← catalogue

Sir George Tressady — Volume II

by Mrs. Humphry Ward · English · Gutenberg #9634 · 526,875 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Sir George Tressady — Volume II
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Sir George Tressady — Volume II

Author: Mrs. Humphry Ward


        
Release date: January 1, 2006 [eBook #9634]
                Most recently updated: January 2, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9634

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


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




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











SIR GEORGE TRESSADY, VOLUME II

IN TWO VOLUMES

BY

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

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







VOLUME II.




PART II



CHAPTER XIII


On a hot morning at the end of June, some four weeks after the Castle
Luton visit, George Tressady walked from Brook Street to Warwick Square,
that he might obtain his mother's signature to a document connected with
the Shapetsky negotiations, and go on from there to the House of Commons.

She was not in the drawing-room, and George amused himself during his
minutes of waiting by inspecting the various new photographs of the
Fullerton family that were generally to be found on her table. What a
characteristic table it was, littered with notes and bills, with patterns
from every London draper, with fashion-books and ladies' journals
innumerable! And what a characteristic room, with its tortured
decorations and crowded furniture, and the flattered portraits of Lady
Tressady, in every caprice of costume, which covered the walls! George
looked round it all with an habitual distaste; yet not without the secret
admission that his own drawing-room was very like it.

His mother might, he feared, have a scene in preparation for him.

For Letty, under cover of some lame excuse or other, had persisted in
putting off the visit which Lady Tressady had intended to pay them at
Ferth during the Whitsuntide recess, and since their return to town
there had been no meeting whatever between the two ladies. George,
indeed, had seen his mother two or three times. But even he had just let
ten days pass without visiting her. He supposed he should find her in a
mood of angry complaint; nor could he deny that there would be some
grounds for it.

"Good morning, George," said a sharp voice, which startled him as he was
replacing a photograph of the latest Fullerton baby. "I thought you had
forgotten your way here by now."

"Why, mother, I am very sorry," he said, as he kissed her. "But I
have really been terribly busy, what with two Committees and this
important debate."

"Oh! don't make excuses, pray. And of course--for Letty--you won't even
attempt it. I wouldn't if I were you."

Lady Tressady settled herself on a chair with her back to the light, and
straightened the ribbons on her dress with hasty fingers. Something in
her voice struck George. He looked at her closely.

"Is there anything wrong, mother? You don't look very well."

Lady Tressady got up hurriedly, and began to move about the room, picking
up a letter here, straightening a picture there. George felt a sudden
prick of alarm. Were there some new revelations in store for him? But
before he could speak she interrupted him.

"I should be very well if it weren't for this heat," she said pettishly.
"Do put that photograph down, George!--you do fidget so! Haven't you got
any news for me--anything to amuse me? Oh! those horrid papers!--I see.
Well! they'll wait a little. By the way, the 'Morning Post' says that
young scamp, Lord Ancoats, has gone abroad. I suppose that girl was
bought off."

She sat down again in a shady corner, fanning herself vigorously.

"I am afraid I can't tell you any secrets," said George, smiling, "for I
don't know any. But it looks as though Mrs. Allison and Maxwell between
them had somehow found a way out."

"How's the mother?"

"You see, she has gone abroad, too--to Bad Wildheim. In fact, Lord
Ancoats has taken her."

"That's the place for heart, isn't it?" said his mother, abruptly.
"There's a man there that cures everybody."

"I believe so," said George. "May we come to business, mother? I have
brought these papers for you to sign, and I must get to the House in
good time."

Lady Tressady seemed to take no notice. She got up again, restlessly, and
walked to the window.

"How do you like my dress, George? Now, don't imagine anything absurd!
Justine made it, and it was quite cheap."

George could not help smiling--all the more that he was conscious of
relief. She would not be asking him to admire her dress if there were
fresh debts to confess to him.

"It makes you look wonderfully young," he said, turning a critical eye,
first upon the elegant gown of some soft pinky stuff in which his mother
had arrayed herself, then upon the subtly rouged and powdered face above
it. "You are a marvellous person, mother! All the same, I think the heat
must have been getting hold of you, for your eyes are tired. Don't racket
too much!"

He spoke with his usual careless kindness, laying a hand upon her arm.

Lady Tressady drew herself away, and, turning her back upon him, looked
out of the window.

"Have you seen any more of the Maxwells?" she said, over her shoulders.

George gave a slight involuntary start. Then it occurred to him that his
mother was making conversation in an odd way.

"Once or twice," he said, reluctantly, in reply. "They were at the
Ardaghs' the other night, of course."

"Oh! you were there?"--Lady Tressady's voice was sharp again. "Well, of
course. Letty went as your wife, and you're a member of Parliament. Lady
Ardagh knows _me_ quite well--but I don't count now; she used to be glad
enough to ask me."

"It was a great crush, and very hot," said George, not knowing
what to say.

Lady Tressady frowned as she looked out of the window.

"Well!--and Lady Maxwell--is she as absurd as ever?"

"That depends upon one's point of view," said George, smiling. "She
seemed as convinced as ever."

"Who sent Mrs. Allison to that place? Barham, I suppose. He always sends
his patients there. They say he's in league with the hotel-keepers."

George stared. What was the matter with her? What made her throw out
these jerky sentences with this short, hurried breath.

Suddenly Lady Tressady turned.

"George!"

"Yes, mother." He stepped nearer to her. She caught his sleeve.

"George "--there was something like a sob in her voice--"you were quite
right. I am ill. There, don't talk about it. The doctors are all fools.
And if you tell Letty anything about it, I'll never forgive you."

George put his arm round her, but was not, in truth, much disturbed. Lady
Tressady's repertory, alas! had many _rôles_. He had known her play that
of the invalid at least as effectively as any other.

"You are just overdone with London and the heat," he said. "I saw it at
once. You ought to go away."

She looked up in his face.

"You don't believe it?" she said.

Then she seemed to stagger. He saw a terrible drawn look in her face,
and, putting out all his strength, he held her, and helped her to a sofa.

"Mother!" he exclaimed, kneeling beside her, "what is the matter?"

Voice and tone were those of another man, and Lady Tressady quailed
under the change. She pointed to a small bag on a table near her. He
opened it, and she took out a box, from which she swallowed something.
Gradually breath and colour returned, and she began to move restlessly.

"That was nothing," she said, as though to herself--"nothing--and it
yielded at once. Well, George, I knew you thought me a humbug!"

Her eyes glanced at him with a kind of miserable triumph. He looked down
upon her, still kneeling, horror-struck against his will. After a life of
acting, was this the truth--this terror, which spoke in every movement,
and in some strange way had seized upon and infected himself?

He urgently asked her to be frank with him. And with a sob she poured
herself out. It was the tragic, familiar story that every household
knows. Grave symptoms, suddenly observed--the hurried visit to a
specialist--his verdict and his warnings.

"Of course, he said at first I ought to give up everything and go
abroad--to this very same place--Bad-what-do-you-call-it? But I told him
straight out I couldn't and wouldn't do anything of the sort. I am just
eaten up with engagements. And as to staying at home and lying-up, that's
nonsense--I should die of that in a fortnight. So I told him to give me
something to take, and that was all I could do. And in the end he quite
came round--they always do if you take your own line--and said I had
much better do what suited me, and take care. Besides, what do any of
them know? They all confess they're just fumbling about. Now, surgery,
of course--that's different. Battye"--Battye was Lady Tressady's ordinary
medical adviser--"doesn't believe all the other man said. I knew he
wouldn't. And as for making an invalid of me, he sees, of course, that it
would kill me at once. There, my dear George, don't make too much of it.
I think I was a fool to tell you."

And Lady Tressady struggled to a sitting position, looking at her son
with a certain hostility. The frown on her white face showed that she was
already angry with him for his emotion--this rare emotion, that she had
never yet been able to rouse in him.

He could only implore her to be guided by her doctor--to rest, to give up
at least some of the mill-round of her London life, if she would not go
abroad. Lady Tressady listened to him with increasing obstinacy and
excitability.

"I tell you I know best!" she said, passionately, at last. "Don't go on
like this--it worries me. Now, look here--"

She turned upon him with emphasis.

"Promise me not to tell Letty a word of this. Nobody shall know--she
least of all. I shall do just as usual. In fact, I expect a very gay
season. Three 'drums' this afternoon and a dinner-party--it doesn't
look as though I were quite forgotten yet, though Letty does think me
an old fogey!"

She smiled at him with a ghastly mixture of defiance and conceit. The old
age in her pinched face, fighting with the rouged cheeks and the gaiety
of her fanciful dress, was pitiful.

"Promise," she said. "Not a word--to her!"

George promised, in much distress. While he was speaking she had a slight
return of pain, and was obliged to submit to lie down again.

"At least," he urged, "don't go out to-day. Give yourself a rest. Shall I
go back, and ask Letty to come round to tea?"

Lady Tressady made a face like a spoilt child.

"I don't think she'll come," she said. "Of course, I know from the first
she took an ungodly dislike to me. Though, if it hadn't been for
me--Well, never mind! Yes, you can ask her, George--do! I'll wait and see
if she comes. If she comes, perhaps I'll stay in. It would amuse me to
hear what she has been doing. I'll behave quite nicely--there!"

And, taking up her fan, Lady Tressady lightly tapped her son's hand with
it in her most characteristic manner.

He rose, seeing from the clock that he should only just have time to
drive quickly back to Letty if he was to be at the House in time for an
appointment with a constituent, which had been arranged for one o'clock.

"I will send Justine to you as I go out," he said, taking up his hat,
"and I shall hear of you from Letty this evening."

Lady Tressady said nothing. Her eyes, bright with some inner
excitement, watched him as he looked for his stick. Suddenly she said,
"George! kiss me!"

Her tone was unsteady. Infinitely touched and bewildered, the young man
approached her, and, kneeling down again beside her, took her in his
arms. He felt a quick sobbing breath pass through her; then she pushed
him lightly away, and, putting up the slim, pink-nailed hand of which she
was so proud, she patted him on the cheek.

"There--go along! I don't like that coat of yours, you know. I told you
so the other day. If your figure weren't so good, you'd positively look
badly dressed in it. You should try another man."

Tressady hailed a hansom outside, and drove back to Brook Street. On the
way his eyes saw little of the crowded streets. So far, he had had no
personal experience of death. His father had died suddenly while he was
at Oxford, and he had lost no other near relation or friend. Strange!
this grave, sudden sense that all was changed, that his careless,
half-contemptuous affection for his mother could never again be what it
had been. Supposing, indeed, her story was all true! But in the case of a
character like Lady Tressady's, there are for long, recurrent,
involuntary scepticisms on the part of the bystander. It seems
impossible, unfitting, to grant to such persons _le beau rôle_ they
claim. It outrages a certain ideal instinct, even, to be asked to believe
that they too can yield, in their measure, precisely the same tragic
stuff as the hero or the saint.

Letty was at home, just about to share her lunch with Harding Watton, who
had dropped in. Hearing her husband's voice, she came out to the
stairhead to speak to him.

But after a minute or two George dashed down again to his study, that he
might write a hurried note to a middle-aged cousin of his mother's,
asking her to go round to Warwick Square early in the afternoon, and
making excuses for Letty, who was "very much engaged."

For Letty had met his request with a smiling disdain. Why, she was simply
"crowded up" with engagements of all sorts and kinds!

"Mother is really unwell," said George, standing with his hands on his
sides, looking down upon her. He was fuming with irritation and hurry,
and had to put a force on himself to speak persuasively.

"My dear old boy!"--she rose on tiptoe and twisted his moustache for
him--"don't we know all about your mother's ailments by this time? I
suppose she wants to give me a scolding, or to hear about the Ardaghs, or
to tell me all about the smart parties _she_ has been to--or something of
the sort. No, really, it's quite impossible--this afternoon. I know I
must go and see her some time--of course I will."

She said this with the air of someone making a great concession. It was,
indeed, her first formal condonement of the offence offered her just
before the Castle Luton visit.

George attempted a little more argument and entreaty, but in vain. Letty
was rather puzzled by his urgency, but quite obdurate. And as he ran down
the stairs, he heard her laugh in the drawing-room mingled with Harding
Watton's. No doubt they were making merry over the "discipline" which
Letty found it necessary to apply to her mother-in-law.

In the House of Commons the afternoon was once more given up to the
adjourned debate on the second reading of the Maxwell Bill. The House was
full, and showing itself to advantage. On the whole, the animation and
competence of the speeches reflected the general rise in combative energy
and the wide kindling of social passions which the Bill had so far
brought about, both in and out of Parliament. Those who figured as the
defenders of industries harassed beyond bearing by the Socialist meddlers
spoke with more fire, with more semblance, at any rate, of putting their
hearts into it than any men of their kind had been able to attain since
the "giant" days of the first Factory debates. Those, on the other hand,
who were urging the House to a yet sterner vigilance in protecting the
worker--even the grown man--from his own helplessness and need, who
believed that law spells freedom, and that the experience of half a
century was wholly on their side--these friends of a strong cause were
also at their best, on their mettle. Owing to the widespread flow of a
great reaction, the fight had become a representative contest between two
liberties--a true battle of ideas.

Yet George, sitting below the Gangway beside his leader, his eyes staring
at the ceiling, and his hands in his pockets, listened to it all in much
languor and revolt. He himself had made his speech on the third day of
the debate. It had cost him endless labour, only to seem to him in the
end--by contrast with the vast majority of speeches made in the course of
the debate, even those by men clearly inferior to himself in mind and
training--to be a hollow and hypocritical performance. What did he
really think and believe? What did he really desire? He vowed to himself
once more, as he had vowed at Ferth, that his mind was a chaos, without
convictions, either intellectual or moral; that he had begun what he was
not able to finish; and that he was doomed to make a failure of his
parliamentary career, as he was already making a failure of coal-owning
and a failure--

He curbed something bitter and springing that haunted his most inmost
mind. But his effort could not prevent his dwelling angrily for a minute
on the thought of Letty laughing with Harding Watton--laughing because he
had asked her a small kindness, and she had most unkindly refused it.

Yet she _must_ help him with his poor mother. How softened were all his
thoughts about that difficult and troublesome lady! As it happened, he
had a good deal of desultory medical knowledge, for the problems and
perils of the body had always attracted his pessimist sense. Yet it did
not help him much at this juncture. At one moment he said to himself,
"eighteen months--she will live eighteen months," and at another, "Battye
was probably right; Barham took an unnecessarily gloomy view--she may
quite well last as long as the rest of us."

       *       *       *       *       *

Suddenly he was startled by a movement beside him.

"The honourable member has totally misunderstood me," cried Fontenoy,
springing to his feet and looking eagerly towards the Speaker.

The member who was speaking on the Government side smiled, put on his
hat, and sat down. Fontenoy flung out a few stinging sentences, was hotly
cheered both by his own supporters and from a certain area of the Liberal
benches, and sat down again triumphant, having scored an excellent point.

George turned round to his companion.

"Good!" he said, with emphasis. "That rubbed it in!"

But when the man opposite was once more on his legs, labouring to undo
the impression which had been made, George found himself wondering
whether, after all, the point had been so good, and why he had been so
quick to praise. _She_ would have said, of course, that it was a point
scored against common-sense, against humanity. He began to fancy the
play of her scornful eyes, the eloquence of her white hand moving and
quivering as she spoke.

How long was it--one hurried month only--since he had walked with her
along the river at Castle Luton? While the crowded House about him was
again listening with attention to the speech which had just brought the
protesting Fontenoy to his legs; while his leader was fidgeting and
muttering beside him; while to his left the crowd of members round the
door was constantly melting, constantly reassembling, Tressady's mind
withdrew itself from its surroundings, saw nothing, heard nothing, but
the scenes of a far-off London and a figure that moved among them.

How often had he been with her since Castle Luton? Once or twice a week,
certainly, either at St. James's Square or in the East End, in spite of
Parliament, and Fontenoy, and his many engagements as Letty's husband.
Strange phenomenon--that little _salon_ of hers in the far East! For it
was practically a _salon_, though it existed for purposes the Hôtel
Rambouillet knew nothing of. He found himself one of many there. And,
like all _salons_, it had an inner circle. Charles Naseby, Edward Watton,
Lady Madeleine Penley, the Levens--some or all of these were generally to
be found in Lady Maxwell's neighbourhood, rendering homage or help in one
way or another. It was touching to see that girl, Lady Madeleine, looking
at the docker or the shirtmaker, with her restless greenish eyes, as
though she realised for the first time what hideous bond it is--the one
true commonalty--that crushes the human family together!

Well!--and what had he seen? Nothing, certainly, of which he had not had
ample information before. Under the fresh spur of the talk that occupied
the Maxwell circle he had made one or two rounds through some dismal
regions in Whitechapel, Mile End, and Hackney, where some of the worst of
the home industries to which, at last, after long hesitation on the part
of successive Governments, Maxwell's Bill was intended to put an end,
crowded every house and yard. He saw some of it in the company of a lady
rent-collector, an old friend of the Maxwells, who had charge of several
tenement blocks where the trouser and vest trade was largely carried on;
and he welcomed the chance of one or two walks in quest of law-breaking
workshops with a young inspector, who could not say enough in praise of
the Bill. But if it had been only a question of fact, George would have
felt when the rounds were done merely an added respect for Fontenoy,
perhaps even for his own party as a whole. Not a point raised by his
guides but had been abundantly discussed and realised--on paper, at any
rate--by Fontenoy and his friends. The young inspector, himself a hot
partisan, and knowing with whom he had to deal, would have liked to
convict his companion of sheer and simple ignorance; but, on the
contrary, Tressady was not to be caught napping. As far as the trade
details and statistics of this gruesome slopwork of East London went, he
knew all that could be shown him.

Nevertheless, cool and impassive as his manner was throughout, the
experience in the main did mean the exchange of a personal for a paper
and hearsay knowledge. When, indeed, had he, or Fontenoy, or anyone else
ever denied that the life of the poor was an odious and miserable
struggle, a scandal to gods and men? What then? Did they make the world
and its iron conditions? And yet this long succession of hot and smelling
dens, this series of pale, stooping figures, toiling hour after hour, at
fever pace, in these stifling backyards, while the June sun shone
outside, reminding one of English meadows and the ripple of English
grass; these panting, dishevelled women, slaving beside their husbands
and brothers, amid the rattle of the machines and the steam of the
pressers' irons, with the sick or the dying, perhaps, in the bed beside
them, and their blanched children at their feet--sights of this sort,
thus translated from the commonplace of reports and newspapers into a
poignant, unsavoury truth, had at least this effect--they vastly
quickened the personal melancholy of the spectator, they raised and drove
home a number of piercing questions which, probably, George Tressady
would never have raised, and would have lived happily without raising, if
it had not been for a woman, and a woman's charm.

For that woman's _solutions_ remained as doubtful to him as ever. He
would go back to that strange little house where she kept her strange
court, meet her eager eyes, and be roused at once to battle. How they had
argued! He knew that she had less hope than ever of persuading him even
to modify his view of the points at issue between the Government and his
own group. She could not hope for a moment that any act of his would be
likely to stand between Maxwell and defeat. He had not talked of his
adventures to Fontenoy--would rather, indeed, that Fontenoy knew nothing
of them. But he and she knew that Fontenoy, so far, had little to fear
from them.

And yet she had not turned from him. To her personal mood, to her wifely
affection even, he must appear more plainly than ever as the callous and
selfish citizen, ready and glad to take his own ease while his brethren
perished. He had been sceptical and sarcastic; he had declined to accept
her evidence; he had shown a persistent preference for the drier and more
brutal estimate of things. Yet she had never parted from him without
gentleness, without a look in her beautiful eyes that had often
tormented his curiosity. What did it mean? Pity? Or some unspoken comment
of a personal kind she could not persuade her womanly reticence to put
into words?

