddenly looked round, and saw Tressady
standing by the table a yard or two from her.

A momentary expression of astonishment crossed her face. He saw that, in
her absorption with the case and the two sisters, she had clean forgotten
all about him. But in a flash she remembered, and smiled.

"So you are really going to take her home? That is very kind of you. It
will make all the difference to the grandmother that somebody should go
and explain. You see, they leave her in the splint for the night, and
to-morrow they will put the leg in plaster. Probably they won't keep her
in hospital more than about three weeks, for they are very full."

"You seem to know all about it!"

"I was a nurse myself once, for a time," she said, but with a certain
stiffness which seemed to mark the transition from the professional to
the great lady.

"Ah! I should have remembered that. I had heard it from Edward Watton."

She looked up quickly. He felt that for the first time she took notice of
him as an individual.

"You know Mr. Watton? I think you are Sir George Tressady, are you not?
You got in for Market Malford in November? I recollect. I didn't like
your speeches."

She laughed. So did he.

"Yes, I got in just in time for a fighting session."

Her laugh disappeared.

"An odious fight!" she said gravely.

"I am not so sure. That depends on whether you like fighting, and how
certain you are of your cause!"

She hesitated a moment; then she said:

"How can Lord Fontenoy be certain of his cause!"

The slight note of scorn roused him.

"Isn't that what all parties say of their opponents?"

She glanced at him again, curiously. He was evidently quite
young--younger than herself, she guessed. But his careless ease and
experience of bearing, contrasted with his thin boy's figure, attracted
her. Her lip softened reluctantly into a smile.

"Perhaps," she said. "Only sometimes, you know, it must be true! Well,
evidently we can't discuss it here at one o'clock in the morning--and
there is the nurse making signs to me. It is really very good of you. If
you are in our neighbourhood on Sunday, will you report?"

"Certainly--with the greatest pleasure. I will come and give you a full
account of my mission."

She held out a slim hand. The sister, red-eyed with crying, was handed
over to him, and he and she were soon in a cab, speeding towards the
Westminster mews whither she directed him.

Well, was Maxwell to be so greatly envied? Tressady was not sure. Such a
woman, he thought, for all her beauty, would not have greatly stirred his
own pulses.




CHAPTER V


The week which had opened thus for Tressady promised to be one of lively
interest for such persons as were either concerned in or took notice of
the House of Commons and its doings. Fontenoy's onslaught upon the
administration of the Home Office, and, through the Home Secretary, on
the Maxwell group and influence, had been long expected, and was known to
have been ably prepared. Its possible results were already keenly
discussed. Even if it were a damaging attack, it was not supposed that it
could have any immediate effect on the state of parties or the strength
of the Government. But after Easter Maxwell's factory Bill--a special
Factory Act for East London, touching the grown man for the first time,
and absolutely prohibiting home-work in certain specified industries--was
to be brought forward, and could not fail to provide Maxwell's
adversaries with many chances of red and glorious battle. It was
disputable from end to end; it had already broken up one Government; it
was strongly pressed and fiercely opposed; and on the fate of each clause
in Committee might hang the life or death of the Ministry--not so much
because of the intrinsic importance of the matter, as because Maxwell was
indispensable to the Cabinet, and it was known that neither Maxwell nor
his close friend and henchman, Dowson, the Home Secretary, would accept
defeat on any of the really vital points of the Bill.

The general situation was a curious one. Some two years before this time
a strong and long-lived Tory Government had come to an end. Since then
all had been confusion in English politics. A weak Liberal Government,
undermined by Socialist rebellion, had lasted but a short time, to be
followed by an equally precarious Tory Ministry, in which Lord
Maxwell--after an absence from politics of some four years or
so--returned to his party, only to break it up. For he succeeded in
imposing upon them a measure in which his own deepest convictions and
feelings were concerned, and which had behind it the support of all the
more important trade unions. Upon that measure the Ministry fell; but
during their short administration Maxwell had made so great an impression
upon his own side that when they returned, as they did return, with an
enlarged majority, the Maxwell Bill retained one of the foremost places
in their programme, and might be said, indeed, at the present moment to
hold the centre of the political field.

That field, in the eyes of any middle-aged observer, was in strange
disarray. The old Liberal party had been almost swept away; only a few
waifs and strays remained, the exponents of a programme that nobody
wanted, and of cries that stirred nobody's blood. A large Independent
Labour and Socialist party filled the empty benches of the Liberals--a
revolutionary, enthusiastic crew, of whom the country was a little
frightened, and who were, if the truth were known, a little frightened
at themselves. They had a coherent programme, and represented a
formidable "domination" in English life. And that English life itself, in
all that concerned the advance and transformation of labour, was in a
singularly tossed and troubled state. After a long period of stagnation
and comparative industrial peace, storms at home, answering to storms on
the Continent, had been let loose, and forces both of reaction and of
revolution were making themselves felt in new forms and under the command
of new masters.

At the head of the party of reaction stood Fontenoy. Some four years
before the present session the circumstances of a great strike in the
Midlands--together, no doubt, with some other influence--had first drawn
him into public life, had cut him off from racing and all his natural
pleasures. The strike affected his father's vast domain in North Mercia;
it was marked by an unusual violence on the part of the men and their
leaders; and Fontenoy, driven, sorely against his will, to take a part by
the fact that his father, the hard and competent administrator of an
enormous fortune, happened at the moment to be struck down by illness,
found himself before many weeks were over taking it with passion, and
emerged from the struggle a changed man. Property must be upheld;
low-born disorder and greed must be put down. He sold his race-horses,
and proceeded forthwith to throw into the formation of a new party all
the doggedness, the astuteness, and the audacity he had been accustomed
to lavish upon the intrigues and the triumphs of the Turf.

And now in this new Parliament his immense labour was beginning to tell.
The men who followed him had grown in number and improved in quality.
They abhorred equally a temporising conservatism and a plundering
democracy. They stood frankly for birth and wealth, the Church and the
expert. They were the apostles of resistance and negation; they were
sworn to oppose any further meddling with trade and the personal liberty
of master and workman, and to undo, if they could, some of the meddling
that had been already carried through. A certain academic quality
prevailed among them, which made them peculiarly sensitive to the
absurdities of men who had not been to Oxford or Cambridge; while some,
like Tressady, had been travellers, and wore an Imperialist heart upon
their sleeve. The group possessed an unusual share of debating and
oratorical ability, and they had never attracted so much attention as now
that they were about to make the Maxwell Bill their prey.

Meanwhile, for the initiated, the situation possessed one or two points
of special interest. Lady Maxwell, indeed, was by this time scarcely less
of a political force than her husband. Was her position an illustration
of some new power in women's hands, or was it merely an example of
something as well known to the Pharaohs as to the nineteenth century--the
ability of any woman with a certain physique to get her way? That this
particular woman's way happened to be also her husband's way made the
case less interesting for some observers. On the other hand, her obvious
wifely devotion attracted simple souls to whom the meddling of women in
politics would have been nothing but repellent had it not been
recommended to them by the facts that Marcella Maxwell was held to be
good as well as beautiful; that she loved her husband; and was the
excellent mother of a fine son.