Or, rather: had she some distant inkling of the real truth--that he was
beginning to hate his own convictions--to feel that to be right with
Fontenoy was nothing, but to be wrong with her would be delight?

What absurdity! With a strong effort, he pulled himself
together--steadied his rushing pulse. It was like someone waking at night
in a nervous terror, and feeling the pressure of some iron dilemma, from
which he cannot free himself--cold vacancy and want on the one side,
calamity on the other.

For that cool power of judgment in his own case which he had always
possessed did not fail him now. He saw everything nakedly and coldly. His
marriage was not three months old, but no spectator could have discussed
its results more frankly than he was now prepared to discuss them with
himself. It was monstrous, no doubt. He felt his whole position to be as
ugly as it was abnormal. Who could feel any sympathy with it or him? He
himself had been throughout the architect of his own misfortune. Had he
not rushed upon his marriage with less care--relatively to the weight of
the human interest in such a matter--than an animal shows when it mates?

Letty's personal idiosyncrasies even--her way of entering a room, her
mean little devices for attracting social notice, the stubborn
extravagance of her dress and personal habits, her manner to her
servants, her sharp voice as she retailed some scrap of slanderous
gossip--her husband had by now ceased to be blind or deaf to any of
them. Indeed, his senses in relation to many things she said and did were
far more irritable at this moment--possibly far less just--than a
stranger's would have been. Often and often he would try to recall to
himself the old sense of charm, of piquancy. In vain. It was all gone--he
could only miserably wonder at the past. Was it that he knew now what
charm might mean, and what divinity may breathe around a woman!

       *       *       *       *       *

"I say, where are you off to?"

Tressady looked up with a start as Fontenoy rose beside him.

"Good opportunity for dinner, I think," said Fontenoy, with a motion of
the head towards the man who had just caught the Speaker's eye. "Are you
coming? I should like a word with you."

George followed him into the Lobby. As the swing-door closed behind him,
they plunged into a whirlpool of talk and movement. All the approaches to
the House were full of folk; everybody was either giving news or getting
it. For the excitement of a coming crisis was in the air. This was
Friday, and the division on the second reading was expected on the
following Monday.

"What a crowd, and what a temperature!" said Fontenoy. "Come on to the
Terrace a moment."

They made their way into the air, and as they walked up and down Fontenoy
talked in his hoarse, hurried voice of the latest aspect of affairs. The
Government would get their second reading, of course that had never been
really doubtful; though Fontenoy was certain that the normal majority
would be a good deal reduced. But all the hopes of the heterogeneous
coalition which had been slowly forming throughout the spring hung upon
the Committee stage, and Fontenoy's mind was now full of the closest
calculations as to the voting on particular amendments.

For him the Bill fell into three parts. The first part, which was mainly
confined to small amendments and extensions of former Acts, would be
sharply criticised, but would probably pass without much change. The
second part contained the famous clause by which it became penal to
practise certain trades, such as tailoring, boot-finishing, and
shirt-making, in a man's or woman's own home--in the same place, that is
to say, as the worker uses for eating and sleeping. This clause, which
represented the climax of a long series of restrictions upon the right of
a man to stitch even his own life away, still more upon his right to
force his children or bribe his neighbour to a like waste of the nation's
force, was by now stirring the industrial mind of England far and wide.

And not the mind of England only. Ireland and Scotland, town and country,
talked of it, seethed with it. The new law, if it passed, was to be
tried, indeed, at first, in London only. But every provincial town and
every country district knew that, if it succeeded, there was not a corner
of the land that would not ultimately feel the yoke, or the deliverance,
of it Every workman's club, every trade-union meeting, every mechanics'
institute was ringing with it. Organised labour, dragged down at every
point--in London, at any rate--by the competition of the starving and
struggling crew of home-workers, clamoured for the Bill. The starving and
struggling crew themselves were partly voiceless, partly bewildered; now
drawn by the eloquence of their trade-union fellows to shout for the
revolution that threatened them, now surging tumultuously against it.

On this vital clause, in Fontenoy's belief, the Government would go down.
But if, by amazing good-fortune and good generalship, they should get
through with it, then the fight would but rage the more fiercely round
the last two sections of the Bill.

The third section dealt with the hours of labour in the new workshops
that were to be. For the first time it became directly penal for a man,
as well as a woman, to work more than the accepted factory-day of ten and
a half hours, with a few exceptions and exemptions in the matter of
overtime. On this clause, if it were ever reached, the Socialist vote,
were it given solidly for the Government, might, no doubt, pull them
through. "But if we have any luck--damn it! they won't get the chance!"
Fontenoy would say, with that grim, sudden reddening which revealed from
moment to moment the feverish tension of the man.

In the last section of the Bill the Government, having made its
revolution, looked round for a class on which to lay the burden of
carrying it into action, and found it in the landlords. The landlords
were to be the policemen of the new Act. To every owner of every tenement
or other house in London the Bill said: _You_ are responsible. If, after
a certain date, you allow certain trades to be carried on within your
walls at all, even by the single man or the single woman working in their
own room, penalty and punishment shall follow.

Of this clause in the Bill Fontenoy could never speak with calmness. One
might see his heart thumping in his breast as he denounced it. At bottom
it was to him the last and vilest step in a long and slanderous campaign
against the class to which he belonged, against property,--against the
existing social order. He fell upon the subject to-night _à propos_ of a
Socialist letter in the morning papers; and George, who was mostly
conscious at the moment of a sick fatigue with Fontenoy and Fontenoy's
arguments, had to bear it as best he might. Presently he interrupted:

"One assumption you make I should like to contest. You imagine, I think,
that if they carry the prohibition and the hours clauses we shall be able
to whip up a still fiercer attack on the 'landlords' clause. Now, that
isn't my view."

Fontenoy turned upon him, startled.

"Why isn't it your view?" he said abruptly.

"Because there are always waverers who will accept a _fait accompli_; and
you know how opposition has a trick of cooling towards the end of a Bill.
Maxwell has carried his main point, they will say; this is a question of
machinery. Besides, many of those Liberals who will be with us on the
main point don't love the landlords. No! don't flatter yourself that, if
we lose the main engagement, there will be any Prussians to bring up. The
thing will be done."

"Well, thank God!" grumbled Fontenoy, "we don't mean to lose the main
engagement. But if one of _our_ men were to argue in that way, I should
know what to say to him."

George made no reply.

They walked on in silence, the summer twilight falling softly over the
river and the Hospital, over the Terrace with its groups, and the
towering pile of buildings beside them.

Presently Fontenoy said, in another voice:

"I have really never had the courage to talk to you of the matter,
Tressady, but didn't you see something of that lad Ancoats before he went
off abroad?"

"Yes, I saw him several times, first at the club; then he came and dined
with me here one night."

"And did he confide in you?"

"More or less," said George, smiling rather queerly at the recollection.

Fontenoy made a sound between a growl and a sigh.

"Really, it's rather too much to have to think out that young
man's affairs as well as one's own. And the situation is so
extraordinary!--Maxwell and I have to be in constant consultation. I went
to see him in his room in the House of Lords the other night, and met a
man coming out, who stopped, and stared as though he were shot. Luckily I
knew him, and could say a word to him, or there would have been all sorts
of cock-and-bull stories abroad."

"Well, and what are you and Maxwell doing?"

"Trying to get at the young woman. One can't buy her off, of course.
Ancoats is his own master, and could outbid us. But Maxwell has found a
brother--a decent sort of fellow--a country solicitor. And there is a
Ritualist curate, a Father somebody,"--Fontenoy raised his
shoulders,--"who seems to have an intermittent hold on the girl. When
she has fits of virtue she goes to confess to him. Maxwell has got hold
of _him_."

"And meanwhile Ancoats is at Bad Wildheim?"

"Ancoats is at Bad Wildheim, and behaving himself, as I hear from his
poor mother." Fontenoy sighed. "But the boy was frightened, of course,
when they went abroad. Now she is getting better, and one can't tell--"

"No, one can't tell," said George.

"I wish I knew what the thing really _meant_," said Fontenoy, presently,
in a tone of perplexed reverie. "What do you think? Is it a passion--?"

"Or a pose?"

George pondered.

"H'm," he said at last--"more of a pose, I think, than a passion. Ancoats
always seems to me the _jeune premier_ in his own play. He sees his life
in scenes, and plays them according to all the rules."

"Intolerable!" said Fontenoy, in exasperation. "And at least he might
refrain from dragging a girl into it! We weren't saints in my day, but we
weren't in the habit of choosing well-brought-up maidens of twenty in our
own set for our confidantes. You know, I suppose, what broke up the party
at Castle Luton?"

"Ancoats told me nothing. I have heard some gossip from Harding Watton,"
said George, unwillingly. It was one of his strongest characteristics,
this fastidious and even haughty dislike of chatter about other people's
private affairs, a dislike which, in the present case, had been
strengthened by his growing antipathy to Harding.

"How should he know?" said Fontenoy, angrily. He was glad enough to use
Watton as a political tool, but had never yet admitted him to the
smallest social intimacy.

Yet with Tressady he felt no difficulty in talking over these private
affairs; and he did, in fact, report the whole story--that same story
with which Marcella had startled Betty Leven on the night in question:
how Ancoats on this Sunday evening had decoyed this handsome,
impressionable girl, to whom throughout the winter he had been paying
decided and even ostentatious court, into a _tête-à-tête_--had poured out
to her frantic confessions of his attachment to the theatrical lady--a
woman he could never marry, whom his mother could never meet, but with
whom, nevertheless, come what might, he was determined to live and die.
She--Madeleine--was his friend, his good angel. Would she go to his
mother and break it to her? Would she understand, and forgive him? There
must be no opposition, or he would shoot himself. And so on, till the
poor girl, worn out with excitement and grief, tottered into Mrs.
Allison's room more dead than alive.

But at that point Fontenoy stopped abruptly.

George agreed that the story was almost incredible, and added the inward
and natural comment of the public-school man--that if people will keep
their boys at home, and defraud them of the kickings that are their due,
they may look out for something unwholesome in the finished product.
Then, aloud, he said:

"I should imagine that Ancoats was acting through the greater part of
that. He had said to himself that such a scene would be effective--and
would be new."

"Good heavens!--why, that makes it ten thousand times more abominable
than before!"

"I daresay," said George, coolly. "But it also makes the future, perhaps,
a little more hopeful--throws some light on the passion or pose
alternative. My impression is, that if we can only find an effective exit
for Ancoats,--a last act that he would consider worthy of him,--he will
bow himself out of the business willingly enough."

Fontenoy smiled rather gloomily, and the two walked on in silence.

Once or twice, as they paced the Terrace, George glanced sidelong at his
leader. A corner of Fontenoy's nightly letter to Mrs. Allison was, he
saw, sticking out of the great man's coat-pocket. Every night he wrote a
crowded sheet upon his knee, under the shelter of a Blue Book, and on one
or two nights George's quick eyes had not been able to escape from the
pencilled address on the envelope to which it was ultimately consigned.
The sheet was written with the regularity and devotion of a Prime
Minister reporting to the Sovereign.

Well! it was all very touching and very remarkable. But George had some
sympathy with Ancoats. To be virtually saddled with a stepfather, with
whom your minutest affairs are confidentially discussed, and yet to have
it said by all the world that your poor mother is too unselfish and too
devoted to her son to marry again--the situation is not without its
pricks. And that Ancoats was acutely conscious of them George had good
reason to know.

"I say, Tressady, will you pair till eleven?" cried a man, swinging
bareheaded along the Terrace with his hat in his hand. "I want an hour or
two off badly, and there will be no big guns on till eleven or so."

George exchanged a word or two with Fontenoy, then stood still, and
thought a moment. A sudden animation flushed into his face. Why not?

"All right!" he said; "till eleven."

Then he and Fontenoy went back to dine. As they mounted the dark
staircase leading from the Terrace another man caught Tressady by the
arm.

"The strike notices are out," he said. "I have just had a wire. Everyone
leaves work to-night."

George shrugged his shoulders. He had been expecting the news at any
moment, and was glad that the long shilly-shallying on both sides was at
last over.

"Good luck to them!" he said. "I'm glad. The fight had to come."

"Oh! we shall be in the middle of arbitration before a fortnight's up.
The men won't stand."

George shook his head. He himself believed that the struggle would last
on through the autumn.

"Well, to be sure, there's Burrows," said his informant, himself a large
coal-owner in the Ferth district; "if Burrows keeps sober, and if
somebody doesn't buy him, Burrows will do his worst."

"That we always knew," said George, laughing, and passed on. He had but
just time to catch his train.

He walked across to the Underground station, and by the time he reached
it he had clean forgotten his pits and the strike, though as he passed
the post-office in the House a sheaf of letters and telegrams had been
put into his hands. Rather, he was full of a boy's eagerness and
exultation. He had never supposed he could be let off to-night, till the
offer of Dudley's pair tempted him. And now, in half an hour he would be
in that queer Mile End room, watching her--quarrelling with her.

A little later, however, as he was sitting quietly in the train, quick
composite thoughts of Letty, of his miners, and his money difficulties
began to clutch at him again. Perhaps, now that the strike was a reality,
it might even be a help to him and a bridle to his wife. Preposterous,
what she was doing and planning at Perth! His face flushed and hardened
as he thought of their many wrangles during the past fortnight, her
constant drag upon his purse, his own weakness, the annoyance and
contempt that made him yield rather than argue.

What was that fellow, Harding Watton, doing in the house at all hours,
and beguiling Letty, by his collector's airs, into a hundred foolish
wants and whims? And that brute Cathedine! Was it decent, was it
bearable, that a bride of three months should take no more notice of her
husband's wishes and dislikes in such a matter than Letty had shown with
regard to her growing friendship with that disreputable person? It seemed
to George that he called most afternoons. Letty laughed, excused herself,
or abused her visitor as soon as he had departed; but the rebuff which
George's pride would not let him ask of her directly, while yet his
whole manner demanded it, was never given.

He sat solitary in his brilliantly lit carriage, staring at the
advertisements opposite, his long chin thrust forward, his head, with its
fair curls, thrown moodily back. And all the time his mind was working
with an appalling clearness. This cold light, in which he was beginning
to see his wife and all she did--it was already a tragedy.

What was he flying to, what was he in search of--there in the East End?
His whole being flung the answer. A little sympathy, a little heart, a
little tenderness and delicacy of soul!--nothing else. He had once taken
it for granted that every woman possessed them in some degree. Or, was it
only since he had found them in this unexampled fulness and wealth that
he had begun to thirst for them in this way? He made himself face the
question. "One needn't lie to oneself!"

At Aldgate, as he was making his way out of the station, he stumbled upon
Edward Watton.

"Hullo! You bound for No. 20, too?"

"No; there is no function to-night. Lady Maxwell is at a meeting. It has
grown rather suddenly from small beginnings, and two days ago they made
her promise to speak. I came down because I am afraid of a row. Things
are beginning to look ugly down here, and I don't think she has much idea
of it. Will you come?"

"Of course."

Watton looked at him with an amused and friendly eye.

It was another instance of her power--that she had been able to bind
even this young enemy to her chariot-wheels. He hoped Letty had the sense
to approve! As a matter of fact, Watton had never, by his own choice,
become well acquainted with his cousin Letty, and had always secretly
marvelled at Tressady's sudden marriage.




CHAPTER XIV


The two men were soon on the top of the Mile End Road tramcar, on their
way eastward. It was a hot, dull evening. The setting sun behind them was
already swallowed up in mist, and the heavy air held down and made
palpable all the unsavoury odours of street and shop. Before them
stretched the wide, interminable road which was once the highway from the
great city to Colchester and East Anglia. A broad and comely thoroughfare
on the whole, save that from end to end it has now the dyed and patched
look that an old village street inevitably puts on when it has been
swallowed up by the bricks and mortar of an overtaking town.

Tressady looked round him in a reverie, interested in the place and the
streets because _she_ cared for them, and had struck one of her roots
here. Strange medley everywhere--in this main street, at all events--of
old and new! Here were the Trinity almshouses, with their Jacobean gables
and their low, spreading quadrangle behind the fine ironwork that
shelters them from the street--a poetic fragment from the days of Wren
and Dryden, sore threatened now by an ever-advancing London, hungry for
ground and space. Here was a vast mission-hall, there a still vaster
brewery; on the right, the quiet entrance to the oldworld quiet of
Stepney-Green; and to the left a huge flame-ringed gin-palace, with shops
on either side, hung to the roof with carpets, or brooms, or umbrellas,
plastered with advertisements, and blazing with gas. While in the street
between streamed the ever-moving crowd of East London folk, jostling,
chattering, loafing, doing their business or their pleasure, and made
perpetually interesting, partly by their frank preoccupation with the
simplest realities of life: with eating, drinking, earning, marrying,
child-rearing; still more, perhaps, by the constant presence among them
of that "leisured class" which, alike at the bottom and the top of
things, has time to be gay, curious, and witty.

As he rolled along, watching the scene, Tressady thought to himself, as
he had often thought before, that the East End, in many of its aspects,
is a very decentish sort of place, about which many people talk much
nonsense. He made the remark, carelessly, to Watton.

Watton shrugged his shoulders, and pointed silently to the entrances,
right and left, of two side-streets, the typical streets of the East End:
long lines of low houses,--two storeys always, or two storeys and a
basement,--all of the same yellowish brick, all begrimed by the same
smoke, every door-knocker of the same pattern, every window-blind hung in
the same way, and the same corner "public" on either side, flaming in the
hazy distance.

Watton hardly put his comment into words; but Tressady, who knew him
well, understood, and nodded over his cigarette. Watton meant, of course,
to suggest the old commonplace of the mean and dull monotony that weighs
like a nightmare upon this vast East London and its human hive, which
hums and toils, drones and feeds, by night and day, in these numberless
featureless boxes of wood and stone, on this flat, interminable earth
that stretches eastward to Essex marshes and southward to the river, and
bears yellow brick and cemeteries for corn. Well! Tressady knew that the
thought of this monotony, and of the thousands under its yoke, was to
Watton a constant sting and oppression; he knew, too, or guessed, the
religious effects it produced in him. For Watton was a religious man, and
the action of the dream within showed itself in him and all he did. But
why should everyone make a grief of East London? He was in the mood again
to-night to feel it a kind of impertinence, this endless, peering anxiety
about a world you never planned and cannot mend. Whose duty is it to cry
for the moon?

"Better get down here, I think," said Watton, signalling to the
tram-conductor, "and find out whether they have really gone, or not."

They stopped, half-way down the Mile End Road, before a piece of wall
with a door in it. A trim maiden of fifteen in a spotless cotton frock
and white apron opened to them.

Inside was a small flagged courtyard and the old-fashioned house that
Marcella Maxwell, a year before,--some time after their first lodging had
been given up,--had rescued from demolition and the builder, to make an
East End home out of it. Somewhere about 1750 some City tradesman had
built it among fields, and taken his rest there; while somewhat later, in
a time of Evangelical revival, a pious widow had thrown out a low room to
one side for class-meetings. In this room Marietta now held her
gatherings, and both Tressady and Watton knew it well.

The little handmaid bubbled over with willing talk. Oh, yes, there was a
meeting up Manx Road, and her Ladyship had gone with Lord Naseby, and
Lady Madeleine, and Mr. Everard, the inspector, and, she thought, one or
two besides. She expected the ladies back about ten, and they were to
stay the night.

"An they do say, sir," she said eagerly, looking up at Watton, whom she
knew, "as there'll be a lot o' rough people at the meetin."

"Oh! I daresay," said Watton. "Well, we're going up, too, to look
after her."

As they walked on they talked over the general situation in the district,
and Watton explained what he knew of this particular meeting. In the
first place, he repeated, he could not see that Lady Maxwell understood
as yet the sort of opposition that the Bill was rousing, especially in
these East End districts. The middle-class and parliamentary resistance
she had always appreciated; but the sort of rage that might be awakened
among a degraded class of workers by proposals that seemed to threaten
their immediate means of living, he believed she had not yet realised, in
anything like its full measure and degree. And he feared that this
meeting might be a disagreeable experience.

For it was the direct fruit of an agitation that, as Tressady knew, was
in particular Fontenoy's agitation. The Free Workers' League, which had
called upon the trade-unionist of Mile End to summon the meeting, and to
hear therein what both sides had to say, was, in fact, Fontenoy's
creation. It had succeeded especially in organising the women
home-workers of Mile End and Poplar. Two or three lady-speakers employed
by the League had been active to the point of frenzy in denouncing the
Bill and shrieking "Liberty!" in the frightened ear of Mile End. Watton
could not find a good word for any of them--was sure that what mostly
attracted them was the notoriety of the position, involving, as it did,
a sort of personal antagonism to Lady Maxwell, who had, so to speak,
made Mile End her own. And to be Lady Maxwell's enemy was, Watton
opined, the next best thing, from the point of view of advertisement, to
being her friend.

"Excellent women, I daresay," said Tressady, laughing--"talking excellent
sense. But, tell me, what is this about Naseby--why Naseby?--on all these
occasions?"

"Why not, indeed?" said Watton. "Ah! you don't know? It seems to be
Naseby that's going to get the egg out of the hat for us."

And he plunged eagerly into the description of certain schemes wherewith
Naseby had lately astonished the Maxwell circle. Tressady listened,
languidly at first, then with a kind of jealous annoyance that
scandalised himself. How well he could understand the attraction of such
things for her quick mind! Life was made too easy for these "golden
lads." People attributed too much importance to their fancies.

Naseby, in fact,--but so much George already knew,--had been for some
months now the comrade and helper of both the Maxwells. His friends still
supposed him to be merely the agreeable and fashionable idler. In
reality, Naseby for some years past had been spending all the varied
leisure that his commission in the Life Guards allowed him upon the work
of a social and economic student. He had joined the staff of a well-known
sociologist, who was at the time engaged in an inquiry into certain
typical East London trades. The inquiry had made a noise, and the
evidence collected under it had already been largely used in the debates
on the Maxwell Bill. Tressady, for instance, had much of it by heart,
although he never knew, until he became a haunter of Lady Maxwell's
circle, that Naseby had played any part in the gathering of it.

At the same time, as George had soon observed, Naseby was no blind
follower of the Maxwells. In truth, under his young gaiety and coolness
he had the temper of the student, who was more in love with his problem
itself than with any suggested solution of it. As he had told Lady
Betty, he had "no opinions"--would himself rather leave the sweated
trades alone, and trust to much slower and less violent things than
law-making. All this the Maxwells knew perfectly, and liked and trusted
him none the less.

Now, however, it seemed there was a new development. If the Bill passed,
Naseby had a plan. He was already a rich man, independently of the
marquisate to come. His grandmother had left him a large preliminary
fortune, and through his friends and connections besides he seemed to
command as much money as he desired. And of this money, supposing the
Bill passed, he proposed to make original and startling use. He had
worked out the idea of a syndicate furnished with, say, a quarter of a
million of money, which should come down upon a given district of the
East End, map it out, buy up all the existing businesses in its typical
trade, and start a system of new workshops proportioned to the
population, supplying it with work just as the Board schools supply it
with education. The new scheme was to have a profit-sharing element: the
workers were to be represented on the syndicate, and every nerve was to
be strained to secure the best business management. The existing
middlemen would be either liberally bought out, or absorbed into the new
machine. It was by no means certain that they would show it any strong
resistance.

Tressady made a number of unfriendly comments on the scheme as Watton
detailed it. A bit of amateur economics, which would only help the Bill
to ruin a few more people than would otherwise have gone down!

"Ah! well," said Watton, "if this thing passes there are bound to be
experiments, and Naseby means to be in 'em. So do I, only I haven't got a
quarter of a million. Here's our road! We're late, of course--the
meeting's begun. I say, just look at this!"

For Manx Road, as they turned into it, was already held by another big
meeting of its own. The room in the Board school which crossed the end of
the street must be full, and this crowd represented, apparently, those
who had been turned away.

As the two friends pushed their way through, Tressady's quick eye
recognised in the throng a number of familiar types. Well-to-do
"pressers" and machinists, factory-girls of different sorts, hundreds of
sallow women, representing the home-workers of Mile End, Bow, and
Stepney--poor souls bowed by toil and maternity, whose marred fingers
labour day and night to clothe the Colonies and the army; their husbands
and brothers, too, English slop-tailors for the most part, of the humbler
sort--the short side-street was packed with them. It was an anxious,
sensitive crowd, Tressady thought, as he elbowed his passage through it.
A small thing might inflame it; and he saw a number of rough lads on the
skirts of it.

Jews, too, there were in plenty. For the stress of this Bill had brought
Jew and Gentile together in a new comradeship that amazed the East End.
Here were groups representing the thrifty, hard-working London Jew of
the second generation,--small masters for the most part, pale with the
confinement and "drive" of the workshop,--men who are expelling and
conquering the Gentile East Ender, because their inherited passion for
business is not neutralised by any of the common English passions for
spending--above all by the passion for drink. Here, too, were men of a
far lower type and grade--the waste and refuse of the vast industrial
mill. Tressady knew a good many of them by sight--sullen, quick-eyed
folk, who buy their "greeners" at the docks, and work them day and night
at any time of pressure; whose workshops are still flaring at two
o'clock in the morning, and alive again by the winter dawn; who fight
and flout the law by a hundred arts, and yet, brutal and shifty as many
of them are, have a curious way of winning the Gentile inspector's
sympathy, even while he fines and harasses them, so clearly are they and
their "hands" alike the victims of a huge world-struggle that does but
toss them on its surge.

These gentry, however, were hard hit by more than one clause of the
Maxwell Bill, and they were here to-night to protest, as they had been
already protesting at many meetings, large and small, all over the East
End. And they had their slaves with them,--ragged, hollow-eyed creatures,
newly arrived from Russian Poland, Austria, or Romania, and ready to
shout or howl in Yiddish as they were told,--men whose strange faces and
eyes under their matted shocks of black or reddish hair suggested every
here and there the typical history and tragic destiny of the race which,
in other parts of the crowd, was seen under its softer and more
cosmopolitan aspects.

As the two men neared the door of the school, where the press was
densest, they were recognised as probably belonging to the Maxwell party,
and found themselves a good deal jeered and hustled, and could hardly
make any way at all. However, a friendly policeman came to their aid.
They were passed into a lobby, and at last, with much elbowing and
pushing, found themselves inside the schoolroom.

So crowded was the place and so steaming the atmosphere, that it was
some minutes before Tressady could make out what was going on. Then he
saw that Naseby was speaking--Naseby, looking remarkably handsome and
well curled, and much at his ease, besides, in the production of a string
of Laodicean comments on the Bill, his own workshop scheme, and the
general prospects of East End labour. He described the scheme, but in
such a way as rather to damn it than praise it; and as for the Bill
itself, which he had undertaken to compare with former Factory Bills,
when he sat down he left it, indeed, in a parlous case--a poor, limping,
doubtful thing, quite as likely to ruin the East End as to do it a hand's
turn of good.

Just as the speaker was coming to his peroration Tressady suddenly caught
sight of a delicate upraised profile on the platform, behind Naseby. The
repressed smile on it set him smiling, too.

"What on earth do they make Naseby speak for!" said Watton, indignantly.
"Idiocy! He spoils everything he touches. Let him give the money, and
other people do the talking. You can see the people here don't know what
to make of him in the least. Look at their faces.--Who's he talking to?"

"Lady Madeleine, I think," said Tressady. "What amazing red hair that
girl has! and what queer, scared eyes! It is like an animal--one wants to
stroke her."

"Well, Naseby strokes her," said Watton, laughing. "Look at her; she
brightens up directly he comes near."

Tressady thought of the tale Fontenoy had just told him, and wondered.
Consolation seemed to come easy to maidens of quality.

Meanwhile various trade-unionists--sturdy, capable men, in black
coats--were moving and seconding resolutions; flinging resentful
comments, too, at Naseby whenever occasion offered. Tressady heard very
little of what they had to say. His eyes and thoughts were busy with the
beautiful figure to the left of the chair. Its dignity and charm worked
upon him like a spell--infused a kind of restless happiness.

When he woke from his trance of watching, it was to turn upon Watton
with impatience. How long was this thing going on? The British workman
spoke with deplorable fluency. Couldn't they push their way through to
the platform?

Watton looked at the crowd, and shrugged his shoulders.

"Not yet--I say! who's this they've put up. Come, my dear fellow, that
looks like the real thing!"

Tressady turned, and saw an old man, a Jew, with a long greyish beard,
coming slowly to the front of the platform. His eyes were black and deep,
sunk under white brows; he was decently but poorly dressed; and he began
to speak with a slight German accent, in an even, melancholy voice,
rather under-pitched, which soon provoked the meeting. He was
vociferously invited to speak up or sit down; and at the first
interruption he stopped timorously, and looked towards the Chair.

An elderly, grey-haired woman was presiding--no doubt to mark the
immense importance of the Bill for the women of the East End. She came
forward at the man's appeal.

"My friends," she said quietly, "you let this man speak, and don't you be
hard on him. He's got a sad story to tell you, and he won't be long about
it. You give him his chance. Some of you shall have yours soon."

Up. The speaker was the paid secretary of one of the women's unions; but
she had been a tailoress for years, and had known a tragic life. Once, at
a meeting where some flippant speaker had compared the reality and
frequency of "starvation" in London to the reality and frequency of the
sea serpent, Tressady had seen her get up and, with a sudden passion,
describe the death of her own daughter from hardship and want, with the
tears running down her cheeks. Her appeal to the justice of the meeting
succeeded, and the old man was allowed to go on. It soon appeared that he
had been put up by one of the tailoring unions to denounce the long hours
worked in some of the Whitechapel and Spitalfields workshops. His H facts
were appalling. But he put them badly, with a dull, stumbling voice, and
he got no hold on the meeting at all till suddenly he stepped forward,
paused,--his miserable face working, his head turning from if side to
side,--and finally said, with a sharp change of note:

"And now, if you please, I will tell you how it was about Isaac--my
brother Isaac. It was Mr. Jacobs "--he looked round, and pointed to the
tradeunion secretary who had been speaking before him--"Mr. Jacobs it
was that put it in my mind to come here and tell you about Isaac. For the
way Isaac died was like this. He and I were born in Spitalfields; he
wasn't one of your greeners--he was a reg'lar good worker, first-rate
general coat-hand, same as me. But he got with a hard master. And last
winter season but one there came a rush. And Isaac must be working six
days a week--and he must be working fourteen hours a day--and, more'n
that, he must be doing his bastes overtime, two hours one time, and an
hour or so, perhaps, another; anyway, they made it up to half a
day--eight hours and more in the week. _You_ know how they reckon it."

He stopped, grinning feebly. The trade-unionists about the platform
shouted or groaned in response. The masters round the door, with their
"greeners," stood silent.

"And about Wednesday in the third week," he went on, "he come to the
master, and he says--Isaac was older than me, and his chest it would be
beginning to trouble him pretty bad, so he says: 'I'm done,' he says; 'I
must go home. You can get another chap to do my bastes to-night--will
you?' And the master says to Isaac: 'If you don't do your bastes
overtime, if you're too high and mighty,' he says, 'why, there's plenty
as will, and you don't need to come to-morrow neither.' And Isaac had his
wife Judith at home, and four little uns; and he stopped and done his
bastes, of _course_. And next night he couldn't well see, and he'd been
dreadful sick all day, and he says to the master again, he says as he
must go home. And the master, he says the same to him--and Isaac stops.
And on Friday afternoon he come home. And the shop had been steamin hot,
but outside it was a wind to cut yer through. And his wife Judith says to
him, 'Isaac, you look starved!' and she set him by the fire. And he sat
by the fire, and he didn't say nothing. Then his hands fell down sudden
like that--"

The old man let his hands drop heavily by his side with a simple dramatic
gesture. By this time there was not a sound in the crowded room. Even the
wildest and most wolfish of the greeners were staring silently, craning
brown necks forward.

"And his wife ran to him, and he falls against her; and he says, 'Lay me
down, Judith, and don't you let em wake me--not the young uns,' he says
'not for nothing and nobody. For if it was the trump of the Most High,'
he says--and Isaac was a religious man, and careful in his speech--'I
must have my sleep.' And she laid him down, and the children and she
watched--and by midnight Isaac turned himself over. He just opened his
eyes once, and groaned. And he never spoke no more--he was gone before
mornin.--And his master gave Judith five shillings towards the coffin,
and the men in the shop, they raised the rest."

The old man paused. He stood considering a moment, his face and ragged
beard thrown out--a spot of greyish white--against the figures behind,
his eyes blinking painfully under the gas.

"Well, we've tried many things," he said at last. "We've tried strikes
and unions, and it isn't no good. There's always one treading on
another, and if you don't do it, someone else will. It's the _law_ as'll
have to do it. You may take that and smoke it!--you won't get nothing
else. Why!"--his hoarse voice trembled--"why, they use us up cruel in the
sort of shop I work for. Ten or twelve years, and a man's all to pieces.
It's the irons, and the heat, and the sitting--_you_ know what it is.
I've lasted fifteen year, but I'm breaking up now. If my master give me
the sack for speaking here I'll have nothing but the Jewish Board of
Guardians to look to. All the same, I made up my mind as I'd come and say
how they served Isaac."

He stopped abruptly, and stood quite still a moment, fronting the
meeting, as though appealing to them, through the mere squalid physical
weakness he could find no more words to express. Then, with a sort of
shambling bow, he turned away, and the main body of the meeting clapped
excitedly, while at the back some of the "sweaters" grinned, and chatted
sarcastic things in Yiddish with their neighbours. Tressady saw Lady
Maxwell rise eagerly as the old man passed her, take his hand, and find
him a seat.

"That, I suppose, was an emotion," said Tressady, looking down upon his
companion.

"Or an argument," said Watton--"as you like!"

One other "emotion" of the same kind--the human reality at its simplest
and cruellest--Tressady afterwards remembered.

A "working-woman" was put up to second an amendment condemning the
workshops clause, which had been moved in an angry speech by one of
"Fontenoy's ladies," a shrill-voiced, fashionable person, the secretary
to the local branch of the Free Workers' League. Tressady had yawned
impatiently through the speech, which had seemed to him a violent and
impertinent performance. But as the speaker sat down he was roused by an
exclamation from a man beside him.

"_That_ woman!" cried a tall curate, straining on tiptoe to see. "No!
They ought to be ashamed of themselves!"

Tressady wondered who and why; but all that he saw was that a thin, tall
woman was being handed along the bench in front of him, while her
neighbours and friends clapped her on the back as she passed, laughing
and urging her on. Then, presently, there she stood on the platform, a
thin, wand-like creature, with her battered bonnet sideways on her head,
a woollen crossover on her shoulders, in spite of July, her hands clasped
across her chest, her queer light eyes wandering and smiling hither and
thither. In her emaciation, her weird cheerfulness, she was like a figure
from a Dance of Death. But what was amazing was her self-possession.

"Now yer laffin' at me," she began in a conversational tone, nodding
towards the group of women she had just left. "You go 'long! I told the
lidy I'd speak, an I will. Well, they comes to me, an they ses, Mrs.
Dickson, yer not to work at 'ome no longer--they'll put yer in prison if
yer do't, they ses; yer to go out ter work, same as the shop 'ands, they
ses; and what's more, if they cotch Mr. Butterford--that's my landlord;
p'raps yer dunno 'im--"

She looked down at the meeting with a whimsical grin, her eyes screwed up
and her crooked brows lifted, so that the room roared merely to look at
her. The trim lady-secretary, however, bent forward with an air of
annoyance. She had not, perhaps, realised that Mrs. Dickson was so much
of a character.

"If they cotch Mr. Butterford, they'll make 'im pay up smart for lettin
yer do such a thing as make knickers in 'is 'ouse. So I asks the lidy,
Wot's ter become o' me an the little uns? An she says she done know, but
yer mus come and speak Tuesday night, she says--Manx Road Schools, she
says--if yer want to perwent em making a law ov it. Which I'm a doin
of--aint I?"

Fresh laughter and response from the room. She went on satisfied.

"An, yer know, if I can't make the knickers at 'ome, I can't make 'em
awy from 'ome. For ther aint no shops as want kids squallin round, as
fer as I can make out. An Jimmy's a limb, as boys mos'ly are in my
egsperience. Larst week 'e give the biby a 'alfpenny and two o' my
biggest buttons to swaller, an I ony jest smacked 'em out of 'er in
time. Ther'd be murder done if I was to leave 'em. An 'ow 'ud I be able
to pay anyone fer lookin' after em? I can't git much, yer know, shop or
no shop. I aint wot I was."

She stopped, and pointed significantly to her chest. Tressady shuddered
as the curate whispered to him.

"I've been in orspital--cut about fearful. I can't go at the pace them
shops works at. They'd give me the sack, double-quick, if I was to go try
in 'em. No, it's _settin_ as does it--settin an settin. I'm at it by
seven, an my 'usband--yer can see im there--e'll tell yer."

She stopped, and pointed to a burly ruffian standing amid a group of
"pals" round the door. This gentleman had his arms folded, and was
alternately frowning and grinning at this novel spectacle of his wife as
a public performer. Bribes had probably been necessary to bring him to
consent to the spectacle at all. But he was not happy, and when his wife
pointed at him, and the meeting turned to look, he suddenly took a dive
head-foremost into the crowd about him; so that when the laughter and
horse-play that followed had subsided, it was seen that Mr. Tom Dickson's
place knew him no more.

Meanwhile Mrs. Dickson stood grinning--grinning wide and visibly. It was
the strangest mirth, as though hollow pain and laughter strove with each
other for the one poor indomitable face.

"Well, ee _could_ 'a told yer, if e'd ad the mind," she said, nodding,
"for ee knows. Ee's been out o' work this twelve an a arf year--well,
come, I'll bet yer, anyway, as ee 'asn't done a 'and's turn this three
year--an I don't blime im. Fust, there isn't the work to be got, and
then yer git out of the way o' wantin it. An beside, I'm used to im.
When Janey--no, it were Sue!--were seven month old, he come in one
night from the public, an after ee'd broke up most o' the things, he
says to me, 'Clear out, will yer!' An I cleared out, and Sue and me
set on the doorstep till mornin. And when mornin come, Tom opened the
door, an ee says, 'What are you doin there, mother? Why aint yer got my
breakfast?' An I went in an got it. But, bless yer, nowadays--the
_women won't do it_!--"

Another roar went up from the meeting. Mrs. Dickson still grinned.

"An so there's nothink but _settin_', as I said before--settin' till yer
can't set no more. If I begin o' seven, I gets Mr. Dickson to put the
teathings an the loaf andy, so as I don't 'ave to get up more'n jes to
fetch the kettle; and the chillen gets the same as me--tea an bread, and
a red 'erring Sundays; an Mr. Dickson, 'e gets 'is meals out. I gives
'im the needful, and 'e don't make no trouble; an the children is
dreadful frackshus sometimes, and gets in my way fearful. But there, if
I can _set_--set till I 'ear Stepney Church goin twelve--I can earn my
ten shillin a week, an keep the lot of 'em. Wot does any lidy or
genelman want, a comin' meddlin down 'ere? Now, that's the middle an
both ends on it. Done? Well, I dessay I is done. Lor, I ses to em in the
orspital it do seem rummy to me to be layin abed like that. If Tom was
'ere, why, 'e'd--"

She made a queer, significant grimace. But the audience laughed no
longer. They stared silently at the gaunt creature, and with their
silence her own mood changed.