Of her devotion, in the case of this particular Bill, there was neither
concealment nor doubt. She was known to have given her husband every
assistance in the final drafting of the measure: she had seen for herself
the working of every trade that it affected; she had innumerable friends
among wage-earners of all sorts, to whom she gave half her social life;
and both among them and in the drawing-rooms of the rich she fought her
husband's cause unceasingly, by the help of beauty, wits, and something
else--a broad impulsiveness and charm--which might be vilified or
scorned, but could hardly be matched, by the enemy.

Meanwhile Lord Maxwell was a comparatively ineffective speaker, and
passed in social life for a reserved and difficult personality. His
friends put no one else beside him; and his colleagues in the Cabinet
were well aware that he represented the keystone in their arch. But
the man in the street, whether of the aristocratic or plebeian sort,
knew comparatively little about him. All of which, combined with the
special knowledge of an inner circle, helped still more to concentrate
public attention on the convictions, the temperament, and the beauty
of his wife.

Amid a situation charged with these personal or dramatic elements the
Friday so keenly awaited by Fontenoy and his party arrived.

Immediately after question-time Fontenoy made his speech. In reply, the
Home Secretary, suave, statistical, and conciliatory, poured a stream of
facts and reports upon the House. The more repulsive they were, the
softer and more mincing grew his voice in dealing with them. Fontenoy had
excited his audience, Dowson succeeded in making it shudder.
Nevertheless, the effect of the evening lay with Fontenoy.

George stayed to hear the official defence to its end. Then he hurried
upstairs in search of Letty, who, with Miss Tulloch, was in the Speaker's
private gallery. As he went he thought of Fontenoy's speech, its halting
opening, the savage force of its peroration. His pulses tingled:
"Magnificent!" he said to himself; "_magnificent!_ We have found a man!"

Letty was eagerly waiting for him, and they walked down the corridor
together. "Well?" he said, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets, and
looking down upon her with a smile. "Well?"

Letty saw that she was expected to praise, and she did her best, his
smile still bent upon her. He was perfectly aware all the time of the
fatuity of what she was saying. She had caught up since her engagement a
certain number of political phrases, and it amused him to note the cheap
and tinkling use she made of them. Nevertheless she was chatting,
smiling, gesticulating, for his pleasure. She was posing for him, using
her grey eyes in these expressive ways, all for him. He thought her the
most entertaining plaything; though it did occur to him sometimes that
when they were married he would give her instruction.

"Ah, well, you liked it--that's good!" he said at last, interrupting her.
"We've begun well, any way. It'll be rather hard, though, to have to
speak after that on Monday!"

"As if you need be afraid! You're not, you know--it's only mock modesty.
Do you know that Lady Maxwell was sitting two from me?"

"No! Well, how did she like Fontenoy?"

"She never moved after he got up. She pressed her face against that
horrid grating, and stared at him all the time. I thought she was very
flushed--but that may have been the heat--and in a very bad temper,"
added Letty, maliciously. "I talked to her a little about your
adventure."

"Did she remember my existence?"

"Oh dear, yes! She said she expected you on Sunday. She never asked _me_
to come." Letty looked arch. "But then one doesn't expect her to have
pretty manners. People say she is shy. But, of course, that is only your
friends' way of saying that you're rude."

"She wasn't rude to you?" said George, outwardly eager, inwardly
sceptical. "Shall I not go on Sunday?"

"But of course you must go. We shall have to know them. She's not a
woman's woman--that's all. Now, are we going to get some dinner, for
Tully and I are famishing?"

"Come along, then, and I'll collect the party."

George had asked a few of his acquaintance in the House to meet his
betrothed, together with an old General Tressady and his wife who were
his distant cousins. The party were to assemble in the room of an
under-secretary much given to such hospitable functions; and thither
accordingly George led the way.

The room, when they reached it, was already fairly full of people, and
alive with talk.

"Another party!" said George, looking round him. "Benson is great at this
sort of thing."

"Do you see Lady Maxwell?" said Letty, in his ear.

George looked to his right, and perceived the lady in question. She also
recognised him at once, and bowed, but without rising. She was the centre
of a group of people, who were gathered round her and the small table on
which she was leaning, and they were so deeply absorbed in the
conversation that had been going on that they hardly noticed the entrance
of Tressady and his companion.

"Leven has a party, you see," said the under-secretary. "Blaythwaite was
to have taken them in--couldn't at the last moment; so they had to come
in here. This is _your_ side of the room! But none of your guests have
come yet. Dinner at the House in the winter is a poor sort of business,
Miss Sewell. We want the Terrace for these occasions."

He led the young girl to a sofa at the further end of the room, and made
himself agreeable, to him the easiest process in the world. He was a
fashionable and charming person, in the most irreproachable of
frock-coats, and Letty was soon at her ease with him, and mistress of
all her usual arts and graces.

"You know Lady Maxwell?" he said to her, with a slight motion of the head
towards the distant group.

Letty replied; and while she and her companion chattered, George, who was
standing behind them, watched the other party.

They were apparently in the thick of an argument, and Lady Maxwell, whose
hands were lightly clasped on the table in front of her, was leaning
forward with the look of one who had just shot her bolt, and was waiting
to see how it would strike.

It struck apparently in the direction of her _vis-à-vis,_ Sir Frank
Leven, for he bent over to her, making a quick reply in a half-petulant
boy's voice. He had been three years in the House, but had still the air
of an Eton "swell" in his last half.

Lady Maxwell listened to what he had to say, a sort of silent passion in
her face all the time--a noble passion nobly restrained.

When he stopped, George caught her reply.

"He has neither _seen_ nor _felt_--every sentence showed it--that is all
one can say. How can one take his judgment?"

George's mouth twitched. He slipped, smiling, into a place beside Letty.
"Did you hear that?" he inquired.

"Fontenoy's speech, of course," said the under-secretary, looking round.
"She's pitching into Leven, I suppose. He's as cranky and unsound as he
can be. Shouldn't wonder if you got him before long."

He nodded good-temperedly to Tressady, then got up to speak to a man on
the edge of the further group.

"How amusing!" said George, his satirical eyes still watching Lady
Maxwell. "How much that set has 'seen and felt' of sweaters, and
white-lead workers, and that ilk! Don't they look like it?"

"Who are they?"

Letty was now using all her eyes to find out, and especially for the
purpose of carrying away a mental photograph of Lady Maxwell's black hat
and dress.

"Oh! the Maxwells' particular friends in the House--most of them as well
provided with family and goods as they make 'em: a philanthropic,
idealist lot, that yearns for the people, and will be the first to be
kicked downstairs when the people gets its own. However, they aren't all
quite happy in their minds. Frank Leven there, as Benson says, is
decidedly shaky. He is the member for the Maxwells' division--Maxwell, of
course, put him in. He has a house there, I believe, and he married Lady
Maxwell's great friend, Miss Macdonald--an ambitious little party, they
say, who simply insisted on his going into Parliament. Oh, then, Bennett
is there--do you see?--the little dark man with a frock-coat and
spectacles? He's Lady Maxwell's link with the Independents--oldest
workman member--been in the House a long time, so that by now he isn't
quite as one-eyed and one-eared as the rest of them. I suppose she hopes
to make use of him at critical moments--she takes care to have tools of
all sorts. Gracious--listen!"

There was, indeed, a very storm of discussion sweeping through the rival
party. Lady Maxwell's penetrating but not loud voice seemed to pervade
it, and her eyes and face, as she glanced from one speaker to another,
drew alternately the shafts and the sympathy of the rest.

Tressady made a face.

"I say, Letty, promise me one thing!" His hand stole towards hers. Tully
discreetly looked the other way. "Promise me not to be a political woman,
there's a dear!"

Letty hastily withdrew her fingers, having no mind at all for caresses
in public.

"But I _must_ be a political woman--I shall have to be! I know heaps of
girls and married women who get up everything in the papers--all the
stupidest things--not because they know anything about it, or because
they care a rap, but because some of their men friends happen to be
members; and when they come to see you, you must know what to talk to
them about."

"Must you?" said George, "How odd! As though one went to tea with a woman
for the sake of talking about the very same things you have been doing
all day, and are probably sick to death of already."

"Never mind," said Letty, with her little air of sharp wisdom. "I _know_
they do it, and I shall have to do it too. I shall pick it up."

"Will you? Of course you will! Only, when I've got a big Bill on, let me
do a little of it for myself--give me some of the credit!"

Letty laughed maliciously.

"I don't know why you've taken such a dislike to her," she said, but in
rather a contented tone, as her eye once more travelled across to Lady
Maxwell. "Does she trample on her husband, after all?"

Tressady gave an impatient shrug.

"Trample on him? Goodness, no! That's all part of the play, too--wifely
affection and the rest of it. Why can't she keep out of sight a little?
We don't want the women meddling."

"Thank you, my domestic tyrant!" said Letty, making him a little bow.

"How much tyranny will you want before you accept those sentiments?" he
asked her, smiling tenderly into her eyes. Both had a moment's pleasant
thrill; then George sprang up.

"Ah, here they are at last!--the General, and all the lot. Now, I hope,
we shall get some dinner."

Tressady had, of course, to introduce his elderly cousins and his three
or four political friends to his future wife; and, amid the small flutter
of the performance, the break-up and disappearance of the rival party
passed unnoticed. When Tressady's guests entered the dining-room which
looks on the terrace, and made their way to the top table reserved for
them, the Leven dinner, near the door, was already half through.

George's little banquet passed merrily enough. The grey-haired General
and his wife turned out to be agreeable and well-bred people, quite able
to repay George's hospitality by the dropping of little compliments on
the subject of Letty into his half-yielded ear. For his way of taking
such things was always a trifle cynical. He believed that people say
habitually twice what they mean, whether in praise or blame; and he did
not feel that his own view of Letty was much affected by what other
people thought of her.

So, at least, he would have said. In reality, he got a good deal of
pleasure out of his _fiancée's_ success. Letty, indeed, was enjoying
herself greatly. This political world, as she had expected, satisfied her
instinct for social importance better than any world she had yet known.
She was determined to get on in it; nor, apparently, was there likely to
be any difficulty in the matter. George's friends thought her a pretty,
lively creature, and showed the usual inclination of the male sex to
linger in her society. She mostly wanted to be informed as to the House
and its ways. It was all so new to her!--she said. But her ignorance was
not insipid; her questions had flavour. There was much talk and laughter;
Letty felt herself the mistress of the table, and her social ambitions
swelled within her.

Suddenly George's attention was recalled to the Maxwell table by the
break-up of the group around it. He saw Lady Maxwell rise and look
round her as though in search of someone. Her eyes fell upon him, and
he involuntarily rose at the same instant to meet the step she made
towards him.

"I must say another word of thanks to you"--she held out her hand. "That
girl and her grandmother were most grateful to you."

"Ah, well!--I must come and make my report. Sunday, I think you said?"

She assented. Then her expression altered:

"When do you speak?"

The question fell out abruptly, and took George by surprise.

"I? On Monday, I believe, if I get my turn. But I fear the British Empire
will go on if I don't!"

She threw a glance of scrutiny at his thin, whimsical face, with its fair
moustache and sunburnt skin.

"I hear you are a good speaker," she said simply. "And you are entirely
with Lord Fontenoy?"

He bowed lightly, his hands on his sides.

"You'll agree our case was well put? The worst of it--"

Then he stopped. He saw that Lady Maxwell had ceased to listen to him.
She turned her head towards the door, and, without even saying good-bye
to him, she hurried away from him towards the further end of the room.

"Maxwell, I see!" said Tressady to himself, with a shrug, as he returned
to his seat. "Not flattering--but rather pretty, all the same!"

He was thinking of the quick change that had remade the face while he was
talking to her--a change as lovely as it was unconscious.

Lord Maxwell, indeed, had just entered the dining-room in search of his
wife, and he and she now left it together, while the rest of the Leven
party gradually dispersed. Letty also announced that she must go home.

"Let me just go back into the House and see what is going on," said
George. "Ten to one I sha'n't be wanted, and I could see you home."

He hurried off, only to return in a minute with the news that the debate
was given up to a succession of superfluous people, and he was free, at
any rate for an hour. Letty, Miss Tulloch, and he accordingly made their
way to Palace Yard. A bright moon shone in their faces as they emerged
into the open air, which was still mild and spring-like, as it had been
all the week.

"I say--send Miss Tulloch home in a cab!" George pleaded in Letty's ear,
"and walk with me a bit. Come and look at the moon over the river. I will
bring you back to the bridge and put you in a cab."

Letty looked astonished and demure. "Aunt Charlotte would be
shocked," she said.

George grew impatient, and Letty, pleased with his impatience, at last
yielded. Tully, the most complaisant of chaperons, was put into a hansom
and despatched.

As the pair reached the entrance of Palace Yard they were overtaken by a
brougham, which drew up an instant in the gateway itself, till it should
find an opening in the traffic outside.

"Look!" said George, pressing Letty's arm.

She looked round hurriedly, and, as the lamps of the gateway shone into
the carriage, she caught a vivid glimpse of the people inside it. Their
faces were turned towards each other as though in intimate
conversation--that was all. The lady's hands were crossed on her knee;
the man held a despatch-box. In a minute they were gone; but both Letty
and George were left with the same impression--the sense of something
exquisite surprised. It had already visited George that evening, only a
few minutes earlier, in connection with the same woman's face.