Suddenly she whipped up her apron. She drew it across her eyes, and flung
it away again passionately.

"I dessay we shall be lyin abed in Kingdom Come," she said defiantly, yet
piteously. "But we've got to git there fust. An I don't want no shops,
thank yer!"

She rambled on a little longer, then, at a sign from the lady-secretary,
made a grinning curtsy to the audience and departed.

"What do they get out of that?" said Watton, in Tressady's ear--"Poor
galley-slave in praise of servitude!"

"Her slavery keeps her alive, please."

"Yes--and drags down the standard of a whole class!"

"You'll admit she seemed content?"

"It's that content we want to kill.--Ah! _at last!_" and Watton clapped
loudly, followed by about half the meeting, while the rest sat silent.
Then Tressady perceived that the chair-woman had called upon Lady Maxwell
to move the next resolution, and that the tall figure had risen.

She came forward slowly, glancing from side to side, as though doubtful
where to look for her friends. She was in black, and her head was covered
with a little black lace bonnet, in the strings of which, at her throat,
shone a small diamond brooch. The delicate whiteness of her face and
hands, and this sparkle of light on her breast, that moved as she moved,
struck a thrill of pleasure through Tressady's senses. The squalid
monotony and physical defect of the crowd about him passed from his mind.
Her beauty redressed the balance. "'Loveliness, magic, and grace--they
are here; they are set in the world!'--and ugliness and pain have not
conquered while this face still looks and breathes." This, and nothing
less, was the cry of the young man's heart and imagination as he
strained forward, waiting for her voice.

Then he settled himself to listen--only to pass gradually from
expectation to nervousness, from nervousness to dismay.

What was happening? She had once told him that she was not a speaker, and
he had not believed her. She had begun well, he thought, though with a
hesitation he had not expected. But now--had she lost her thread--or
what? Incredible! when one remembered her in private life, in
conversation. Yet these stumbling sentences, this evident distress!

Tressady found himself fidgeting in sympathetic misery. He and Watton
looked at each other.

A little more, and she would have lost her audience. She _had_ lost it.
At first there had been eager listening, for she had plunged
straightway into a set explanation and defence of the Bill point by
point, and half the room knew that she was Lord Maxwell's wife. But by
the end of ten minutes their attention was gone. They were only staring
at her because she was handsome and a great lady. Otherwise, they
seemed not to know what to make of her. She grew white; she wavered.
Tressady saw that she was making great efforts, and all in vain. The
division between her and her audience widened with every sentence, and
Fontenoy's lady-organiser, in the background, sat smilingly erect.
Tressady, who had been at first inclined to hate the thought of her
success in this Inferno, grew hot with wrath and irritation. His own
vanity suffered in her lack of triumph.

Amazing! How _could_ her personal magic--so famous on so many
fields--have deserted her like this in an East End schoolroom, before
people whose lives she knew, whose griefs she carried in her heart?

Then an idea struck him. The thought was an illumination--he understood.
He shut his eyes and listened. Maxwell's sentences, Maxwell's
manner--even, at times, Maxwell's voice! He had been rehearsing to her
his coming speech in the House of Lords, and she was painfully repeating
it! To his disgust, Tressady saw the reporters scribbling away--no doubt
they knew their business! Aye, there was the secret. The wife's adoration
showed through her very failure--through this strange conversion of all
that was manly, solid, and effective in Maxwell, into a confused mass of
facts and figures, pedantic, colourless, and cold!

Edward Watton began to look desperately unhappy. "Too long," he said,
whispering in Tressady's ear, "and too technical. They can't follow."

And he looked at a group of rough factory-girls beginning to scuffle with
the young men near them, at the restless crowd of "greeners," at the
women in the centre of the hall lifting puzzled faces to the speaker, as
though in a pain of listening.

Tressady nodded. In the struggle of devotion with a half-laughing
annoyance he could only crave that the thing should be over.

But the next instant his face altered. He pushed forward instinctively,
turning his back on Watton, hating the noisy room, that would hardly
let him hear.

Ah!--those few last sentences, that voice, that quiver of passion--they
were her own--herself, not Maxwell. The words were very simple, and a
little tremulous--words of personal reminiscence and experience. But for
one listener there they changed everything. The room, the crowd, the
speaker--he saw them for a moment under another aspect: that poetic,
eternal aspect, which is always there, behind the veil of common things,
ready to flash out on mortal eyes. He _felt_ the woman's heart, oppressed
with a pity too great for it; the delicate, trembling consciousness, like
a point in space, weighed on by the burden of the world; he stood, as it
were, beside her, hearing with her ears, seeing the earth-spectacle as
she saw it, with that terrible second sight of hers: the all-environing
woe and tragedy of human things--the creeping hunger and pain--the
struggle that leads no whither--the life that hates to live and yet
dreads to die--the death that cuts all short, and does but add one more
hideous question to the great pile that hems the path of man.

A hard, reluctant tear rose in his eyes. Is it starved tailoresses and
shirtmakers alone who suffer? Is there no hunger of the heart, that
matches and overweighs the physical? Is it not as easy for the rich as
the poor to miss the one thing needful, the one thing that matters and
saves? Angrily, and in a kind of protest, he put out his hand, as it
were, to claim his own share of the common pain.

"Make way there! make way!" cried a police-sergeant, holding back the
crowd, "and let the lady pass."

Tressady did his best to push through with Lady Maxwell on his arm. But
there was an angry hum of voices in front of him, an angry pressure round
the doors.

"We shall soon get a cab," he said, bending over her. "You are very
tired, I fear. Please lean upon me."

Yet he could but feel grateful to the crowd. It gave him this joy of
protecting and supporting her. Nevertheless, as he looked ahead, he
wished that they were safely off, and that there were more police!

For this meeting, which had been only mildly disorderly and inattentive
while Marcella was speaking, had suddenly flamed, after she sat down,
into a fierce confusion and tumult--why, Tressady hardly now understood.
A man had sprung up to speak as she sat down who was apparently in bad
repute with most of the unions of the district. At any rate, there had
been immediate uproar and protest. The trade-unionists would not hear
him--hurled names at him--"thief," "blackleg"--as he attempted to speak.
Then the Free Workers, for whom this dubious person had been lately
acting, rose in a mass and booed at the unionists; and finally some of
the dark-eyed, black-bearded "greeners" near the door, urged on,
probably, by the masters, whose slaves they were, had leaped the benches
near them, shouting strange tongues, and making for the hostile throng
around the platform.

Then it had been time for Naseby and the police to clear the platform and
open a passage for the Maxwell party. Unfortunately, there was no outlet
to the back, no chance of escaping the shouting crowd in Manx Road.
Tressady, joining his friends at last by dint of his height and a free
play of elbows, found himself suddenly alone with Lady Maxwell, Naseby
and Lady Madeleine borne along far behind, and no chance but to follow
the current, with such occasional help as the police stationed along the
banks of it might be able to give.

Outside, Tressady strained his eyes for a cab.

"Here, sir!" cried the sergeant in front, carving a passage by dint of
using his own stalwart frame as a ram.

They hurried on, for some rough lads on the edges of the crowd had
already begun stone-throwing. The faces about them seemed to be partly
indifferent, partly hostile. "Look at the bloomin bloats!" cried a wild
factory-girl with a touzled head as Lady Maxwell passed. "Let 'em stop at
'ome and mind their own 'usbands--yah!"

"Garn! who paid for your bonnet?" shouted another, until a third girl
pulled her back, panting, "If you say that any more I'll scrag yer!" For
this third girl had spent a fortnight in the Mile End Road house, getting
fed and strengthened before an operation.

But here was the cab! Lady Maxwell's foot was already on the step, when
Tressady felt something fly past him.

There was a slight cry. The form in front of him seemed to waver a
moment. Then Tressady himself mounted, caught her, and in another moment,
after a few plunges from the excited horse, they were off down Manx
Road, followed by a shouting crowd that gradually thinned.

"You are hurt!" he said.

"Yes," she said faintly, "but not much. Will you tell him to drive first
to Mile End Road?"

"I have told him. Can I do anything to stop the bleeding?"

He looked at her in despair. The handkerchief, and the delicate hand
itself that she was holding to her brow, were dabbled in blood.

"Have you a silk handkerchief to spare?" she asked him, smiling slightly
and suddenly through her pallor, as though at their common predicament.

By good fortune he had one. She took off her hat, and gave him a few
business-like directions. His fingers trembled as he tried to obey her;
but he had the practical sense that the small vicissitudes and hardships
of travel often develop in a man, and between them they adjusted a rough
but tolerable bandage.

Then she leant against the side of the cab, and he thought she would
have swooned. There was a pause, during which he watched the quivering
lines of the lips and nostrils and the pallor of the cheeks with a
feeling of dismay.

But she did not mean to faint, and little by little her will answered to
her call upon it. Presently she said, with eyes shut and brow contracted:

"I _trust_ the others are safe. Oh! what a failure--what a failure! I am
afraid I have done Aldous harm!"

The tone of the last words touched Tressady deeply. Evidently she could
hardly restrain her tears.

"They were not worthy you should go and speak to them," he said quickly.
"Besides, it was only a noisy minority."

She did not speak again till they drew up before the house in the Mile
End Road. Then she turned to him.

"I was to have stayed here for the night, but I think I must go home.
Aldous might hear that there had been a disturbance. I will leave a
message here, and drive home."

"I trust you will let me go with you. We should none of us be happy to
think of you as alone just yet. And I am due at the House by eleven."

She smiled, assenting, then descended, leaning heavily upon him in
her weakness.

When she reappeared, attended by her two little servants, all frightened
and round-eyed at their mistress's mishap, she had thrown a thick lace
scarf round her head, which hid the bandage and gave to her pale beauty a
singularly touching, appealing air.

"I wish I could see Madeleine," she said anxiously, standing beside the
cab and looking up the road. "Ah!"

For she had suddenly caught sight of a cab in the distance driving
smartly up. As it approached, Naseby and Lady Madeleine were plainly to
be seen inside it. The latter jumped out almost at Marcella's feet,
looking more scared than ever as she saw the bandage and the black scarf
twisted round the white face. But in a few moments Marcella had soothed
her, and given her over, apparently, to the care of another lady staying
in the house. Then she waved her hand to Naseby, who, with his usual
coolness, asked no questions and made no remarks, and she and Tressady
drove off.

"Madeleine will stay the night," Marcella explained as they sped towards
Aldgate. "That was our plan. My secretary will look after her. She has
been often here with me lately, and has things of her own to do. But I
ought not to have taken her to-night. Lady Kent would never have forgiven
me if she had been hurt. Oh! it was all a mistake--all a great mistake! I
suppose I imagined--that is one's folly--that I could really do some
good--make an effect."

She bit her lip, and the furrow reappeared in the white brow.

Tressady felt by sympathy that her heart was all sore, her moral being
shaken and vibrating. After these long months of labour and sympathy and
emotion, the sudden touch of personal brutality had unnerved her.

Mere longing to comfort, to "make-up," overcame him.

"You wouldn't talk of mistake--of failing--if you knew how to be near
you, to listen to you, to see you, touches and illuminates some of us!"

His cheek burnt, but he turned a manly, eager look upon her.

Her cheek, too, flushed, and he thought he saw her bosom heave.

"Oh no!--no!" she cried. "How _impossible!_--when one feels oneself so
helpless, so clumsy, so useless. Why couldn't I do better? But perhaps it
is as well. It all prepares one--braces one--against--"

She paused and leaned forward, looking out at the maze of figures and
carriages on the Mansion House crossing, her tight-pressed lips trembling
against her will.

"Against the last inevitable disappointment." That, no doubt, was what
she meant.

"If you only understood how loth some of us are to differ from you," he
cried,--"how hard it seems to have to press another view,--to be
already pledged."

"Oh yes!--_please_--I know that you are pledged," she said, in
hasty distress, her delicacy shrinking as before from the direct
personal argument.

They were silent a little. Tressady looked out at the houses in Queen
Victoria Street, at the lamplit summer night, grudging the progress of
the cab, the approach of the river, of the Embankment, where there would
be less traffic to bar their way--clinging to the minutes as they passed.

"Oh! how could they put up that woman?" she said presently, her eyes
still shut, her hand shaking, as it rested on the door. "How _could_
they? It is the thought of women like that--the hundreds and thousands of
them--that goads one on. A clergyman who knows the East End well said to
me the other day, 'The difference between now and twenty years ago is
that the women work much more, the men less.' I can never get away from
the thought of the women! Their lives come to seem to me the mere refuse,
the rags and shreds, that are thrown every day into the mill and ground
to nothing--without a thought--without a word of pity, an hour of
happiness! Cancer--three children left out of nine--and barely forty,
though she looked sixty! They tell me she may live eighteen months. Then,
when the parish has buried her, the man has only to hold up his finger to
find someone else to use up in the same way. And she is just one of
thousands."

"I can only reply by the old, stale question," said Tressady, sturdily.
"Did we make the mill? Can we stop its grinding? And if not, is it fair
even to the race that has something to gain from courage and gaiety--is
it _reasonable_ to take all our own poor little joy and drench it in
this horrible pain of sympathy, as you do! But we have said all these
things before."

He bent over to her, smiling. But she did not look up. And he saw a tear
which her weakness, born of shock and fatigue, could not restrain, steal
from the lashes on the cheek. Then he added, still leaning towards her:

"Only, what I never have said--I think--is what is true to-night. At last
you have made one person feel--if that matters anything!--the things you
feel. I don't know that I am particularly grateful to you! And,
practically, we may be as far apart as ever. But I was without a sense
when I went into this game of politics; and now--"

His heart beat. What would he not have said, mad youth!--within the
limits imposed by her nature and his own dread--to make her look at him,
to soften this preposterous sadness!

But it needed no more. She opened her eyes, and looked at him with a wild
sweetness and gratitude which dazzled him, and struck his memory with the
thought of the Southern, romantic strain in her.

"You are very kind and comforting!" she said; "but then, from the
first--somehow--I knew you were a friend to us. One felt it--through all
difference."

The little sentences were steeped in emotion--emotion springing from
many sources, fed by a score of collateral thoughts and memories--with
which Tressady had, in truth, nothing to do. Yet the young man gulped
inwardly. She had been a tremulous woman till the words were said.
Now--strange!--through her very gentleness and gratefulness, a barrier
had risen between them. Something stern and quick told him this was
the very utmost of what she could ever say to him--the farthest limit
of it all.

They passed under Charing Cross railway bridge. Beside them, as they
emerged, the moon shone out above the darks and silvers of the river, and
in front, the towers of Westminster rose purplish grey against a west
still golden.

"How were things going in the House this afternoon?" she asked, looking
at the towers. "Oh! I forgot. You see, the clock says close on eleven.
Please let me drop you here. I can manage by myself quite well."

He protested, and she yielded, with a patient kindness that made him
sore. Then he gave his account, and they talked a little of Monday's
division and of the next critical votes in Committee--each of them, so he
felt in his exaltation, a blow dealt to her--that he must help to deal.
Yet there was a fascination in the topic. Neither could get away from it.

Presently, Pall Mall being very full of traffic, they had to wait a
moment at the corner of the street that turns into St. James's Square. In
the pause Tressady caught sight of a man on the pavement. The man smiled,
looked astonished, and took off his hat. Lady Maxwell bowed coldly, and
immediately looked away. Tressady recognised Harding Watton. But neither
he nor she mentioned his name.

In another minute he had seen her vanish within the doors of her own
house. Her hand had rested gently, willingly, in his.

"I am so grateful!" she had said; "so will Maxwell be. We shall meet
soon, and laugh over our troubles!"

And then she was gone, and he was left standing a moment, bewildered.

Eleven? What had he to do?

Then he remembered his pair, and that he had promised to call for Letty
at a certain house, and take her on to a late ball. The evening, in fact,
instead of ending, was just beginning. He could have laughed, as he got
back into his cab.

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile Marcella had sped through the outer hall into the inner, where
one solitary light, still burning, made a rather desolate dark-in-light
through the broad, pillared space. A door opened at the farther side.

"Aldous!"

"You!"

He came out, and she flew to him. He felt her trembling as she touched
him. In ten words she told him something of what had happened. Then
he saw the bandage round her temple. His countenance fell. She knew
that he turned white, and loved him for it. How few things had power
to move him so!

He wanted to lead her back into his library, where he was at work. But
she resisted.

"Let me go up to Annette," she said. "The little wound--oh! it is not
much, I _know_ it is not much--ought to be properly seen to. We will do
it between us in a moment. Then come--I will send her down for you. I
want to tell you."

But in her heart of hearts she was just a little afraid of telling him.
What if an exaggerated version should get into the papers--if it should
really do him harm--at this critical moment! She was always tormented by
this dread, a dread born of long-past indiscretions and mistakes.

He acquiesced, but first he insisted on half leading, half carrying her
upstairs; and she permitted it, delighting in his strong arm.

Half an hour later she sent for him. The maid found him pacing up and
down the hall, waiting.

When he entered her room she was lying on her sofa in a white wrapper of
some silky stuff. The black lace had been drawn again round her head, and
he saw nothing but a very pale face and her eager, timid eyes--timid for
no one in the world but him. As he caught sight of her, she produced in
him that exquisite mingled impression of grace, passion, self-yielding,
which in all its infinite variations and repetitions made up for him the
constant poem of her beauty. But though she knew it, she glanced at him
anxiously as he approached her. It had been to her a kind of luxury of
feeling, in the few moments that she had been waiting for him, to cherish
a little fear of him--of his displeasure.

"Now describe exactly what you have been doing," he said, sitting down by
her with a troubled face and taking her hand, as soon as he had assured
himself that the cut was slight and would leave no scar.

She told her tale, and was thrilled to see that he frowned. She laid her
hand on his shoulder.

"It is the first public thing I have done without consulting you. I meant
to have asked you yesterday, but we were both so busy. The meeting was
got up rather hurriedly, and they pressed me to speak, after all the
arrangements were made."

"We are both of us too busy," he said, rather sadly; "we glance, and nod,
and bustle by--"

He did not finish the quotation, but she could. Her eyes scanned his
face. "Do you think I ought to have avoided such a thing at such a time?
Will it do harm?"

His brow cleared. He considered the matter.

"I think you may expect some of the newspapers to make a good deal of
it," he said, smiling.

And, in fact, his own inherited tastes and instincts were all chafed by
her story. His wife--the wife of a Cabinet Minister--pleading for her
husband's Bill, or, as the enemy might say, for his political existence,
with an East End meeting, and incidentally with the whole
public--exposing herself, in a time of agitation, to the rowdyism and
the stone-throwing that wait on such things! The notion set the
fastidious old-world temper of the man all on edge. But he would never
have dreamed of arguing the matter so with her. A sort of high chivalry
forbade it. In marrying her he had not made a single condition--would
have suffered tortures rather than lay the smallest fetter upon her. In
consequence, he had been often thought a weak, uxorious person. Maxwell
knew that he was merely consistent. No sane man lays his heart at the
feet of a Marcella without counting the cost.

She did not answer his last remark. But he saw that she was wistful and
uneasy, and presently she laid her fingers lightly on his.

"Tell me if I am too much away from you--too much occupied with
other people."