Letty laughed, rather consciously.

George looked down upon her as he guided her through the gate.

"Some people seem to find it pleasant to be together!" he said, with a
vibration in his voice. "But why did we look?" he added, discontentedly.

"How could we help it, you silly boy?"

They walked to wards the bridge and down the steps, happy in each other,
and freshened by the night breeze. Over the river the moon, hung full and
white, and beneath it everything--the silver tracks on the water, the
blaze of light at Charing Cross Station, the lamps on Westminster Bridge
and in the passing steamers, a train of barges, even the darkness of the
Surrey shore--had a gentle and poetic air. The vast city had, as it were,
veiled her greatness and her tragedy; she offered herself kindly and
protectingly to these two--to their happiness and their youth.

George made his companion wait beside the parapet and look, while he
himself drew in the air with a sort of hunger.

"To think of the hours we spend in this climate," he said, "caged up in
abominable places like the House of Commons!"

The traveller's distaste for the monotony of town and indoor life spoke
in his vehemence. Letty raised her eyebrows.

"I am very glad of my furs, thank you! You seem to forget that it is
February."

"Never mind!--since Monday it has had the feel of April. Did you see my
mother to-day?"

"Yes. She caught me just after luncheon, and we talked for an hour."

"Poor darling! I ought to have been there to protect you. But she vowed
she would have her say about that house."

He looked down upon her, trying to see her expression in the shifting
light. He had gone through a disagreeable little scene with his mother at
breakfast. She had actually lectured him on the rashness of taking the
Brook Street house!--he understanding the whole time that what the odd
performance really meant was, that if he took it he would have a smaller
margin of income wherefrom to supplement her allowance.

"Oh, it was all right!" said Letty, composedly. "She declared we should
get into difficulties at once, that I could have no idea of the value
of money, that you always _had_ been extravagant, that everybody would
be astonished at our doing such a thing, etcetera, etcetera. I
_think_--you don't mind?--I think she cried a little. But she wasn't
really very unhappy."

"What did you say?"

"Well, I suggested that when we were married, we and she should both set
up account-books; and I promised faithfully that if she would let us see
hers, we would let her see ours."

George threw back his head with a gurgle of laughter.

"Well?"

"She was afraid," said Letty, demurely, "that I didn't take things
seriously enough. Then I asked her to come and see my gowns."

"And that, I suppose, appeased her?"

"Not at all. She turned up her nose at everything, by way of punishing
me. You see, she had on a new-Worth--the third since Christmas. My poor
little trousseau rags had no chance."

"H'm!" said George, meditatively. "I wonder how my mamma is going to
manage when we are married," he added, after a pause.

Letty made no reply. She was walking firmly and briskly; her eyes, full
of a sparkling decision, looked straight before her; her little mouth was
close set. Meanwhile through George's mind there passed a number of
fragmentary answers to his own question. His feeling towards his mother
was wholly abnormal; he had no sense of any unseemliness in the
conversation about her which was gradually growing common between himself
and Letty; and he meant to draw strict lines in the future. At the same
time, there was the tie of old habit, and of that uneasy and unwelcome
responsibility with regard to her which had descended upon him at the
time of his father's death. He could not honestly regard himself as an
affectionate son; but the filial relationship, even in its most imperfect
aspect, has a way of imposing itself.

"Ah, well! I daresay we shall pull through," he said, dismissing the
familiar worry with a long breath. "Why, how far we have come!" he added,
looking back at Charing Cross and the Westminster towers. "And how
extraordinarily mild it is! We can't turn back yet, and you'll be tired
if I race you on in this way. Look, Letty, there's a seat! Would you be
afraid--just five minutes?"

Letty looked doubtful.

"It's so absurdly late. George, you _are_ funny! Suppose somebody came by
who knew us?"

He opened his eyes.

"And why not? But see! there isn't a carriage, and hardly a person, in
sight. Just a minute!"

Most unwillingly Letty let herself be persuaded. It seemed to her a
foolish and extravagant thing to do; and there was now no need for either
folly or extravagance. Since her engagement she had dropped a good many
of the small audacities of the social sort she had so freely allowed
herself before it. It was as though, indeed, now that these audacities
had served their purpose, some stronger and perhaps inherited instincts
emerged in her, obscuring the earlier self. George was sometimes
astonished by an ultra-conventional note, of which certainly he had heard
nothing in their first days of intimacy at Malford.

However, she sat down beside him, protesting. But he had no sooner stolen
her hand, than the moonlight showed her a dark, absent look creeping over
his face. And to her amazement he began to talk about the House of
Commons, about the Home Secretary's speech, of all things in the world!
He seemed to be harking back to Mr. Dowson's arguments, to some of the
stories the Home Secretary had told of those wretched people who
apparently enjoy dying of overwork and phosphorus, and white-lead, who
positively will die of them, unless the inspectors are always harrying
them. He still held her hand, but she saw he was not thinking of her;
and a sudden pique rose in her small mind. Generally, she accepted his
love-making very coolly--just as it came, or did not come. But to-night
she asked herself with irritation--for what had he led her into his silly
escapade, but to make love to her? And now here were her fingers slipping
out of his, while he harangued her on things she knew and cared nothing
about, in a voice and manner he might have addressed to anybody!

"Well, I don't understand--I really _don't!_" she interrupted sharply. "I
thought you were all against the Government--I thought you didn't believe
a word they say!"

He laughed.

"The difference between them and us, darling, is only that _they_ think
the world can be mended by Act of Parliament, and _we_ think it can't. Do
what you will, _we_ say the world is, and must be, a wretched hole for
the majority of those that live in it; _they_ suppose they can cure it by
quack meddlings and tyrannies."

He looked straight before him, absorbed, and she was struck with the
harsh melancholy of his face.

What on earth had he kept her here for to talk this kind of talk!

"George, I really _must_ go!" she began, flushing, and drawing her
hand away.

Instantly he turned to her, his look brightening and melting.

"Must you? Well, the world sha'n't be a wretched hole for us, shall it,
darling? We'll make a little nest in it--we'll forget what we can't
help--we'll be happy as long as the fates let us--won't we, Letty?"

His arm slipped round behind her. He caught her hands.

He had recollected himself. Nevertheless Letty was keenly conscious that
it was all most absurd, this sitting on a seat in a public thoroughfare
late at night, and behaving like any 'Arry and 'Arriet.

"Why, of course we shall be happy," she said, rising with decision as she
spoke; "only somehow I don't always understand you, George. I wish I knew
what you were really thinking about."

"_You!_" he said, laughing, and drawing her hand within his arm, as they
turned backwards towards the bridge.

She shook her head doubtfully. Whereupon he awoke fully to the situation,
and during the short remainder of their walk he wooed and flattered her
as usual. But when he had put her safely into a hansom at the corner of
the bridge, and smiled good-bye to her, he turned to walk back to the
House in much sudden flatness of mood. Her little restless egotisms of
mind and manner had chilled him unawares. Had Fontenoy's speech been so
fine, after all? Were politics--was anything--quite worth while? It
seemed to him that all emotions were small, all crises disappointing.