He sighed,--the slightest sigh,--but she winced. "I had just an hour
before dinner," he said; "you were not here, and the house seemed very
empty. I would have come down to fetch you, but there were some important
papers to read before to-morrow." A Cabinet meeting was fixed, as she
knew, for the following day. "Then, I have been making Saunders draw up a
statement for the newspapers in answer to Watton's last attack, and it
would have been a help to talk to you before we sent it off. Above all,
if I had known of the meeting I should have begged you not to go. I ought
to have warned you yesterday, for I knew that there was some ugly
agitation developing down there. But I never thought of you as likely to
face a mob. Will you please reflect"--he pressed her hand almost roughly
against his lips--"that if that stone had been a little heavier, and
flung a little straighter--"

He paused. A dew came to her eyes, a happy glow to her cheek. As for her,
she was grateful to the stone that had raised such heart-beats.

Perhaps some instinct told him not to please her in this way too much,
for he rose and walked away a moment.

"There! don't let's think of it, or I shall turn tyrant after all, and
plunge into 'shalls' and 'sha'n'ts'! You _know_ you carry two lives, and
all the plans that either of us care about, in your hand. You say that
Tressady brought you home?"

He turned and looked at her.

"Yes. Edward Watton brought him to the meeting."

"But he has been down to see you there several times before, as well as
coming here?"

"Oh yes! almost every week since we met at Castle Luton."

"It is curious," said Maxwell, thoughtfully; "for he will certainly vote
steadily with Fontenoy all through. His election speeches pledged him
head over ears."

"Oh! of course he will vote," said Marcella, moving a little uneasily;
"but one cannot help trying to modify his way of looking at things. And
his tone _is_ changed."

Maxwell stood at the foot of her sofa, considering, a host of perplexed
and unwelcome notions flitting across his mind. In spite of his idealist
absorption in his work, his political aims, and the one love of his
life, he had the training of a man of the world, and could summon the
shrewdness of one when he pleased. He had liked this young Tressady, for
the first time, at Castle Luton, and had seen him fall under Marcella's
charm with some amusement. But this haunting of their camp in the East
End, at such a marked and critical moment, was strange, to say the least
of it. It must point, one would think, to some sudden and remarkable
strength of personal influence.

Had she any real consciousness of the power she wielded? Once or twice,
in the years since they had been married, Maxwell had watched this spell
of his wife's at work, and had known a moment of trouble. "If I were the
fellow she had talked and walked with so," he had once said to himself,
"I must have fallen in love with her had she been twenty times another
man's wife!" Yet no harm had happened; he had only reproached himself for
a gross mind without daring to breathe a word to her.

And he dared not now. Besides, how absurd! The young man was just
married, and, to Maxwell's absent, incurious eyes, the bride had seemed a
lively, pretty little person enough. No doubt it was the nervous strain
of his political life that made such fancies possible to him. Let him not
cumber her ears with them!

Then gradually, as he stood at her feet, the sight of her, breathing
weakness, submission, loveliness, her eyes raised to his, banished every
other thought from his happy heart, and drew him like a magnet.

Meanwhile she began to smile. He knelt down beside her, and she put both
hands on his shoulders.

"Dear!" she said, half laughing and half crying, "I did speak so badly;
you would have been ashamed of me. I couldn't hold the meeting. I didn't
persuade a soul. Lord Fontenoy's ladies had it all their own way. And
first I was dreadfully sorry I couldn't do such a thing decently--sorry
because of one's vanity, and sorry because I couldn't help you. And now I
think I'm rather glad."

"Are you?" said Maxwell, drily; "as for me, I'm enchanted! There!--so
much penalty you _shall_ have."

She pressed his lips with her hand.

"Don't spoil my pretty speech. I am only glad because--because public
life and public success make one stand separate--alone. I have gone
far enough to know how it might be. A new passion would come in, and
creep through one like a poison. I should win you votes--and our
hearts would burn dry! There! take me--scold me--despise me. I am a
poor thing--but yours!"

With such a humbleness might Diana have wooed her shepherd, stooping her
goddess head to him on the Latmian steep.




CHAPTER XV


George went back to the House, and stayed for half an hour or so,
listening to a fine speech from a member of a former Liberal Cabinet. The
speech was one more sign of the new cleavage of parties that was being
everywhere brought about by the pressure of the new Collectivism.

"We always knew," said the speaker, referring to a Ministry in which
he had served seven years before, "that we should be fighting
Socialism in good earnest before many years were over; and we knew,
too, that we should be fighting it as put forward by a Conservative
Government. The hands are the hands of the English Tory, the voice is
the voice of Karl Marx."

The Socialists sent forth mocking cheers, while the Government benches
sat silent. The rank-and-file of the Conservative party already hated the
Bill. The second reading must go through. But if only some rearrangement
were possible without rushing the country into the arms of
revolutionists--if it were only conceivable that Fontenoy, or even the
old Liberal gang, should form a Government, and win the country, the
Committee stage would probably not trouble the House long.

Meanwhile in the smoking-rooms and lobbies the uncertainties of the
coming division kept up an endless hum of gossip and conjecture. Tressady
wandered about it all like a ghost, indifferent and preoccupied, careful
above all to avoid any more talk with Fontenoy. While he was in the House
itself he stood at the door or sat in the cross-benches, so as to keep a
space between him and his leader.

A little before twelve he drove home, dressed hastily, and went off to a
house in Berkeley Square, where he was to meet Letty. He found her
waiting for him, a little inclined to be reproachful, and eager for her
ball. As they drove towards Queen's Gate she chattered to him of her
evening, and of the people and dresses she had seen.

"And, you foolish boy!" she broke out, laughing, and tapping him on the
hand with her fan--"you looked so glum this morning when I couldn't go
and see Lady Tressady--and--what do you think? Why, she has been at a
party to-night--at a party, my dear!--and _dressed_! Mrs. Willy Smith
told me she had seen her at the Webers'."

"I daresay," said George, rather shortly; "all the same, this morning she
was very unwell."

Letty shrugged her shoulders, but she did not want to be disagreeable and
argue the point. She was much pleased with her dress--with the last
glance of herself that she had caught in the cloak-room looking-glass
before leaving Berkeley Square--and, finally, with this well-set-up,
well-dressed husband beside her. She glanced at him every now and then as
she put on a fresh pair of gloves. He had been very much absorbed in this
tiresome Parliament lately, and she thought herself a very good and
forbearing wife not to make more fuss. Nor had she made any fuss about
his going down to see Lady Maxwell at the East End. It did not seem to
have made the smallest difference to his opinions.

The thought of Lady Maxwell brought a laugh to her lips.

"Oh! do you know, Harding was so amusing about the Maxwells to-day!" she
said, turning to Tressady in her most good-humoured and confiding mood.
"He says people are getting so tired of her,--of her meddling, and her
preaching, and all the rest of it,--and that everybody thinks him so
absurd not to put a stop to it. And Harding says that it doesn't succeed
even--that Englishmen will never stand petticoat government. It's all
very well--they have to stand it in some forms!"

And, stretching her slim neck, she turned and gave her husband a tiny
flying kiss on the cheek. Mechanically grateful, George took her hand in
his, but he did not make her the pretty speech she expected. Just before
she spoke he was about to tell her of his evening--of the meeting, and of
his drive home with Lady Maxwell. He had been far too proud hitherto, and
far too confident in himself, to make any secret to Letty of what he did.
And, luckily, she had raised no difficulties. In truth, she had been too
well provided with amusements and flatteries of her own since their
return from the country to leave her time or opportunities for jealousy.
Perhaps, secretly, the young husband would have been more flattered if
she had been more exacting.

But as she quoted Harding something stiffened in him. Later, after the
ball, when they were alone, he would tell her--he would try and make her
understand what sort of a woman Marcella Maxwell was. In his trouble of
mind a confused plan crossed his thoughts of trying to induce Lady
Maxwell to make friends with Letty. But a touch of that charm, that
poetry!--he asked no more.

He glanced at his wife. She looked pretty and young as she sat beside
him, lost in a pleasant pondering of social successes. But he wondered,
uncomfortably, why she must use such a thickness of powder on her still
unspoilt complexion; and her dress seemed to him fantastic, and not
over-modest. He had begun to have the strangest feeling about their
relation, as though he possessed a double personality, and were looking
on at himself and her, wondering how it would end. It was characteristic,
perhaps, of his half-developed moral life that his sense of ordinary
husbandly responsibility towards her was not strong. He always thought of
her as he thought of himself--as a perfectly free agent, dealing with him
and their common life on equal terms.

The house to which they were going belonged to very wealthy people, and
Letty was looking forward feverishly to the cotillon.

"They say, at the last dance they gave, the cotillon gifts cost eight
hundred pounds," she said gleefully, to George. "They always do things
extraordinarily well."

No doubt it was the prospect of the cotillon that had brought such a
throng together. The night was stifling; the stairs and the supper-room
were filled with a struggling mob; and George spent an hour of purgatory
wondering at the gaieties of his class.

He had barely more than two glimpses of Letty after they had fought their
way into the room. On the first occasion, by stretching himself to his
full height so as to look over the intervening crowd, he saw her seated
in a chair of state, a mirror in one hand and a lace handkerchief in the
other. Young men were being brought up behind her to look into the glass
over her shoulder, and she was merrily brushing their images away.
Presently a tall, dark fellow advanced, with jet-black moustache and red
cheeks. Letty kept her handkerchief suspended a moment over the
reflection in the glass. George could see the corners of her lips
twitching with amusement. Then she quietly handed the mirror to the
leader of the cotillon, rose, gathered up her white skirt a little, the
music struck up joyously, and she and Lord Cathedine spun round the room
together, followed by the rest of the dancers.

George meanwhile found few people to talk to. He danced a few dances,
mostly with young girls in the white frocks of their first season--a
species of partner for which, as a rule, he had no affinity at all. But
on the whole he passed the time leaning against the wall in a corner,
lost in a reverie which was a vague compound of this and that, there and
here; of the Manx Road schoolroom, its odours and heats, its pale,
uncleanly crowd absorbed in the things of daily bread, with these gay,
scented rooms, and this extravagance of decoration, that made even
flowers a vulgarity, with these costly cotillon gifts--pins, bracelets,
rings--that were being handed round and wondered over by people who had
already more of such things than they could wear; of these rustling
women, in their silks and diamonds, with that gaunt stooping image of the
loafer's wife, smiling her queer defiance at pain and fate, and letting
meddling "lidies" know that without sixteen hours' "settin" she could not
keep her husband and children alive. Stale commonplace, that all the
world knows by heart!--the squalor of the _pauperum tabernae_ dimming the
glory of the _regum turres_. Yet there are only a few men and women in
each generation who really pass into the eclipsing shadow of it. Others
talk--_they_ feel and struggle. There were many elements in Tressady's
nature that might seem destined to force him into their company. Yet
hitherto he had resolutely escaped his destiny--and enjoyed his life.

About supper-time he found himself near Lady Cathedine, a thin-faced,
silent creature, whose eyes suddenly attracted him. He took her down to
supper, and spent an exceedingly dull time. She had the air of one pining
to talk, to confide herself. Yet in practice it was apparently impossible
for her to do it. She fell back into monosyllables or gentle banalities;
and George noticed that she was always restlessly conscious of the
movements in the room--who came in, who went out--and throwing little
frightened glances towards the door.

He was glad indeed when his task was over. On their way to the
drawing-rooms they passed a broad landing, which on one side led out to a
balcony, and had been made into a decorated bower for sitting-out. At
the farther end he saw Letty sitting beside Harding Watton. Letty was
looking straight before her, with a flushed and rather frowning face.
Harding was talking to her, and, to judge from his laughing manner, was
amusing himself, if not her.

George duly found Lady Cathedine a seat, and returned himself to ask
Letty whether it was not time to go. He found, however, that she had been
carried off by another partner, and could only resign himself to a fresh
twenty minutes of boredom. He leant, yawning, against the wall, feeling
the evening interminable.

Then a Harrow and Oxford acquaintance came up to him, and they chatted
for a time behind a stand of flowers that stood between them and one of
the doorways to the ballroom. At the end of the dance George saw Lady
Cathedine hurrying up to this door with the quick, furtive step that was
characteristic of her. She passed on the other side of the flowers, and
George heard her say to someone just inside the room:

"Robert, the carriage has come!"

A pause; then a thick voice said, in an emphatic undertone:

"Damn the carriage!--go away!"

"But, Robert, you know we _promised_ to look in at Lady Tuam's on the
way home."

The thick voice dropped a note lower.

"Damn Lady Tuam! I shall come when it suits me."

Lady Cathedine fell back, and George saw her cross the landing, and drop
into a chair beside an old general, who was snoozing in a peaceful corner
till his daughters should see fit to take him home. The old general took
no notice of her, and she sat there, playing with her fan, her rather
prominent grey eyes staring out of her white face.

Both George and his friend, as it happened, had heard the conversation.
The friend raised his eyebrows in disgust.

"What a brute that fellow is! They have been married four months.
However, she was amply warned."

"Who was she?"

"The daughter of old Wickens, the banker. He married her for her money,
and lives upon it religiously. By now, I should think, he has dragged her
through every torture that marriage admits of."

"So soon?" said George, drily.

"Well," said the friend, laughing, "no doubt it admits of a great many."

"I am ready to go home," said a voice at Tressady's elbow.

Something in the intonation surprised him, and he turned quickly.

"By all means," he said, throwing an astonished look at his wife, who had
come up to him on Lord Cathedine's arm. "I will go and look for the
carriage."

What was the matter, he asked himself as he ran downstairs--what was the
meaning of Letty's manner and expression?

But by the time he had sent for the carriage the answer had suggested
itself. No doubt Harding Watton had given Letty news of that hansom in
Pall Mall, and no doubt, also--He shrugged his shoulders in annoyance.
The notion of having to explain and excuse himself was particularly
unpalatable. What a fool he had been not to tell Letty of his East End
adventure on their way to Queen's Gate.

He was standing in a little crowd at the foot of the stairs when Letty
swept past him in search of her wraps. He smiled at her, but she held her
head erect as though she did not see him.

So there was to be a scene. George felt the rise of a certain inner
excitement. Perhaps it was as well. There were a good many things he
wanted to say.

At the same time, the Cathedine episode had filled him with a new disgust
for the violences and brutalities to which the very intimacy of the
marriage relation may lead. If a scene there was to be, he meant to be
more or less frank, and at the same time to keep both himself and her
within bounds.

       *       *       *       *       *

"You can't deny that you made a secret of it from me," cried Letty,
angrily. "I asked you what had been doing in the House, and you never let
me suspect that you had been anywhere else the whole evening."

"I daresay," said George, quietly. "But I never meant to make any
mystery. Something you said about Lady Maxwell put me off telling
you--then. I thought I would wait till we got home."

They were in George's study--the usual back-room on the ground-floor,
which George could not find time to make comfortable, while Letty had
never turned her attention to it. Tressady was leaning against the
mantelpiece. He had turned up a solitary electric light, and in the cold
glare of it Letty was sitting opposite to him, angrily upright. The ugly
light had effaced the half-tones of the face and deepened the lines of
it, while it had taken all the grace from her extravagant dress and
tumbled flowers. She seemed to have lost her prettiness.

"Something I said about Lady Maxwell?" she repeated scornfully. "Why
shouldn't I say what I like about Lady Maxwell? What does she matter
either to you or to me that I should not laugh at her if I please?
Everybody laughs at her."

"I don't think so," said Tressady, quietly. "I have seen her to-night in
a curious and touching scene--in a meeting of very poor people. She tried
to make a speech, by the way, and spoke badly. She did not carry the
meeting with her, and towards the end it got noisy. As we came out she
was struck with a stone, and I got a hansom for her, and drove her home
to St. James's Square. We were just turning into the Square when Harding
saw us. I happened to be with her in the crowd when the stone hit her.
What do you suppose I could do but bring her home?"

"Why did you go? and why didn't you tell me at once?"

"Why did I go?" Tressady hesitated, then looked down upon his wife.
"Well!--I suppose I went because Lady Maxwell is very interesting to
watch--because she is sympathetic and generous, and it stirs one's mind
to talk to her."

"Not at all!" cried Letty, passionately. "You went because she is
handsome--because she is just a superior kind of flirt. She is always
making women anxious about their husbands under this pretence of
politics. Heaps of women hate her, and are afraid of her."

She was very white, and could hardly save herself from the tears of
excitement. Yet what was working in her was not so much Harding Watton's
story as this new and strange manner of her husband's. She had sat
haughtily silent in the carriage on their way home, fully expecting him
to question her--to explain, entreat, excuse himself, as he had generally
been ready to do whenever she chose to make a quarrel. But he, too, said
nothing, and she could not make up her mind how to begin. Then, as soon
as they were shut into his room her anger had broken out, and he had not
yet begun to caress and appease her. Her surprise had brought with it a
kind of shock. What was the matter? Why was she not mistress as usual?

As she made her remark about Marcella, Tressady smiled a little, and
played with a cigarette he had taken up.

"Whom do you mean?" he asked her. "One often hears these things said of
her in the vague, and never with any details. I myself don't believe it.
Harding, of course, believes anything to her disadvantage."

Letty hesitated; then, remembering all she could of Harding's ill-natured
gossip, she flung out some names, exaggerating and inventing freely. The
emphasis with which she spoke reddened all the small face again--made it
hot and common.

Tressady raised his shoulders as she came to the end of her tirade.

"Well, you know I don't believe all that--and I don't think Harding
believes it. Lady Maxwell, as you once said yourself, is not, I suppose,
a woman's woman. She gets on better, no doubt, with men than with women.
These men you speak of are all personal and party friends. They support
Maxwell, and they like her. But if anybody is jealous, I should think
they might remember that there is safety in numbers."

"Oh, that's all very well! But she wants _power_, and she doesn't care a
rap how she gets it. She is a dangerous, intriguing woman--and she just
trades upon her beauty!"

Tressady, who had been leaning with his face averted from her, turned
round with sparkling eyes.

"You foolish child!" he said slowly--"you foolish child!"

Her lips twitched. She put out a shaking hand to her cloak, that had
fallen from her arms.

"Oh! very well. I sha'n't stay here to be talked to like that, so
good-night."

He took no notice. He walked up to her and put his hands on her
shoulders.

"Don't you know what it is"--he spoke with a curious imperiousness--"that
protects any woman--or any man either for the matter of that--from
Marcella Maxwell's beauty? Don't you know that she adores her husband?"

"That's a pose, of course, like everything else," cried Letty, trying to
move herself away; "you once said it was."

"Before I knew her. It's not a pose--it's the secret of her whole life."

He walked back to the mantelpiece, conscious of a sudden rise of inward
bitterness.

"Well, I shall go to bed," said Letty, again half rising. "You might, I
think, have had the kindness and the good taste to say you were sorry I
should have the humiliation of finding out where my husband spends his
evenings, from Harding Watton!"

Tressady was stung.

"When have I ever concealed what I did from you?" he asked her hotly.

Letty, who was standing stiff and scornful, tossed her head
without speaking.

"That means," said Tressady after a pause, "that you don't take my word
for it--that you suspect me of deceiving you before to-night?"

Letty still said nothing. His eyes flashed. Then a pang of conscience
smote him. He took up his cigarette again with a laugh.

"I think we are both a pair of babies," he said, as he pretended to look
for matches. "You know very well that you don't really think I tell you
mean lies. And let me assure you, my dear child, that fate did not mean
Lady Maxwell to have lovers--and that she never will have them. But when
that's said there's something else to say."

He went up to her again, and touched her arm.

"You and I couldn't have this kind of scene, Letty, could we, if
everything was all right?"

Her breast rose and fell hurriedly.

"Oh! I supposed you would want to retaliate--to complain on your side!"