CHAPTER VI


The following Sunday, somewhere towards five o'clock, George rang the
bell of the Maxwells' house in St. James's Square. It was a very fine
house, and George's eye, as he stood waiting, ran over the facade with an
amused, investigating look.

He allowed himself the same expression once or twice in the hall, as one
mute and splendid person relieved him of his coat, and another, equally
mute and equally unsurpassable, waited for him on the stairs, while
across a passage beyond the hall he saw two red-liveried footmen
carrying tea.

"When one is a friend of the people," he pondered as he went upstairs,
"is one limited in horses but not in flunkeys? These things are obscure."

He was ushered first into a stately outer drawing-room, filled with
old French furniture and fine pictures; then the butler lifted a
velvet curtain, pronounced the visitor's name with a voice and
emphasis as perfectly trained as the rest of him, and stood aside for
George to enter.

He found himself on the threshold of a charming room looking west, and
lit by some last beams of February sun. The pale-green walls were covered
with a medley of prints and sketches. A large writing-table, untidily
heaped with papers, stood conspicuous on the blue self-coloured carpet,
which over a great part of the floor was pleasantly void and bare. Flat
earthenware pans, planted with hyacinths and narcissus, stood here and
there, and filled the air with spring scents. Books ran round the lower
walls, or lay piled where-ever there was a space for them; while about
the fire at the further end was gathered a circle of chintz-covered
chairs--chairs of all shapes and sizes, meant for talking. The whole
impression of the pretty, disorderly place, compared with the stately
drawing-room behind it, was one of intimity and freedom; the room made a
friend of you as you entered.

Half a dozen people were sitting with Lady Maxwell when Tressady was
announced. She rose to meet him with great cordiality, introduced him to
little Lady Leven, an elfish creature in a cloud of fair hair, and with a
pleasant "You know all the rest," offered him a chair beside herself and
the tea-table.

"The rest" were Frank Leven, Edward Watton, Bayle, the Foreign Office
private secretary who had been staying at Malford House at the time of
Tressady's election, and Bennett, the "small, dark man" whom George had
pointed out to Letty in the House as a Labour member, and one of the
Maxwells' particular friends.

"Well?" said Lady Maxwell, turning to her new visitor as she handed him
some tea, "were you as much taken with the grandmother as the grandmother
was taken with you? She told me she had never seen a 'more haffable
gentleman, nor one as she'd a been more willin to ha done for'!"

George laughed. "I see," he said, "that my report has been anticipated."

"Yes--I have been there. I have found a 'case' in them indeed--alack! The
granny--I am afraid she is an unseemly old woman--and the elder girl both
work for the Jew son-in-law on the first floor--homework of the most
abominable kind--that girl will be dead in a year if it goes on."

George was rapidly conscious of two contradictory impressions--one of
pleasure, one of annoyance--pleasure in her tall, slim presence, her
white hand, and all the other flashing points of a beauty not to be
denied--and irritation that she should have talked "shop" to him with her
first breath. Could one never escape this altruistic chatter?

But he was not left to grapple with it alone, for Lady Leven looked
up quickly.

"Mr. Watton, will you please take Lady Maxwell's tea away if she mentions
the word 'case' again? We gave her fair warning."

Lady Maxwell hastily clasped both her hands round her tea-cup.

"Betty, we have discussed the opera for at least twenty minutes."

"Yes--at peril of our lives!" said Lady Leven. "I never talked so fast
before. One felt as though one _must_ say everything one had to say about
Melba and the de Reszkes, all in one breath--before one's poor little
subject was torn from one--one would never have such a chance again."

Lady Maxwell laughed, but coloured too.

"Am I such a nuisance?" she said, dropping her hands on her knee with a
little sigh. Then she turned to Tressady.

"But Lady Leven really makes it out worse than it is. We haven't even
_approached_ a Factory Act all the afternoon."

Lady Leven sprang forward in her chair. "Because! _because_, my dear, we
simply declined to let you. We made a league--didn't we, Mr.
Bennett?--even you joined it."

Bennett smiled.

"Lady Maxwell overworks herself--we all know that," he said, his look, at
once kind, honest, and perennially embarrassed, passing from Lady Leven
to his hostess.

"Oh, don't sympathise, for Heaven's sake!" cried Betty. "Wage war upon
her--it's our only hope."

"Don't you think Sunday at least ought to be frivolous?" said Tressady,
smiling, to Lady Maxwell.

"Well, personally, I like to talk about what interests me on Sunday as
well as on other days," she said with a frank simplicity; "but I know I
ought to be kept in order--I become a terrible bore."

Frank Leven roused himself from the sofa on which he had languidly
subsided.

"Bores?" he said indignantly, "we're all bores. We all have been bores
since people began to think about what they're pleased to call 'social
work.' Why should I love my neighbour?--I'd much rather hate him. I
generally do."

"Doesn't it all depend," said Tressady, "on whether he happens to be able
to make it disagreeable for you in return?"

"That's just it," said Betty Leven, eagerly. "I agree with Frank--it's
all so stupid, this 'loving' everybody. It makes one positively hot. We
sit under a clergyman, Frank and I, who talks of nothing every Sunday but
love--_love_--like that, long-drawn-out--how our politics should be
'love,' and our shopping should be 'love'--till we long simply to
bastinado somebody. I want to have a little real nice cruelty--something
sharp and interesting. I should like to stick pins into my maid, only
unfortunately, as she has more than once pointed out to me, it would be
so much easier for her to stick them into me!"

"You want the time of Miss Austen's novels back again," said young Bayle,
stooping to her, with his measured and agreeable smile--"before even the
clergy had a mission."

"Ah! but it would be no good," said Lady Leven, sighing, "if _she_
were there!"

She threw out her small hand towards her hostess, and everybody laughed.

Up to the moment of the laugh, Lady Maxwell had been lying back in her
chair listening, the beautiful mouth absently merry, and the eyes
speaking--Tressady thought--of quite other things, of some hidden
converse of her own, going on in the brain behind the eyes. A certain
prophetess-air seemed natural to her. Nevertheless, that first impression
of her he had carried away from the hospital scene was being somehow
blurred and broken up.

She joined in the laugh against herself; then, with a little nod towards
her assailant, she said to Edward Watton, who was sitting on her right
hand. "_You're_ not taken in, I know."

"Oh, if you mean that I go in for 'cases' and 'causes' too," cried Lady
Leven, interrupting, "of course I do--I can't be left alone. I must dance
as my generation pipes."

"Which means," said her husband, drily, "that she went for two days
filling soda-water bottles the week before last, and a day's shirt-making
last week. From the first, I was told that she would probably return to
me with an eye knocked out, she being totally inexperienced and absurdly
rash. As to the second, to judge from the description she gave me of the
den she had been sitting in when she came home, and the headache she had
next day, I still expect typhoid. The fortnight isn't up till Wednesday."