"Yes," he said deliberately, "I think I do want to complain. Why is it
that--I began to like going down to see Lady Maxwell--why did I like
talking to her at Castle Luton? Well! of course it's pleasant to be with
a beautiful person--I don't deny that in the least. But she might have
been as beautiful as an angel, and I mightn't have cared twopence about
her. She has something much less common than beauty. It's very simple,
too--I suppose it's only _sympathy_--just that. Everybody feels the same.
When you talk to her she seems to care about it; she throws her mind into
yours. And there's a charm about it--there's no doubt of that."

He had begun his little speech meaning to be perfectly frank and
honest--to appeal to her better nature and his own. But something
stopped him abruptly, perhaps the sudden perception that he was after
playing the hypocrite--perhaps the consciousness that he was only making
matters worse.

"It's a pity you didn't say all these things before," she said, with
a hard laugh, "instead of denouncing the political woman, as you
used to do."

He sat down on the arm of the chair beside her, balancing lightly, with
his hands in his pockets.

"Did I denounce the political woman? Well, the Lord knows I'm not in love
with her now! It isn't politics, my dear, that are attaching--it's the
kind of human being. Ah! well, don't let's talk of it. Let's go back to
that point of sympathy. There's more in it than I used to think. Suppose,
for instance, you were to try and take a little more interest in my
political work than you do? Suppose you were to try and see money matters
from my point of view, instead of driving us"--he paused a moment, then
went on coolly, lifting his thin, long-chinned face to her as she stood
quivering beside him--"driving us into expenses that will, sooner or
later, be the ruin of us--that rob us, too, of self-respect. Suppose you
were to take a little more account, also, of my taste in people? I am
afraid I don't like Harding, though he is your cousin, and I don't
certainly see why he should furnish our drawing-rooms and empty our purse
for us as he has been doing. Then, as to Lord Cathedine, I'm really not
over-particular, but when I hear that fellow's in the house, my impulse
is to catch the nearest hansom and drive away from it. I heard him speak
to his wife to-night in a way for which he ought to be kicked down Oxford
Street--and, in general, I should say that it takes the shine off a
person to be much seen with Cathedine."

The calm attitude--the voice, just a shade interrogative, exasperated
Letty still more. She, too, sat down, her cheeks flaming.

"I am _extremely_ obliged to you! You really couldn't have been more
frank. I am sorry that _nothing_ I do pleases you. You must be quite
sorry by now you married me--but really I didn't force you! Why should I
give up my friends? You know very well you won't give up Lady Maxwell."

She looked at him keenly, her little foot beating the ground.
George started.

"But what is there to give up?" he cried. "Come and see her
yourself--come with me, and make friends with her. You would be
quite welcome."

But as he spoke he knew that he was talking absurdly, and that Letty had
reason for her laugh.

"Thank you! Lady Maxwell made it _quite_ plain to me at Castle Luton that
she didn't want _my_ acquaintance. I certainly sha'n't force myself upon
her any more. But if you'll give up going to see her--well, perhaps I'll
see what can be done to meet your wishes; though, of course, I think all
you say about Harding and Lord Cathedine is just unreasonable prejudice!"

George was silent. His mind was torn between the pricks of a conscience
that told him Letty had in truth, as far as he was concerned, a far more
real grievance than she imagined, and a passionate intellectual contempt
for the person who could even distantly imagine that Marcella Maxwell
belonged to the same category as other women, and was to be won by the
same arts as they. At last he broke out impatiently:

"I cannot possibly show discourtesy to one who has been nothing but
kindness to me, as she is to scores of others--to old friends like Edward
Watton, or new ones like--"

"She wants your vote, of course!" threw in Letty, with an excited laugh.
"_Either_ she is a flirt--_or_ she wants your vote. Why should she take
so much notice of you? She isn't your side--she wants to get hold of
you--and it makes you ridiculous. People just laugh at you and her!" She
turned upon him passionately. A little more, and the wish to say the
wounding, venomous thing would have grown like a madness upon her. But
George kept his self-possession.

"Well, they may laugh," he said, with a strong effort to speak
good-humouredly. "But politics aren't managed like that, as you and they
will find out. Votes are not so simple as they sound."

He got up and walked away from her as he spoke. As usual, his mood was
beginning to cool. He saw no way out. They must both accept the _status
quo_. No radical change was possible. It is character that makes
circumstance, and character is inexorable.

"Well, of course I didn't altogether believe that you would really be
such a fool, and wreck all your prospects!" said Letty, violently, her
feverish eyes intent the while on her husband and on the thin fingers
once more busied with the cigarette. "There now! I think we have had
enough of this! It doesn't seem to have led to much, does it?"

"No," said George, coolly; "but perhaps we shall come to see more alike
in time. I don't want to tyrannise--only to show you what I think. Shall
I carry up your cloak for you?"

He approached her punctiliously. Letty gathered her wraps upon her arm in
a disdainful silence, warding him off with a gesture. As he opened the
door for her she turned upon him:

"You talk of my extravagance, but you never seem to consider what you
might do to make up to me for the burden of being your mother's relation!
You expect me to put up with the annoyance and ridicule of belonging to
her--and to let her spend all your money besides. I give you fair warning
that I sha'n't do it! I shall try and spend it on my side, that she
sha'n't get it."

She was perfectly conscious that she was behaving like a vixenish child,
but she could not restrain herself. This strange new sense that she could
neither bend nor conquer him was becoming more than she could bear.

George looked at her, half inclined to shake her first, and then insist
on making friends. He was conscious that he could probably assert himself
with success if he tried. But the impulse failed him. He merely said,
without any apparent temper, "Then I shall have to see if I can invent
some way of protecting both myself and you."

She flung through the door, and almost ran through the long passage to
the stairs, in a sobbing excitement. A sudden thought struck George as he
stood looking after her. He pursued her, caught her at the foot of the
stairs, and held her arm strongly.

"Letty! I wasn't to tell you, but I choose to break my promise. Don't be
too cruel, my dear, or too angry. My mother is dying!"

She scanned him deliberately, the flushed face--the signs of strongly
felt yet strongly suppressed emotion. The momentary consciousness flew
through her that he was at bottom a very human, impressionable
creature--that if she could but have broken down and thrown herself on
his neck, this miserable evening might open for both of them a new way.
But her white-heat of passion was too strong. She pushed him away.

"She made you believe that this morning? Then I'd better hurry up at
Ferth; for of course it only means that there will be a fresh list of
debts directly!"

He let her go, and she heard him walk quickly back to his study and
shut the door. She stared after him triumphantly for a moment, then
rushed upstairs.

In her room her maid was waiting for her. Grier's sallow face and gloomy
eyes showed considerable annoyance at being kept up so late. But she said
nothing, and Letty, who in general was only too ready to admit the woman
to a vulgar familiarity, for once held her tongue. Her state of
excitement and exhaustion, however, was evident, and Grier bestowed many
furtive, examining glances upon her mistress in the course of the
undressing. She thought she had heard "them" quarrelling on the stairs.
What a pity she had been too tired and cross to listen!

Of course they must come to quarrelling! Grier's sympathies were
tolerably impartial. She had no affection for her mistress, and she
cordially disliked Sir George, knowing perfectly well that he thought ill
of her. But she had a good place, and meant to keep it if she could. To
which end she had done her best to strengthen a mean hold on Letty. Now,
as she was brushing out Letty's brown hair, and silently putting two and
two together the while, an idea occurred to her which pleased her.

After Grier had left her, Letty could not make up her mind to go to bed.
She was still pacing up and down the room in her dressing-gown, when she
heard a knock--Grier's knock.

"Come in!"

"Please, my lady," said Grier, appearing with something in her hand,
"doesn't this belong to your photograph box? I found it on the floor in
Sir George's dressing-room this morning."

Letty hastily took it from her, and, in spite of an instant effort to
control herself, the red flushed again into a cheek that had been very
pale when Grier came in.

"Where did you find it?"

"It had tumbled off Sir George's table, I think," said Grier, with
elaborate innocence; "someone must have took it out of your photo-box."

"Thank you," said Letty, shortly. "You may go, Grier."

The maid went, and Letty was left standing with the photograph in
her hands.

Two days before Tressady had been in Edward Watton's room in St.
James's Street, and had seen this amateur photograph of Marcella
Maxwell and her boy on Watton's table. The poetic charm of it had
struck him so forcibly that he had calmly put it in his pocket, telling
the protesting owner that he in his _rôle_ of great friend could easily
procure another, and must beware of a grudging spirit. Watton had
laughed and submitted, and Tressady had carried off the picture,
honestly meaning to present it to Letty for a collection of
contemporary "beauties" she had just begun to make.

Later in the day, as he was taking off his coat in the evening to dress
for dinner, Tressady drew out the photograph. A sudden instinct, which he
himself could hardly have explained, made him delay handing it over to
Letty. He thrust it into the top tray of his collar-and-shirt wardrobe.
Two days later the butler, coming in a hurry before breakfast to put out
his master's clothes, shook the photograph out of the folds of the shirt,
where it had hidden itself, without noticing what he had done. The
picture slipped between the wardrobe and the wall of the recess in which
it stood, was discovered later in the day by the housemaid, and given to
Lady Tressady's maid.

Letty laid the photograph down on the dressing-table, and stood leaning
upon her hands, looking at it. Marcella was sitting under one of the
cedars of Maxwell Court with her boy beside her. A fine corner of the old
house made a background, and the photographer had so dealt with his
picture as to make it a whole, full of significance, and culminating in
the two faces--the sensitive, speaking beauty of the mother, the sturdy
strength of the child. Marcella had never looked more wistful, more
attaching. It was the expression of a woman at rest, in the golden moment
of her life, yet conscious--as all happiness is conscious--of the common
human doom that nothing escapes. Meanwhile the fine, lightly furrowed
brow above the eyes spoke action and power; so did the strong waves of
black hair blown back by the breeze. A noble, strenuous creature, yet
quivering through and through with the simplest, most human instincts. So
one must needs read her, as one looked from the eyes to the eager clasp
of the arm about the boy.

Letty studied it, as though she would pierce and stab it with looking.
Then, with a sudden wild movement, she took up the picture, and tore it
into twenty pieces. The pieces she left strewn on the floor, so that they
must necessarily strike the eye of anyone coming into the room. And in a
few more minutes she was in bed, lying still and wakeful, with her face
turned away from the door.

About an hour afterwards there was a gentle knock at her door. She made
no answer, and Tressady came in. He stepped softly, thinking she was
asleep, and presently she heard him stop, with a stifled exclamation. She
made no sound, but from his movement she guessed that he was picking up
the litter on the floor. Then she heard it thrown into the basket under
her writing-table, and she waited, holding her breath.

Tressady walked to a far window, drew a curtain back softly, and stood
looking out at the starlight over the deserted street. Once, finding him
so still, she ventured a hasty glance at him over the edge of the sheet.
But she could see nothing. And after a time he turned and came to his
accustomed place beside her. In twenty minutes at latest, she knew, much
to her chagrin, that he was asleep.

She herself had no sleep. She was stung to wakefulness by that recurrent
sense of the irrevocable which makes us say to ourselves in wonder, "How
can it have happened? Two hours ago--such a little while--it had not
happened!" And the mind clutches at the bygone hour, so near, so
eternally distant--clutches at its ghost, in vain.

Yet it seemed to her now that she had been jealous from the first moment
when she and George had come into contact with Marcella Maxwell. During
the long hours of this night her jealousy burnt through her like a hot
pain--jealousy, mixed with reluctant memory. Half consciously she had
always assumed that it had been a piece of kindness on her part to marry
George Tressady at all. She had almost condescended to him. After all,
she had played with ambitions so much higher! At any rate, she had taken
for granted that he would always admire and be grateful to her--that in
return for her pretty self she might at least dispose of him and his as
she pleased.

And now, what galled her intolerably was this discernment of the way in
which--at least since their honeymoon--he must have been criticising
and judging her--judging her by comparison with another woman. She
seemed to see at a glance, the whole process of his mind, and her
vanity writhed under it.

How much else than vanity? As she turned restlessly from side to side,
possessed by plans for punishing George, for humiliating Lady Maxwell,
and avenging herself, she said to herself that she did not care,--that it
was not worth caring about,--that she would either bring George to his
senses, or manage to amuse herself without him.

But in reality she was held tortured and struggling all the time in the
first grip of that masterful hold wherewith the potter lifts his clay
when he lays it on the eternal whirring of the wheel.




CHAPTER XVI


The newspapers of the morning following these events--that is to say,
of Saturday, July 5--gave very lively accounts of the East End meeting,
at which, as some put it, Lady Maxwell "had got her answer" from the
East End mob. The stone-throwing, the blow, the woman, and the cause
were widely discussed that same day throughout the clubs and
drawing-rooms of Mayfair and Belgravia, no less than among the clubs and
"publics" of the East End; and the guests at country-house parties as
they hurried out of town for the Sunday, carried the gossip of the
matter far and wide. The Maxwells went down alone to Brookshire, and the
curious visitors who called in St. James's Square "to inquire" came away
with nothing to report.

"A put-up thing, the whole business," said Mrs. Watton, indignantly, to
her son Harding, as she handed him the "Observer," on the Sunday morning,
in the dining-room of the family house in Tilney Street. "Of course, a
little martyrdom just now suits her book excellently. How that man _can_
let her make him a laughing-stock in this way--"

"A laughing-stock?" said Harding, smiling. "Not at all. Don't spoil your
first remark, mother. For, of course, it is all practical politics. The
handsomest woman in England doesn't give her temple to be gashed for
nothing. You will see what her friends will make out of it!--and out of
the brutal violence of our mob."

"Disgusting!" said Mrs. Watton, playing severely with the lid of the
mustard-pot that stood beside her.

She and Harding were enjoying a late breakfast _tête-à-tête._ The old
Squire had finished long before, and was already doing his duty with a
volume of sermons in the library upstairs, preparatory to going to
church. Mrs. Watton and Harding, however, would accompany him thither
presently; for Harding was a great supporter of the Establishment.

The son raised his shoulders at his mother's adjective.

"What I want to know," he said, "is whether Lady Maxwell is going to bag
George Tressady, or not. He brought her home from the meeting on Friday."

"Brought her home from the meeting?--_George Tressady?_"

Mrs. Watton raised her masculine head and frowned at her son, as though
he were, in some sense, personally responsible for this unseemly fact.

"He has been haunting her in the East End for weeks. I got that out of
Edward. But, of course, one knew that was going to happen as soon as
one saw them together at Castle Luton. She throws her flies cleverly,
that woman!"

"All I can say is," observed Mrs. Watton, ponderously, "that in any
decent state of society such a woman would be banned!"

Harding rose, and stood by the open window caressing his moustache. It
was a perception of long standing with him, that life would have been
better worth living had his mother possessed a sense of humour.

"It seems to me," his mother resumed after a pause, "that someone at
least should give Letty a hint."

"Oh! Letty can take care of herself," said Watton, laughing. He might
have said, if he had thought it worth while, that somebody had already
given Letty a hint. Tressady, it appeared, disliked him. Well, people
that disliked you were fair game. However, in spite of Tressady's
dislike, he had been able to amuse himself a good deal with Letty and
Letty's furnishing during the last few months. Harding, who prided
himself on the finest of tastes, liked to be consulted; he liked
anything, also, that gave him importance, if it were only with the master
of a curiosity shop, and, under cover of Letty's large dealings, he had
carried off various spoils of his own for his rooms in the Temple--spoils
which were not to be despised--at a very moderate price indeed.

"Who could have thought George Tressady would turn out such a weak
creature," said his mother, rising, "when one remembers how Lord Fontenoy
believed in him?"

"And does still believe in him, more or less," said Harding; "but
Fontenoy will have to be warned."

He looked at the clock, to see if there was time for a cigarette before
church, lit it, and, leaning against the window, gazed towards the hazy
park with a meditative air.

"Do you mean there is any question of his ratting?" said his mother.

Harding raised his eyebrows.

"Well, no--hardly anything so gross as that. But you can see all the
spirit has gone out of him. He does no work for us. The party gets
nothing out of him."

Harding spoke as if he had the party in his pocket. His mother looked at
him with a severely concealed admiration. There were few limits to her
belief in Harding. But it was not her habit to flatter her sons.

"What makes one so mad," she said, as she sailed towards the door in a
stiff rustle of Sunday brocade, "is the way in which the people who
admire her talk of her. When one thinks that all this 'slumming,' and all
this stuff about the poor, only means keeping her husband in office and
surrounding herself with a court of young men, it turns one sick!"

"My dear mother, we keep all our little hypocrisies," said Harding,
indulgently. "Don't forget that Lady Maxwell provides me with a deal of
good copy."

And after his mother had left him he smoked on, thinking with pleasure of
an article of his on "The Woman of the Slums," packed with allusions to
Marcella Maxwell, which was to appear in the next number of the
"Haymarket Reporter," the paper that he and Fontenoy were now running.
Harding was not the editor. He disliked drudgery and office-hours; and
his father was good for enough to live upon. But he was a powerful
adviser in the conduct of the new journal, and wrote, perhaps, the
smartest articles.

The paper, indeed, was written by the smartest people conceivable, and
had achieved the smartest combinations. "Liberty" was its catchword; but
the employer must be absolute. To care or think about religion was
absurd; but whoso threw a stone at the Established Church, let him die
the death. Christianity must be steadily, even ferociously supported; in
the policing of an unruly world it was indispensable. But the perennial
butt of the paper was the fool who "went about doing good." The young men
who lived in "settlements," for instance, and gave University Extension
Lectures--the paper pursued all such with a hungry malice, only less
biting than that wherewith day by day it attacked Lord Maxwell, the arch
offender of all the philanthropic tribe. To help a man who had toiled his
ten or twelve hours in the workshop or the mine to read Homer or Dante in
the evening,--well! in the language of Hedda Gabler "people don't do
these things,"--not people with any sense of the humorous or the seemly.
Harding and his crew had required a good deal of help in their time
towards the reading of those authors; that, however, was only their due,
and in the order of the universe. The same universe had sent the miner
below to dig coals for his betters, while Harding Watton went to college.

But the last and worst demerit in the eyes of Harding and his set was
that old primitive offence that Cain already found so hard to bear. Half
the violence which the new paper had been lavishing on Maxwell--apart
from passionate conviction of the Fontenoy type, which also spoke through
it--sprang from this source. Maxwell, in spite of his obvious drawbacks,
threatened to succeed, to be accepted, to take a large place in English
political life. And his wife, too, reigned, and had her way without the
help of clever young men who write. There was the sting. Harding at any
rate found it intolerable.

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile, in spite of newspapers to right of it and newspapers to left
of it, the political coach clattered on.

The following day--Monday--was a day of early arrivals, packed benches,
and much excitement in the House of Commons; for the division on the
second reading was to be taken after the Home Secretary's reply on the
debate. Dowson was expected to get up about ten o'clock, and it was
thought that the division would be over by eleven.

On this afternoon and evening Fontenoy was ubiquitous. At least so it
seemed to Tressady. Whenever one put one's head into the Smoking-room or
the Library, whenever one passed through the Lobby, or rushed on to the
Terrace for ten minutes' fresh air, Fontenoy's great brow and rugged face
were always to be seen, and always in fresh company.

The heterogeneous character of the Opposition with which the Government
was confronted, the conflicting groups and interests into which it was
split up, offered large scope for the intriguing, contriving genius of
the man. And he was spending it lavishly. The small eyes were more
invisible, the circles round them more saucer-like than ever.

Meanwhile George Tressady had never been so keenly conscious as on
this critical afternoon that his party had begun to drop him out of
its reckonings. Consultations that would once have included him as a
matter of course were going on without him. During the whole of this
busy day Fontenoy even had hardly spoken to him; the battle was
leaving him on one side.