There was a shout of mingled laughter and inquiry.

"How did you do it?--and whom did you bribe?" said Bayle to Lady Leven.

"I didn't bribe anybody," she said indignantly. "You don't understand. My
friends introduced me."

Then, drawn out by him, she plunged into a lively account of her workshop
experiences, interrupted every now and then by the sarcastic comments of
her husband and the amusement of the two younger men who had brought
their chairs close to her. Betty Leven ranked high among the lively
chatterboxes of her day and set.

Lady Maxwell, however, had not laughed at Frank Leven's speech. Rather,
as he spoke of his wife's experiences, her face had clouded, as though
the blight of some too familiar image, some sad ever-present vision, had
descended upon her.

Beimett also did not laugh. He watched the Levens indulgently for a few
minutes, then insensibly he, Lady Maxwell, Edward Watton, and Tressady
drew together into a circle of their own.

"Do you gather that Lord Fontenoy's speech on Friday has been much
taken up in the country?" said Bennett, bending forward and addressing
Lady Maxwell. Tressady, who was observing him, noticed that his dress
was precisely the "Sunday best" of the respectable workman, and was,
moreover, reminded by the expression of the eyes and brow that Bennett
was said to have been a well-known "local preacher" in his
north-country youth.

Lady Maxwell smiled, and pointed to Tressady.

"Here," she said, "is Lord Fontenoy's first-lieutenant."

Bennett looked at George.

"I should be glad," he said, "to know what Sir George thinks?"

"Why, certainly--we think it has been very warmly taken up," said George,
promptly--"to judge from the newspapers, the letters that have been
pouring in, and the petitions that seem to be preparing."

Lady Maxwell's eyes gleamed. She looked at Bennett silently a moment,
then she said:

"Isn't it amazing to you how strong an impossible case can be made to
look?"

"It is inevitable," said Bennett, with a little shrug, "quite
inevitable. These social experiments of ours are so young--there is
always a strong case to be made out against any of them, and there will
be for years to come."

"Well and good," said George; "then we cavillers are inevitable too.
Don't attack us--praise us rather; by your own confession, we are as much
a part of the game as you are."

Bennett smiled slightly, but did not in reality quite follow. Lady
Maxwell bent forward.

"Do you know whether Lord Fontenoy has any _personal_ knowledge of the
trades he was speaking about?" she said, in her rich eager voice; "that
is what I want so much to find out."

George was nettled by both the question and the manner.

"I regard Fontenoy as a very competent person," he said drily. "I imagine
he did his best to inform himself. But there was not much need; the
persons concerned--whom you think you are protecting--were so very eager
to inform us!"

Lady Maxwell flushed.

"And you think that settles it--the eagerness of the cheap life to be
allowed to maim and waste itself? But again and again English law has
stepped in to prevent it--and again and again everybody has been
thankful."

"It is all a question of balance, of course," said George. "Must a
few unwise people be allowed to kill themselves--or thousands lose
their liberty?"

His blue eyes scanned her beautiful impetuous face with a certain cool
hardness. Internally he was more and more in revolt against a "monstrous
regiment of women" and the influence upon the most complex economic
problems of such a personality as that before him.

But his word "liberty" pricked her. The look of feeling passed away. Her
eyes kindled as sharply and drily as his own.

"Freedom?--let me quote you Cromwell! 'Every sectary saith, "O give me
liberty!" But give it him, and to the best of his power he will yield it
to no one else.' So with your careless or brutal employer--give him
liberty, and no one else shall get it."

"Only by metaphor--not legally," said George, stubbornly. "So long as men
are not slaves by law there is always a chance for freedom. Any way _we_
stand for freedom--as an end, not a means. It is not the business of the
State to make people happy--not at all!--at least that is our view--but
it _is_ the business of the State to keep them free."

"Ah!" said Bennett, with a long breath, "there you've hit the nail--the
whole difference between you and us."

George nodded. Lady Maxwell did not speak immediately. But George was
conscious that he was being observed, closely considered. Their glances
crossed an instant, in antagonism, certainly, if not in dislike.

"How long is it since you came home from India?" she asked him suddenly.

"About six months."

"And you were, I think, a long time abroad?"

"Nearly four years. Does that make you think I have not had much time to
get up the things I am going to vote about?" said the young man,
laughing. "I don't know! On the broadest issues of politics, one makes up
one's mind as well in Asia as in Europe--better perhaps."

"On the Empire, I suppose--and England's place in the world? That's a
side which--I know--I remember much too little. You think our life
depends on a governing class--and that _we_ and democracy are weakening
that class too much?"

"That's about it. And for democracy it is all right. But _you_--you are
the traitors!"

His thrust, however, did not rouse her to any corresponding rhetoric. She
smiled merely, and began to question him about his travels. She did it
with great deftness, so that after an answer or two both his temper and
manner insensibly softened, and he found himself talking with ease and
success. His mixed personality revealed itself--his capacity for certain
veiled enthusiasms, his respect for power, for knowledge, his pessimist
beliefs as to the average lot of men.

Bennett, who listened easily, was glad to help her make her guest talk.
Frank Leven left the group near the sofa and came to listen, too.
Tressady was more and more spurred, carried out of himself. Lady
Maxwell's fine eyes and stately ways were humanised after all by a quick
responsiveness, which for most people, however critical, made
conversation with her draw like a magnet. Her intelligence, too, was
competent, left the mere feminine behind in these connections that
Tressady offered her, no less than in others. She had not lived in the
world of high politics for nearly five years for nothing; so that
unconsciously, and indeed quite against his will, Tressady found himself
talking to her, after a while, as though she had been a man and an equal,
while at the same time taking more pains than he would ever have taken
for a man.

"Well, you _have_ seen a lot!" said Frank Leven at last, with a rather
envious sigh.

Bennett's modest face suddenly reddened.

"If only Sir George will use his eyes to as good purpose at home--" he
said involuntarily, then stopped. Few men were more unready and awkward
in conversation; yet when roused he was one of the best platform speakers
of his day.

George laughed.

"One sees best what appeals to one, I am afraid," he said, only to be
instantly conscious that he had made a rather stupid admission in face of
the enemy.

Lady Maxwell's lip twitched; he saw the flash of some quick thought cross
her face. But she said nothing.

Only when he got up to go, she bade him notice that she was always at
home on Sundays, and would be glad that he should remember it. He made a
rather cold and perfunctory reply. Inwardly he said to himself, "Why does
she say nothing of Letty, whom she knows--and of our marriage--if she
wants to make friends?"