Well, what room for bitterness?--though, with the unreason that no man
escapes, he was not without bitterness. He had disappointed them as a
debater--and, in other ways, what had he done for them since Whitsuntide?
No doubt also the mention of his name in the reports of the Mile End
meeting had not been without its effect. He believed that Fontenoy's
personal regard for him still held. Otherwise, he was beginning to feel
himself placed in a tacit isolation.

What wonder, good Lord! During the dinner-hour he found himself in a
corner of the library, dreaming over a biography of Lord Melbourne. Poor
Melbourne! in those last tragic years of waiting and pining, every day
expecting the proffer of office that never came and the familiar
recognition that would be his no more. But Melbourne was old, and had
had his day.

"I wanted to speak to you," said a hoarse voice, over his shoulder.

"Say on, and sit down," said George, smiling, and pushing forward a chair
beside him. "I should think you'll want a week's sleep after this."

"Have you got some time to spare this week," said Fontenoy, abruptly, as
he sat down.

George hesitated.

"Well, no. I ought to go down to the country immediately, and see after
my own affairs and the strike, before Committee begins. There is a
meeting of coal-owners on Wednesday."

"What I want wouldn't take long," said Fontenoy, persistently, after a
pause. "I hear you have been going round workshops lately?"

His keen, peremptory eyes fixed his companion.

"I had a round or two with Everard," said George. "We saw a fair
representative lot."

The thought that flashed through Fontenoy's mind was, "Why the deuce
didn't you speak of it to me?" Aloud, he said with impatience:

"Representing what Everard chose to show, I should think. However, what I
want is this. You know the series of extracts from reports that has been
going on lately in the 'Chronicle.'"

George nodded.

"We want something done to correct the impression that has been made. You
and I know perfectly well that the vast majority of workshops work
factory-hours and an average of four and a half days a week. You have
just had personal experience, and you can write. Will you do three or
four signed articles for the 'Reporter' this week or next? Of course the
office will give you every help."

George considered.

"I think not," he said presently, looking up. "I shouldn't do it well.
Perhaps I have become too conscious of the exceptions--the worst cases.
Frankly, the whole thing has become more of a problem to me than it was."

Fontenoy moved, and grunted uneasily.

"Does that mean," he said at last, in his harshest manner, "that you
will feel any difficulty in--?"

"In voting? No. I shall vote right enough. I am all for delay. This
particular Bill doesn't convince me any more than it did. But I don't
want to take a strong public part just at present."

The two men eyed each other in silence.

"I thought there was something brewing," said Fontenoy at last.

"Well, I'm not sorry to have had these few words," was George's reply,
after a pause. "I wanted to tell you that, though I shall vote, I don't
think I shall speak much more. I don't believe I'm the stuff people in
Parliament ought to be made of. I shall be remorseful presently for
having led you into a mistake!" He forced a smile.

"I made no mistake," said Fontenoy, grimly, and departed. Then, as he
walked down the corridor, he completed his sentence--"except in not
seeing that you were the kind of man to be made a fool of by women!"

First of all, a hasty marriage with a silly girl who could be no help to
him or to the cause; now, according to Watton--who had called upon
Fontenoy that morning, at his private house, to discuss various matters
of business--the Lady-Maxwell fever in a pronounced form. Most likely. It
was the best explanation.

The leader's own sense of annoyance and disappointment was considerable.
There was no man for whom he had felt so much personal liking as for
Tressady since the fight began.

Somewhere before midnight the division on the second reading was taken,
amid all those accompaniments of crowd, expectation, and commotion, that
are usually evoked by the critical points of a contested measure. The
majority for Government was forty-four--less by twenty-four votes than
its normal figure.

As the cheers and counter-cheers subsided, George found himself borne
into the Lobby with the crowd pouring out of the House. As he approached
the door leading to the outer lobby, a lady in front of him turned.
George received a lightning impression of beauty, of a kind of anxious
joy, and recognised Marcella Maxwell.

She held out her hand.

"Well, the first stage is over!" she said.

"Yes, and well over," he said, smiling. "But you have shed a great many
men already."

"Oh! I know--I know. The next few weeks will be intolerable; one will
feel sure of nobody." Then her voice changed--took a certain shyness. "A
good many people from here are coming down to us at Mile End during the
next few weeks--will you come some time, and bring Lady Tressady?"

"Thank you," said George, rather formally. "It is very kind of you."
Then, in another voice: "And you are really none the worse?"

His eyes sought the injured temple, and she instinctively put up her
hand to the black wave of hair that had been drawn forward so as to
conceal the mark.

"Oh no! That boy was not an expert, luckily. How absurd the papers
have been!"

George shook his head.

"I don't know what else one could expect," he said, laughing.

"Not at all!"--the flush mounted in the delicate hollow of the cheek.
"Why should there be any more fuss about a woman's being struck than a
man? We don't want any of this extra pity and talk."

"Human nature, I am afraid," said George, raising his shoulders. Did she
really suppose that women could mix in the political fight on the same
terms as men--could excite no more emotion there than men? Folly!

Then Maxwell, who was standing behind her, came forward, greeted Tressady
kindly, and they talked for a few minutes about the evening's debate. The
keen look of the elder scanned the younger's face and manner the while
with some minuteness. As for George, his dialogue with the Minister, at
which more than one passer-by threw looks of interest and amusement, gave
him no particular pleasure. Maxwell's qualities were not of the kind that
specially appealed to him; nor was he likely to attract Maxwell.
Nevertheless, he could have wished their ten minutes' talk to last
interminably, merely because of the excuse it gave him to be near
her!--played upon by her movements and her tones. He talked to Maxwell of
speeches, and votes, and little incidents of the day. And all the time he
knew how she was surrounded; how the crowd that was always gathering
about her came and went; with whom she talked; above all, how that eager,
sensitive charm which she had shown in its fulness to him--perhaps to
him only, beside her husband, of all this throng--played through her
look, her voice, her congratulations, and her dismays. For had he not
seen her in distress and confusion--seen her in tears, wrestling with
herself? His heart caressed the thought like a sacred thing, all the time
that he was conscious of her as the centre of this political throng--the
adored, detested, famous woman, typical in so many ways of changing
custom and of an expanding world.

Then, in a flash, as it were, the crowd had thinned, the Maxwells had
gone, and George was running down the steps of the members' entrance,
into the rain outside. He seemed to carry with him the scent of a
rose,--the rose she had worn on her breast,--and his mind was tormented
with the question he had already asked himself: "How is it going to end?"

He pushed on through the wet streets, lost in a hundred miseries and
exaltations. The sensation was that of a man struggling with a rising
tide, carried helplessly in the rush and swirl of it. Yet conscience had
very little to say, and, when it did speak, got little but contempt for
its pains. What had any clumsy code, social or moral, to do with it? When
would Marcella Maxwell, by word or look or thought, betray the man she
loved? Not till

A' the seas gang dry, my dear,
An the rocks melt wi' the sun!

How he found his way home he hardly knew; for it was a moment of blind
crisis with him. All that crowded, dramatic scene of the House--its
lights, its faces, its combinations--had vanished from his mind. What
remained was a group of three people, contemplated in a kind of
terror--terror of what this thing might grow to! Once, in St. James's
Street, the late hour, the soft, gusty night, suddenly reminded him of
that other gusty night in February when he had walked home after his
parting with Letty, so well content with himself and the future, and
had spoken to Marcella Maxwell for the first time amid that little
crowd in the Mall. Nothing had been irreparable then. He had his life
in his hands.

As for this passion, that was creeping into all his veins, poisoning and
crippling all his vitalities, he was still independent enough of it to be
able to handle it with the irony it deserved. For it was almost as
ludicrous as it was pitiable. He did not want any man of the world, any
Harding Watton, to tell him that.

What amazed him was the revelation of his own nature that was coming out
of it. He had always been rather proud to think of himself as an
easygoing fellow with no particular depths. Other men were proud of a
"storm period"--of feasting and drinking deep--made a pose of it.
Tressady's pose had been the very opposite. Out of a kind of good taste,
he had wished to take life lightly, with no great emotion. And marriage
with Letty had seemed to satisfy this particular canon.

Now, for the first time, certain veils were drawn aside, and he knew what
this hunger for love, and love's response, can do with a man--could do
with _him_, were it allowed its scope!

Had Marcella Maxwell been another woman, less innocent, less secure!

As it was, Tressady no sooner dared to give a sensuous thought to her
beauty than his own passion smote him back--bade him beware lest he
should be no longer fit to speak and talk with her, actually or
spiritually. For in this hopeless dearth of all the ordinary rewards and
encouragements of love he had begun to cultivate a sort of second, or
spiritual, life, in which she reigned. Whenever he was alone he walked
with her, consulted her, watched her dear eyes, and the soul playing
through them. And so long as he could maintain this dream he was
conscious of a sort of dignity, of reconciliation with himself; for the
passions and tragedies of the soul always carry with them this dignity,
as Dante, of all mortals, knew first and best.

But with the turn into Upper Brook Street, the dream suddenly and
painfully gave way. He saw his own house, and could forget Letty and the
problem of his married life no more. What was he going to do with her and
it? What relation was he going to establish with his wife, through all
these years that stretched so interminably before them? Remorse mingled
with the question. But perhaps impatience, still more--impatience of his
own misery, of this maze of emotion in which he felt himself entangled,
as it were against his will.

During the three days which had passed since his quarrel with Letty,
their common life had been such a mere confusion of jars and discomforts
that George's hedonist temper was almost at the end of its patience; yet
so far, he thought, he had not done badly in the way of forbearance.
After the first moment of angry disgust, he had said to himself that the
tearing up of the photograph was a jealous freak, which Letty had a right
to if it pleased her. At any rate, he had made no comment whatever upon
it, and had done his best to resume his normal manner with her the next
day. She had been, apparently, only the more enraged; and, although there
had been no open quarrelling since, her cutting, contemptuous little airs
had been very hard to bear. Nor was it possible for George to ignore her
exasperated determination to have her own way in the matter both of
friends and expenses.

As he took his latch-key out of the lock, and turned up the electric
light, he saw two handsome marqueterie chairs standing in the hall. He
went to look at them in some perplexity. Ah! no doubt they had been sent
as specimens. Letty had grown dissatisfied with the chairs originally
bought for the dining-room. He remembered to have heard her say something
about a costly set at a certain Asher's, that Harding had found.

He studied them for a few moments, his mouth tightening. Then, instead of
going upstairs, he went into his study, and sat down to his table to
write a letter.

Yes--he had better go off to Staffordshire by the early train; and this
letter, which he would put upon her writing-desk in the drawing-room,
should explain him to Letty.

The letter was long and candid, yet by no means without tenderness. "I
have written to Asher," it said, "to direct him to send in the morning
for the chairs I found in the hall. They are too expensive for us, and I
have told him that I will not buy them, I need not say that in writing to
him I have avoided every word that could be annoying to you. If you would
only trust me, and consult me a little about such things,--trifles as
they be,--life just now would be easier than it is."

Then he passed to a very frank statement of their financial position, and
of his own steady resolve not to allow himself to drift into hopeless
debt. The words were clear and sharp, but not more so than the course of
the preceding six weeks made absolutely necessary. And their very
sharpness led him to much repentant kindness at the end. No doubt she was
disappointed both in him and in his circumstances; and, certainly,
differences had developed between them that they had never foreseen at
the time of their engagement. But to "make a good thing" of living
together was never easy. He asked her not to despair, not to judge him
hardly. He would do his best--let her only give him back her confidence
and affection.

He closed the letter, and then paced restlessly about the little room for
a time. It seemed to him that he was caught in a vice--that neither
happiness, nor decent daily comfort, nor even the satisfactions of
ambition, were ever to be his.

Next day he was off to Euston before Letty was properly awake. She found
his letter waiting for her when she descended, and spent the day in a
pale excitement. Yet by the end of it she had pretty well made up her
mind. She would have to give in on the money question. George's figures
and her natural shrewdness convinced her that the ultimate results of
fighting him in this matter could only be more uncomfortable for herself
than for him. But as to her freedom in choosing her own friends, or as
to her jealousy of Lady Maxwell, she would never give in. If George had
ceased to court his wife, then he could have nothing to say if she
looked for the amusement and admiration that were her due from other
people. There was no harm in that. Everybody else did it; and she was
not going to be pretty and young for nothing. Whereupon she sat down and
wrote a line to Lord Cathedine to tell him that she and "Tully" would be
at the Opera on the following night, and to beg him to make sure that
she got her "cards for Clarence House." Moreover, she meant to make use
of him to procure her a card for a very smart ball, the last of the
season, which was coming off in a fortnight. That could be arranged, no
doubt, at the Opera.

       *       *       *       *       *

George returned from the North in a few days looking, if possible,
thinner and more careworn than when he went. He had found the strike a
very stubborn business. Burrows was riding the storm triumphantly; and
while upon his own side Tressady looked in vain for a "man," there was a
dogged determination to win among the masters. George's pugnacity shared
it fully. But he was beginning to ask himself a number of questions about
these labour disputes which, apparently, his co-employers did not ask
themselves. Was it that here, no less than in matters that concerned the
Bill before Parliament, _her_ influence, helped by the power of an
expanding mind, had developed in him that fatal capacity for sympathy,
for the double-seeing of compromise, which takes from a man all the joy
of battle.

Letty, at any rate, was not troubled by anything of the sort. When he
came back he found that she was ready to be on fairly amicable terms with
him. Moreover, she had postponed the more expensive improvements and
changes she had begun to make at Perth against his will; nor was there
any sign of the various new purchases for the London house with which she
had threatened him. On the other hand, she ceased to consult him about
her own engagements; and she let him know, though without any words on
the subject, that she had entirely broken with his mother--would neither
see her nor receive her. As her attitude on this point involved--or,
apparently, must involve--a refusal to accept her husband's statement
made solemnly under strong emotion, George's pride took it in absolute
silence. No doubt it was her revenge upon him for their crippled
income--and for Lady Maxwell.

The effect of her behaviour on this point was to increase his own pity
for his mother. He told her frankly that Letty could not get over the
inroads upon their income and the shortening of their resources produced
by the Shapetsky debt, just at a time when they should have been able to
spend, and were already hampered by the state of the coal trade. It would
be better that she and Letty should not meet for a time. He would do his
best to make it up.

Lady Tressady took his news with a curious equanimity.

"Well, she always hated me!" she said--"I don't exactly know why--and was
a little jealous of my gowns, too, I think. Don't mind, George. I must
say it out. You know, she doesn't really dress very well--Letty doesn't.
Though, my goodness, the bills! Wait till you see them before you call
_me_ extravagant. You should make her go to that new woman--what do they
call her? She's a _darling_, and such a style! Never mind about Letty;
you needn't bother. I daresay she isn't very nice to _you_ about it. But
if you don't come and see me, I shall cut my throat, and leave a note on
the dressing-table. It would spoil your career dreadfully, so you'd
better take care."

But, indeed, George came, without any pressing, almost every day. He saw
her in her bursts of gaiety and affectation, when the habits of a
lifetime asserted themselves as strongly as ever; and he saw her in her
moments of pain and collapse, when she could hide the omens of inexorable
physical ill neither from herself nor him. By the doctor's advice, he
ceased to press her to give in, to resign herself to bed and invalidism.
It was best, even physically, to let her struggle on. And he was both
astonished and touched by her pluck. She had never been so repellent to
him as on those many occasions in the past when she had feigned illness
to get her way. Now that Death was really knocking, the half-gay,
half-frightened defiance with which she walked the palace of life, one
moment listening to the sounds at the gate, the next throwing herself
passionately into the revelry within, revealed to the son a new fact
about her--a fact of poetry unutterably welcome.

Even her fawning dependents, the Fullertons, ceased to annoy him. They
were poor parasites, but she thought for them, and they professed to love
her in return. She had emptied her life of finer things, but this
relation of patron and flatterer, such as it was, did something to fill
the vacancy; and George made no further effort to disturb it.

It was surprising, indeed, how easily, as the weeks went on, he came
to bear many of those ways of hers which had once set him most on
edge--even her absurd outbursts of affection towards him, and
preposterous praise of him in public. In time he submitted even to
being flown at and kissed before the Fullertons. Amazing into what new
relations that simple perspective of _the end_ will throw all the
stuff of life!

       *       *       *       *       *

In Parliament the weeks rushed by. The first and comparatively
non-contentious sections of the Bill passed with a good deal of talk and
delay. George spoke once or twice, without expecting to speak,
instinctively pleasing Fontenoy where he could. They had now but little
direct intercourse. But George did not feel that his leader had become
his enemy, and was not slow to recognise a magnanimity he had not
foreseen. Yet, after all, he had not offered the worst affront to party
discipline. Fontenoy could still count on his vote. As to the rest of
his party, he saw that he was to be finally reckoned as a "crank," and
let alone. It was not, he found, altogether to be regretted. The position
gave him a new freedom of speech.

Meanwhile he and Marcella Maxwell rarely met. Week after week passed, and
still Tressady avoided those gatherings at the Mile End house, of which
he heard full accounts from Edward Watton. He once formally asked Letty
if she would go with him to one of Lady Maxwell's East End "evenings,"
and she, with equal formality, refused. But he did not take advantage of
her refusal to go himself. Was it fear of his own weakness, or
compunction towards Letty, or the mere dread of being betrayed into
something at once ridiculous and irreparable?

At the same time, it was surprising how often during these weeks he had
occasion to pass through St. James's Square. Once or twice he saw her go
out or come in, and sometimes was near enough to catch the sudden smile
and look which surely must be the smile and look she gave her friends,
and not to every passing stranger! Once or twice, also, he met her for a
few minutes in the Lobby, or on the Terrace, but always in a crowd. She
never repeated her invitation. He divined that she was, perhaps, vexed
with herself for having seemed to press the point on the night of the
second reading.

       *       *       *       *       *

July drew to an end. The famous "workshop clause" had been debated for
nearly ten days, the whole country, as it were, joining in. One evening
in the last week of the month Naseby and Lady Madeleine were sitting
together in a corner of a vast drawing-room in Carlton House Terrace.
The drawing-room was Mrs. Allison's. She had returned about a fortnight
before from Bad Wildheim, and was now making an effort, for the boy's
sake, to see some society. As she moved about the room in her black silk
and lace she was more gentle, but in a sense more inaccessible, than
ever. She talked with everyone, but her eyes followed her son's auburn
head, with its strange upstanding tufts of hair above the fair, freckled
face; or they watched the door, even when she was most animated. She
looked ill and thin, and the many friends who loved her would have
gladly clung about her and cherished her. But it was not easy to cherish
Mrs. Allison.

"Do you see how our hostess keeps a watch for Fontenoy?" said Naseby, in
a low voice, to Lady Madeleine.

Madeleine turned her startled face to him. Nature had given her this
hunted look--the slightly open mouth, the wide eyes of one who
perpetually hears or expects bad news. Naseby did not like it, and had
tried to laugh her out of her scared ways before this. But he had no
sooner laughed at her than he found himself busy--to use Watton's
word--in "stroking" and making it up to her, so tender and clinging was
the girl's whole nature, so golden was her hair, so white her skin!

"Isn't it the division news she is expecting?"

"Yes--but don't look so unhappy! She will bear up--even if they are
beaten. And they will be beaten. Fontenoy's hopes have been going down.
The Government will get through this clause at all events--by a shave."

"What a fuss everybody is making about this Bill!"

"Well, you don't root up whole industries without a fuss. But, certainly,
Maxwell has roused the country finely."

"_She_ will break down if it goes on," said Lady Madeleine, in a
melancholy voice.

Naseby laughed.