Nevertheless, he left the house with the feeling of one who has passed
an hour not of the common sort. He had done himself justice, made his
mark. And as for her--in spite of his flashes of dislike he carried
away a strong impression of something passionate and vivid that clung
to the memory. Or was it merely eyes and pose, that astonishingly
beautiful colour, and touch of classic dignity which she got--so the
world said--from some remote strain of Italian blood? Most probably!
All the same, she had fewer of the ordinary womanly arts than he had
imagined. How easy it would have been to send that message to Letty she
had not sent! He thought simply that for a clever woman she might have
been more adroit.

       *       *       *       *       *

The door had no sooner closed behind Tressady than Betty Leven, with
a quick look after him, bent across to her hostess, and said in a
stage whisper:

"Who? Post me up, please."

"One of Fontenoy's gang," said her husband, before Lady Maxwell could
answer. "A new member, and as sharp as needles. He's been exactly to all
the places where I want to go, Betty, and you won't let me."

He glanced at his wife with a certain sharpness. For Tressady had spoken
in passing of nilghai-shooting in the Himalayas, and the remark had
brought the flush of an habitual discontent to the young man's cheek.

Betty merely held out a white child's wrist.

"Button my glove, please, and don't talk. I have got ever so many
questions to ask Marcella."

Leven applied himself rather sulkily to his task while Betty pursued her
inquiries.

"Isn't he going to marry Letty Sewell?"

"Yes," said Lady Maxwell, opening her eyes rather wide. "Do you
know her?"

"Why, my dear, she's Mr. Watton's cousin--isn't she?" said Betty, turning
towards that young man. "I saw her once at your mother's."

"Certainly she is my cousin," said that young man, smiling, "and she is
going to marry Tressady at Easter. So much I can vouch for, though I
don't know her so well, perhaps, as the rest of my family do."

"Oh!" said Betty, drily, releasing her husband and crossing her small
hands across her knee. "That means--Miss Sewell isn't one of Mr. Watton's
_favourite_ cousins. You don't mind talking about your cousins, do you?
You may blacken the character of all mine. Is she nice?"

"Who--Letty? Why, of course she is nice," said Edward Watton, laughing.
"All young ladies are."

"Oh goodness!" said Betty, shaking her halo of gold hair. "Commend me to
cousins for letting one down easy."

"Too bad, Lady Leven!" said Watton, getting up to escape. "Why not ask
Bayle? He knows all things. Let me hand you over to him. He will sing you
all my cousin's charms."

"Delighted!" said Bayle as he, too, rose--"only unfortunately I ought at
this moment to be at Wimbledon."

He had the air of a typical official, well dressed, suave, and infinitely
self-possessed, as he held out his hand--deprecatingly--to Lady Leven.

"Oh! you private secretaries!" said Betty, pouting and turning
away from him.

"Don't abolish us," he said, pleading. "We must live."

"_Je n'en vois pas la nécessité!_" said Betty, over her shoulder.

"Betty, what a babe you are!" cried her husband, as Bayle, Watton, and
Bennett all disappeared together.

"Not at all!" cried Betty. "I wanted to get some truth out of somebody.
For, of course, the real truth is that this Miss Sewell is--"

"Is what?" said Leven, lost in admiration all the time, as Lady Maxwell
saw, of his wife's dainty grace and rose-leaf colour.

"Well--a--_minx!_" said Betty, with innocent slowness,
opening her blue eyes very wide; "a mischievous--rather
pretty--hard-hearted--flirting--little minx!"

"Really, Betty!" cried Lady Maxwell. "Where have you seen her?"

"Oh, I saw her last year several times at the Wattons' and other places,"
said Betty, composedly. "And so did you too, please, madam. I remember
very well one day Mrs. Watton brought her into the Winterbournes' when
you and I were there, and she chattered a great deal."

"Oh yes!--I had forgotten."

"Well, my dear, you'll soon have to remember her! so you needn't talk
in that lofty tone. For they're going to be married at Easter, and if
you want to make friends with the young man, you'll have to realise
the wife!"

"Married at Easter? How do you know?"

"In the first place Mr. Watton said so, in the next there are such
things as newspapers. But of course you didn't notice such trifles, you
never do."

"Betty, you're very cross with me to-day!" Lady Maxwell looked up at her
friend with a little pleading air.

"Oh no! only for your good. I know you're thinking of nothing in the
world but how to make that man take a reasonable view of Maxwell's Bill.
And I want to impress upon you that _he's_ probably thinking a great deal
more about getting married than about Factory Bills. You see, _your_
getting married was a kind of accident. But other people are different.
And oh, dear, you do know so little about them when they don't live hi
four pair backs! There, don't defend yourself--you sha'n't!"

And, stooping, Betty stifled her friend's possible protest by
kissing her.

"Now then, come along, Frank--you've got your speech to write--and I've
got to copy it out. Don't swear! you know you're going to have two whole
days' golfing next week. Good-bye, Marcella! My love to Aldous--and tell
him not to be so late next time I come to tea. Good-bye!"

And off she swept, pausing, however, on the landing to open the door
again and put in an eager face.

"Oh! and, by the way, the young man has a mother--Frank reminded me. His
womenkind don't seem to be his strong point--but as she doesn't earn
_even_ four-and-sixpence a week--very sadly the contrary--I won't tell
you any more now, or you'll forget. Next time!"

When Marcella Maxwell was at last left alone, she began to pace slowly up
and down the large bare room, as it was very much her wont to do.

She was thinking of George Tressady, and of the personality his talk had
seemed to reveal.

"His heart is all in _power_--in what he takes for magnificence." she
said to herself. "He talks as if he had no humanity, and did not care a
rap for anybody. But it is a pose--I _think_ it is a pose. He is
interesting--he will develop. One would like--to show him things."

After another pensive turn or two she stopped beside a photograph that
stood upon her writing-table. It was a photograph of her husband--a tall,
smoothfaced man, with pleasant eyes, features of no particular emphasis,
and the free carriage of the country-bred Englishman. As she looked at it
her face relaxed unconsciously, inevitably; under the stimulus of some
habitual and secret joy. It was for his sake, for his sake only that she
was still thinking of George Tressady, still pondering the young man's
character and remarks.

So much at least was true--no other member of Fontenoy's party had as
yet given her even the chance of arguing with him. Once or twice in
society she had tried to approach Fontenoy himself, to get somehow into
touch with him. But she had made no way. Lord Fontenoy had simply turned
his square-jawed face and red-rimmed eyes upon her with a stupid
irresponsive air, which Marcella knew perfectly well to be a mask, while
it protected him none the less effectively for that against both her
eloquence and her charm. The other members of the party were young
aristocrats, either of the ultra-exclusive or of the sporting type. She
had made her attempts here and there among them, but with no more
success. And once or twice, when she had pushed her attack to close
quarters, she had been suddenly conscious of an underlying insolence in
her opponent--a quick glance of bold or sensual eyes which seemed to
relegate the mere woman to her place.

But this young Tressady, for all his narrowness and bitterness, was of a
different stamp--or she thought so.

She began to pace up and down again, lost in reverie, till after a few
minutes she came slowly to a stop before a long Louis Quinze
mirror--her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes half consciously
studying what she saw.

Her own beauty invariably gave her pleasure--though very seldom for the
reasons that would have affected other women. She felt instinctively that
it made life easier for her than it could otherwise have been; that it
provided her with a natural and profitable "opening" in any game she
might wish to play; and that even among the workmen, unionist leaders,
and officials of the East End it had helped her again and again to score
the points that she wanted to make. She was accustomed to be looked at,
to be the centre, to feel things yielding before her; and without
thinking it out, she knew perfectly well what it was she gained by this
"fair seeming show" of eye and lip and form. Somehow it made nothing seem
impossible to her; it gave her a dazzling self-confidence.

The handle of the door turned. She looked round with a smiling start,
and waited.

A tall man in a grey suit came in, crossed the room quickly, and put his
arms round her. She leant back against his shoulder, putting up one hand
to touch his cheek caressingly.

"Why, how late you are! Betty left reproaches for you."

"I had a walk with Dowson. Then two or three people caught me on the
way back--Rashdell among others." (Lord Rashdell was Foreign
Secretary.) "There are some interesting telegrams from Paris--I copied
them out for you."

The country happened to be at the moment in the midst of one of its
periodical difficulties with France. There had been a good deal of
diplomatic friction, and a certain amount of anxiety at the Foreign
Office. Marcella lit the silver kettle again and made her man some fresh
tea, while he told her the news, and they discussed the various points of
the telegrams he had copied for her, with a comrade's freedom and
vivacity. Then she said:

"Well, I have had an interesting time too! That young Tressady has
been to tea."

"Oh! has he? They say there is a lot of stuff in him, and he may do us a
great deal of mischief. How did you find him?"

"Oh, very clever, very limited--and a mass of prejudices," she said,
laughing. "I never saw an odder mixture of knowledge and ignorance."

"What? Knowledge of India and the East?--that kind of thing?"

She nodded.

"Knowledge of everything except the subject he has come home to fight
about! Do you know, Aldous--"

She paused. She was sitting on a stool beside him, her arm upon his knee.

"What do I know?" he said, his hand seeking hers.

"Well, I can't help feeling that that man might live and learn. He isn't
a mere obstructive block--like the rest."

Maxwell laughed.

"Then Fontenoy is not as shrewd as usual. They say he regards him as
their best recruit."

"Never mind. I rather wish you'd try to make friends with him."

Maxwell, however, helped himself to cake and made no response. On the two
or three occasions on which he had met George Tressady, he had been
conscious, if the truth were told, of a certain vague antipathy to the
young man.

Marcella pondered.

"No," she said, "no--I don't think after all he's your sort. Suppose _I_
see what can be done!"

And she got up with her flashing smile--half love, half fun--and
crossed the room to summon her little boy, Hallin, for his evening
play. Maxwell looked after her, not heeding at all what she was saying,
heeding only herself, her voice, the atmosphere of charm and life she
carried with her.




CHAPTER VII


Marcella Maxwell, however, had not been easily wooed by the man who now
filled all the horizon of her life. At the time when Aldous Raeburn, as
he then was--the grandson and heir of old Lord Maxwell--came across her
first she was a handsome, undeveloped girl, of a type not uncommon in our
modern world, belonging by birth to the country-squire class, and by the
chances of a few years of student life in London to the youth that takes
nothing on authority, and puts to fierce question whatever it finds
already on its path--Governments, Churches, the powers of family and
wealth--that takes, moreover, its social pity for the only standard, and
spends that pity only on one sort and type of existence. She accepted
Raeburn, then the best _parti_ in the county, without understanding or
loving him, simply that she might use his power and wealth for certain
social ends to which the crude philanthropy of her youth had pledged
itself. Naturally, they were no sooner engaged than Raeburn found himself
launched upon a long wrestle with the girl who had thus--in the
selfishness of her passionate idealist youth--opened her relation to him
with a deliberate affront to the heart offered her. The engagement had
stormy passages, and was for a time wholly broken off. Aldous was made
bitterly jealous, or miserably unhappy. Marcella left the old house in
the neighbourhood of the Maxwell property, where her lover had first seen
and courted her. She plunged into London life, and into nursing, that
common outlet for the woman at war with herself or society. She suffered
and struggled, and once or twice she came very near to throwing away all
her chances of happiness. But in the end, Maxwell tamed her; Maxwell
recovered her. The rise of love in the unruly, impetuous creature, when
the rise came, was like the sudden growth of some great forest flower. It
spread with transforming beauty over the whole nature, till at last the
girl who had once looked upon him as the mere tool of her own moral
ambitions threw herself upon Maxwell's heart with a self-abandoning
passion and penitence, which her developed powers and her adorable beauty
made a veritable intoxication.

And Maxwell was worthy that she should do this thing. When he and
Marcella first met, he was a man of thirty, very able, very reserved, and
often painfully diffident as to his own powers and future. He was the
only young representative of a famous stock, and had grown up from his
childhood under the shadow of great sorrows and heavy responsibilities.
The stuff of the poet and the thinker lay hidden behind his shy manners;
and he loved Marcella Boyce with all the delicacy, all the idealising
respect, that passion generates in natures so strong and so highly
tempered. At the same time, he had little buoyancy or gaiety; he had a
belief in his class, and a constitutional dislike of change, which were
always fighting in his mind with the energies of moral debate; and he
acquiesced very easily--perhaps indifferently--in many outward
conventions and prejudices.

The crisis through which Marcella put him developed and matured the man.
To the influences of love, moreover, were added the influences of
friendship--of such a friendship as our modern time but seldom rears to
perfection. In Raeburn's college days, a man of rare and delicate powers
had possessed himself of Raeburn's tenacious affection, and had
thenceforward played the leader to Raeburn's strength, physical and
moral, availing himself freely, wherever his own failed him, of the
powers and capacities of his friend. For he himself bore in him from his
youth up the seeds of physical failure and early death. It was partly the
marvellous struggle in him of soul with body that subdued to him the
homage of the stronger man. And it was clearly his influence that broke
up and fired Raeburn's slower and more distrustful temper, informing an
inbred Toryism, a natural passion for tradition, and the England of
tradition with that "repining restlessness" which is the best spur of
noble living.

Hallin was a lecturer and an economist; a man who lived in the perception
of the great paradox that in our modern world political power has gone to
the workman, while yet socially and intellectually he remains little less
weak, or starved, or subject than before. When he died he left to Raeburn
a legacy of feelings and ideas, all largely concerned with this contrast
between the huge and growing "tyranny" of the working class and the
individual helplessness or bareness of the working man. And it was these
feelings and ideas which from the beginning made a link between Raeburn
and the young revolts and compassions of Marcella Boyce. They were at one
in their love of Edward Hallin; and after Hallin's death, in their sore
and tender wish to make his thoughts tell upon the English world.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Maxwells had now been married

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