"Not at all! Lady Maxwell was made for war--she thrives on it. Don't you,
too, enjoy it?"

"I don't know," said the girl, drearily. "I don't know what I was
made for."

And over her feather fan her wide eyes travelled to the distant ogress
figure of her mother, sitting majestical in black wig and diamonds beside
the Russian Ambassador. Naseby's also travelled thither--unwillingly. It
was a disagreeable fact that Lady Kent had begun to be very amiable to
him of late.

Lady Madeleine's remark made him silent a moment. Then he looked at
her oddly.

"I am going to offend you," he said deliberately. "I am going to tell you
that you were made to wear white satin and pearls, and to look as you
look this evening."

The girl flushed hotly.

"I knew you despised women," she said, in a strained voice, staring back
at him reproachfully. During her months of distress and humiliation she
had found her only comfort in "movements" and "causes"--in the moral
aspirations generally--so far as her mother would allow her to have
anything to do with them. She had tried, for instance, to work with
Marcella Maxwell--to understand her.

But Naseby held his ground.

"Do I despise women because I think they make the grace and poetry of the
world?" he asked her. "And, mind you, I don't draw any lines. Let them be
county councillors and guardians, and inspectors, and queens as much as
they like. I'm very docile. I vote for them. I do as I'm told."

"Only, you don't think that _I_ can do anything useful!"

"I don't think you're cut out for a 'platform woman,' if that's what you
mean," he said, laughing--"even Lady Maxwell isn't. And if she was, she
wouldn't count. The women who matter just now--and you women are getting
a terrible amount of influence--more than you've had any time this half
century--are the women who sit at home in their drawing-rooms, wear
beautiful gowns, and attract the men who are governing the country to
come and see them."

"Lady Maxwell doesn't sit at home and wear beautiful gowns!"

"I vow she does!" said Naseby, with spirit. "I can vouch for it. I was
caught that way myself. Not that I belong to the men who are governing
the country. And now she has roped me to her chariot for good and all.
Ah, Ancoats! how do you do?"

He got up to make room for the master of the house as he spoke. But as
he walked away he said to himself, with a kind of delight: "Good! she
didn't turn a hair."

Lady Madeleine, indeed, received her former suitor with a cool dignity
that might have seemed impossible to anyone so plaintively pretty. He
lingered beside her, twirling his carefully pointed moustache, that
matched the small Richelieu chin, and looking at her with a furtive
closeness from time to time.

"Well--so you have just come back from Paris?" she said indifferently.

"Yes; I stayed a day or two after my mother. One didn't want to come back
to this dull hole."

"Did you see the new piece at the Francais?"

He made a face.

"Not I! One couldn't be caught by such _vieux jeu_ as that! There was a
splendid woman in one of the _cafés chantants_--but I suppose you don't
go to _cafés chantants?"_

"No," said Madeleine, eyeing him over her fan with a composure that
astonished herself. "No, I don't go to _cafés chantants_."

Ancoats looked blank a moment, then resumed, with fervour:

"This woman's divine--_épatant_! Then, at the Chat Noir--but--ah! well,
perhaps you don't go to the Chat Noir?"

"No, I don't go to the Chat Noir."

He fidgeted for a minute. She sat silent. Then he said:

"There are some new French pictures in the next room. Will you come and
see them?"

"Thank you, I think I'll stay here," she said coldly.

He lingered another second or two, then departed. The girl drew a long
breath, then instinctively turned her white neck to see if Naseby had
really left her. Strange! he too, from far away, was looking round. In
another moment he was making his way slowly back to her.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Ah, there's Tressady! Now for news."

The remark was Naseby's. He and Lady Madeleine were, as it happened,
inspecting the very French pictures that the girl had just refused to
look at in Ancoats's company.

But now they hurried back to the main drawing-room where the Tressadys
were already surrounded by an eager crowd.

"Eighteen majority," Tressady was saying. "The Socialists saved it at
the last moment, after growling and threatening till nobody knew what
was going to happen. Forty Ministerialists walked out, twenty more, at
least, were away unpaired, and the Old Liberals voted against the
Government to a man."

"Oh! they'll go--they'll go on the next clause," said an elderly peer,
whose ruddy face glowed with delight. "Serve them right, too! Maxwell's
whole aim is revolution made easy. The most dangerous man we have had for
years! Looks so precious moderate, too, all the time. Tell me how did
Slade vote after all?"

And Tressady found himself buttonholed by one person after another;
pressed for the events and incidents of the evening: how this person had
voted, how that; how Ministers had taken it; whether, after this Pyrrhic
victory there was any chance of the Bill's withdrawal, or at least of
some radical modification in the coming clauses. Almost everyone in the
crowded room belonged, directly or indirectly, to the governing political
class. Barely three people among them could have given a coherent account
of the Bill itself. But to their fathers and brothers and cousins would
belong the passing or the destroying of it. And in this country there is
no game that amuses so large a number of intelligent people as the
political game.

"I don't know why he should look so d--d excited over it," said Lord
Cathedine to Naseby in a contemptuous aside, with a motion of the head
towards Tressady, showing pale and tall above the crowd. "He seems to
have voted straight this time, but he's as shaky as he can be. You
never know what that kind of fellow will be up to. Ah, my lady! and
how are you?"

He made a low bow, and Naseby, turning, saw young Lady Tressady
advancing.

"Are you, too, talking politics?" said Letty, with affected disgust,
giving her hand to Cathedine and a smile to Naseby.

"We will now talk of nothing but your scarlet gown," said Cathedine in
her ear. "Amazing!"

"You like it?" she said, with nonchalant self-possession. "It makes me
look dreadfully wicked, I know." And she threw a complacent glance at a
mirror near, which showed her a gleam of white shoulders in a setting of
flame-coloured tulle.

"Well, you wouldn't wish to look good," said Cathedine, pulling his
black moustache. "Any fool can do that!"

"You cynic!" she said, laughing. "Come and talk to me over there. Have
you got me my invitations?"

Cathedine followed, a disagreeable smile on his full lips, and they
settled themselves in a corner out of the press. Nor were they disturbed
by the sudden hush and parting of the crowd when, five minutes later,
amid a general joyous excitement, Fontenoy walked in.

Mrs. Allison forgot her usual dignity, and hurried to meet the leader as
he came up to her, with his usual flushed and haggard air.

"Magnificent!" she said tremulously. "Now you are going to win!"

He shook his head, and would hardly let himself be congratulated by any
of the admirers, men or women, who pressed to shake hands with him. To
most of them he said, impatiently, that it was no good hallooing till
one was out of the wood, that for his own part he had expected more, and
that the Government might very well rally on the next clause. Then, when
he had effectively chilled the enthusiasm of the room, he drew his
hostess aside.

"Well, and are you happier?" he said to her in a low voice, his whole
expression changing.

"Oh, dear friend! don't think of me," she said, putting out a thin hand
to him with a grateful gesture. "Yes, the boy has been very good--he
gives me a great deal of his time. But how can one _know_--how can one
possibly know?"

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

After a pause, he said:

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

The mother assented eagerly, then said, with a smile:

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

Fontenoy shrugged his shoulders.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

"Why not?"

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

"Why, they have to hearten their friends!"

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

"And may win yet," said George, an odd sparkle in his eye, as he stood
looking over his tiny companion to the door. "Nobody is sure of anything,
I can tell you."

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

"Pray, why?"

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

And she unfurled her fan with a jerk half melancholy, half decided.
Then, suddenly, a laugh flashed over her face; she raised herself
eagerly on tiptoe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER XVII


"Hullo! Are you come back?"

The speaker was George Tressady. He was descending the steps of his club
in Fall Mall, and found his arm caught by Naseby, who had just dismissed
his hansom outside.

"I came back last night. Are you going homewards? I'll walk across the
Square with you."

The two men turned into St. James's Square, and Naseby resumed:

"Yes, we had a most lively campaign. Maxwell spoke better than I ever
heard him."

"The speeches have been excellent reading, too. And you had good
meetings?"

"Splendid! The country is rallying, I can tell you. The North is now
strong for Maxwell and the Bill--or seems to be."

"Just as we are going to kick it out in the House! It's very queer--for
no one could tell, a month ago, how the big towns were going. And it
looked as though London even were deserting them."

"A mere wave, I think. At least, I'll bet you anything they'll win this
Stepney election. Shall we get the division on the hours clause
to-morrow?"

"They say so."

"If you know your own interests, you'll hurry up," said Naseby, smiling.
"The country is going against you."

"I imagine Fontenoy has got his eye on the country! He's been letting the
Socialists talk nonsense till now to frighten the steady-going old
fellows on the other side or putting up our men to mark time. But I saw
yesterday there was a change."

"Between ourselves, hasn't he been talking a good deal of nonsense on his
own account?"

Naseby threw a glance of laughing inquiry at his companion. George
shrugged his shoulders in silence. It had become matter of public remark
during the last few days that Fontenoy was beginning at last to show the
strain of the combat--that his speeches were growing hysterical and his
rule a tyranny. His most trusted followers were now to be heard grumbling
in private over certain aspects of his bearing in the House. He had come
into damaging collision with the Speaker on one or two occasions, and had
made here and there a blunder in tactics which seemed to show a weakening
of self-command. Tressady, indeed, knew enough to wonder that the man's
nerve and coolness had maintained themselves in their fulness so long.

"So Maxwell took a party to the North?" said George, dropping the subject
of Fontenoy.

"Lady Maxwell, of course--myself, Bennett, and Madeleine Penley. It was a
pleasure to see Lady Maxwell. She has been dreadfully depressed in town
lately. But those trade-union meetings in Lancashire and Yorkshire were
magnificent enough to cheer anyone up."

George shook his head.

"I expect they come too late to save the Bill."

"I daresay. Well, one can't help being tremendously sorry for her. I
thought her looking quite thin and ill over it. It makes one doubt about
women in politics! Maxwell will take it a deal more calmly, unless one
misunderstands his cool ways. But I shouldn't wonder if _she_ had a
breakdown."

George made no reply. Naseby talked a little more about Maxwell and the
tour, the critical side of him gaining upon the sympathetic with every
sentence. At the corner of King Street he stopped.

"I must go back to the club. By the way, have you heard anything of
Ancoats lately?"

George made a face.

"I saw him in a hansom last night, late, crossing Regent Circus with a
young woman--_the_ young woman, to the best of my belief."

In the few moments' chat that followed Tressady found that Naseby, like
Fontenoy, regarded him as the new friend who might be able to do
something for a wild fellow, now that mother and old friends were alike
put aside and ignored. But, as he rather impatiently declared--and was
glad to declare--such a view was mere nonsense. He had tried, for the
mother's sake, and could do nothing. As for him, he believed the thing
was very much a piece of _blague_--

"Which won't prevent it from taking him to the devil," said Naseby,
coolly; "and his mother, by all accounts, will die of it. I'm sorry for
her. He seems to think tremendous things of you. I thought you might,
perhaps, have knocked it out of him." George shook his head again, and
they parted.

In truth, Tressady was not particularly flattered by Ancoats's fancy for
him. He did not care enough about the lad in return. Yet, in response to
one or two outbreaks of talk on Ancoats's part--talks full of a stagey
railing at convention--he had tried, for the mother's sake, to lecture
the boy a little--to get in a word or two that might strike home. But
Ancoats had merely stared a moment out of his greenish eyes, had shaken
his queer mane of hair, as an animal shakes off the hand that curbs it,
had changed the subject at once, and departed. Tressady had seen very
little of him since.

And had not, in truth, taken it to heart. He had neither time nor mind to
think about Ancoats. Now, as he walked home to dinner, he put the subject
from him impatiently. His own moral predicament absorbed him--this weird,
silent way in which the whole political scene was changing in aspect and
composition under his eyes, was grouping itself for him round one
figure--one face.

Had he any beliefs left about the Bill itself? He hardly knew. In truth
it was not his reason that was leading him. It now was little more than a
passionate boyish longing to wrench himself free from this odious task of
hurting and defeating Marcella Maxwell. The long process of political
argument was perhaps tending every day to the loosening and detaching of
those easy convictions of a young Chauvinism, that had drawn him
originally to Fontenoy's side. Intellectually he was all adrift. At the
same time he confessed to himself, with perfect frankness, that he could
and would have served Fontenoy happily enough, but for another
influence--another voice.

Yet his old loyalty to Fontenoy tugged sorely at his will. And with this
loyalty of course was bound up the whole question of his own personal
honour and fidelity--his pledges to his constituents and his party.

Was there no rational and legitimate way out? He pondered the political
situation as he walked along with great coolness and precision. When the
division on the hours clause was over the main struggle on the Bill, as
he had all along maintained, would be also at an end. If the Government
carried the clause--and the probability still was that they would carry
it by a handful of votes--the two great novelties of the Bill would have
been affirmed by the House. The homework in the scheduled trades would
have been driven by law into inspected workshops, and the male workers in
these same trades would have been brought under the time-restrictions of
the Factory Acts.

Compared to these two great reforms, or revolutions, the remaining
clause--the landlords clause--touched, as he had already said to
Fontenoy, questions of secondary rank, of mere machinery. Might not a man
thereupon--might not he, George Tressady--review and reconsider his
whole position?

He had told Fontenoy that his vote was safe; but must that pledge extend
to more than the vital stuff, the main proposals of the Bill? The hours
clause?--yes. But after it?

Fontenoy, no doubt, would carry on the fight to the bitter end, counting
on a final and hard-wrung victory. The sanguine confidence which had
possessed him about the time of the second reading was gone. He did not,
Tressady knew, reckon with any certainty on turning out the Government in
this coming division. The miserable majority with which they had carried
the workshops clause would fall again--it would hardly be altogether
effaced. That final wiping-out would come--if indeed it were attained--in
the last contest of all, to which Fontenoy was already heartening and
urging on his followers.

Fontenoy's position, of course, in the matter was clear. It was that of
the leader and the irreconcilable.

But for the private member, who had seen cause to modify some of his
opinions during the course of debate, who had voted loyally with his
party up till now--might not the division on the hours clause be said to
mark a new stage in the Bill--a stage which restored him his freedom?

The House would have pronounced on the main points of the Bill; the
country was rallying in a remarkable and unexpected way to the
Government--might it not be fairly argued that the war had been carried
far enough?

He already, indeed, saw signs of that backing down of opposition which he
had prophesied to Fontenoy. The key to the whole matter lay, he believed,
in the hands of the Old Liberals, that remnant of a once great host, who
were now charging the Conservative Government with new and damaging
concessions to the Socialist tyranny. These men kept a watchful eye on
the country; they had maintained all along that the country had not
spoken. George had already perceived a certain weakening among them. And
now, this campaign of Maxwell's, this new enthusiasm in the industrial
North--no doubt they would have their effect.

He hurried on, closely weighing the whole matter, the prey to a strange
and mingled excitement.

Meanwhile the streets through which he walked had the empty, listless air
which marks a stage from which the actors have departed. It was nearing
the middle of August, and society had fled.

All the same, as he reflected with a relief which was not without its
sting, he and Letty would not be alone at dinner. Some political friends
were coming, stranded, like themselves, in this West End, which had by
now covered up its furniture and shut its shutters.

What a number of smart invitations had been showering upon them during
the last weeks of the season, and were now still pursuing them, for the
country-house autumn! The expansion of their social circle had of late
often filled George with astonishment. No doubt, he said to
himself,--though with a curious doubtfulness,--Letty was very successful;
still, the recent rush of attentions from big people, who had taken no
notice of them on their marriage, was rather puzzling. It had affected
her so far more than himself. For he had been hard pressed by Parliament
and the strike, and she had gone about a good deal alone--appearing,
indeed, to prefer it.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Come out with me on the Terrace," said Marcella to Betty Leven; "I had
rather not wait here. Aldous, will you take us through?"

She and Betty were standing in the inner lobby of the House of Commons.
The division had just been called and the galleries cleared. Members were
still crowding into the House from the Library, the Terrace, and the
smoking-rooms; and all the approaches to the Chamber itself were filled
with a throng about equally divided between the eagerness of victory and
the anxieties of defeat.

Maxwell took the ladies to the Terrace, and left them there, while he
himself went back to the House. Marcella took a seat by the parapet,
leant both hands upon it, and looked absently at the river and the
clouds. It was a cloudy August night, with a broken, fleecy sky, and
gusts of hot wind from the river. A few figures and groups were moving
about the Terrace in the flickering light and shade--waiting like
themselves.

"Will you be very sad if it goes wrongly?" said Betty, in a low voice, as
she took her friend's hand in hers.

"Yes--" said Marcella, simply. Then, after a pause, she added, "It will
be all the harder after this time in the North. Everything will have come
too late."

There was a silence; then Betty said, not without sheepishness, "Frank's
all right."

Marcella smiled. She knew that little Betty had been much troubled by
Frank's tempers of late, and had been haunted by some quite serious
qualms about his loyalty to Maxwell and the Bill. Marcella had never
shared them. Frank Leven had not grit enough to make a scandal and desert
a chief. But Betty's ambition had forced the boy into a life that was
not his; had divided him from the streams and fields, from the country
gentleman's duties and pleasures, that were his natural sphere. In this
hot town game of politics, this contest of brains and ambitions, he was
out of place--was, in fact, wasting both time and capacity. Betty would
have to give way, or the comedy of a lovers' quarrel might grow to
something ill-matched with the young grace and mirth of such a pair of
handsome children.

Marcella meant to tell her friend all this in due time. Now she
could only wait in silence, listening for every sound, Betty's soft
fingers clasping her own, the wind as it blew from the bridge
cooling her hot brow.

"Here they are!" said Betty.

They turned to the open doorway of the House. A rush of feet and voices
approached, and the various groups on the Terrace hurried to meet it.

"Just saved! By George, what a squeak!" said a man's voice in the
distance; and at the same moment Maxwell touched his wife on the
shoulder.

"A majority of ten! Nobody knew how it had gone till the last moment."

She put up her face to him, leaning against him.

"I suppose it means we can't pull through?" He bent to her.

"I should think so. Darling, don't take it to heart so much!"

In the darkness he felt the touch of her lips on his hand. Then she
turned, with a white cheek and smiling mouth, to meet the greetings and
rueful congratulations of the friends that were crowding about them.

The Terrace was soon a moving mass of people, eagerly discussing the
details of the division. The lamps, blown a little by the wind, threw
uncertain lights on faces and figures, as they passed and re-passed
between the mass of building on the one hand and the wavering darkness of
the river on the other. To Marcella, as she stood talking to person after
person--talking she hardly knew what--the whole scene was a dim
bewilderment, whence emerged from time to time faces or movements of
special significance.

Now it was Dowson, the Home Secretary, advancing to greet her, with his
grey shaven face, eyelids somewhat drooped, and the cool, ambiguous look
of one not quite certain of his reception. He had been for long a close
ally of Maxwell's. Marcella had thought him a true friend. But certainly,
in his conduct of the Bill of late there had been a good deal to suggest
the attitude of a man determined to secure himself a retreat, and
uncertain how far to risk his personal fortunes on a doubtful issue. So
that she found herself talking to him with a new formality, in the tone
of those who have been friends, yet begin to foresee the time when they
may be antagonists.

Or, again, it was Fontenoy--Fontenoy's great head and overhanging brows,
thrown suddenly into light against the windy dusk. He was walking with a
young viscount whose curls, clothes, and shoulders were alike
unapproachable by the ordinary man. This youth could not forbear an
exultant twitching of the lip as he passed the Maxwells. Fontenoy
ceremoniously took off his hat. Marcella had a momentary impression of
the passionate, bull-like force of the man, before he disappeared into
the crowd. His eye had wavered as it met hers. Out of courtesy to the
woman he had tried

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/9634