The door opened silently, and there came in a figure that for a moment
was hardly recognised by either Maxwell or his wife. Shrunken, pale, and
grief-stricken, Ancoats's poor mother entered, her eye seeking eagerly
for Maxwell, perceiving nothing else. She was in black, her veil
hurriedly thrown back, and the features beneath it were all blurred by
distress and fatigue.
Marcella hurried to her. Mrs. Allison took her hand in both her own with
the soft, appealing motion habitual to her, then said hastily, still
looking at Maxwell:
"Maxwell, the boy has gone. He left me two days ago. This morning, in my
trouble, I sent for Lord Fontenoy, my kind, kind friend. And he persuaded
me to come to you at once. I begged him to come too--"
She glanced timidly from one to the other, implying many things.
But even with this preface, Maxwell's greeting of his defeated
antagonist was ceremony itself. The natural instinct of such a man is to
mask victory in courtesy. But a paragraph that morning in Fontenoy's
paper--a paragraph that he happened to have seen in Lord Ardagh's
room--had appealed to another natural instinct, stronger and more
primitive. It amazed him that even this emergency and Mrs. Allison's
persuasions could have brought the owner of the paper within his doors
on this particular morning.
Fontenoy, immersed in the correspondence of the morning, had not yet
chanced to see the paragraph, which was Harding Watton's. Yet, if he had,
he could not have shown a more haughty and embarrassed bearing. He was
there under a compulsion he did not know how to resist, a compulsion of
tears and grief; but the instinct for manners, which so often upon
occasion serves the man of illustrious family, as well, almost, as good
feeling or education may serve another, had been for the time weakened in
him by the violences and exhaustion of the political struggle, and he did
not feel certain that he could trust himself. He was smarting still
through every nerve, and the greeting especially that Maxwell's tall wife
extended to him was gall and bitterness. She meanwhile, as she advanced
towards him, was mostly struck with the perfection of his morning dress.
The ultra-correctness and strict fashion that he affected in these
matters were generally a surprise to those who knew him only by
reputation.
After five minutes' question and answer the Maxwells understood something
of the situation. A servant of Ancoats's had been induced to disclose
what he knew. There could be no question that the young fellow had gone
off to Normandy, where he possessed a chalet close to Trouville, in the
expectation that his fair lady would immediately join him there. She had
not yet started. So much Fontenoy had already ascertained. But she had
thrown up a recent engagement within the last few days, and before
Ancoats's flight all Fontenoy's information had pointed to the likelihood
of a _coup_ of some sort. As for the boy himself, he had left his mother
at Castle Luton, three days before, on the pretext of a Scotch visit, and
had instead taken the evening train to Paris, leaving a letter for his
mother in which the influence of certain modern French novels of the
psychological kind could perhaps be detected. "The call of the heart that
drives me from you," wrote this incredible young man, "is something
independent of myself. I wring my hands, but I follow where it leads.
Love has its crimes,--that I admit,--but they are the only road to
experience. And experience is all I care to live for! At any rate, I
cannot accept the limits that you, mother, would impose upon me. Each of
us must be content to recognise the other's personality. I have tried to
reconcile you to an affection that must be content to be irregular. You
repel it and me, under the influence of a bigotry in which I have ceased
to believe. Suffer me, then, to act for myself in this respect. At any
time that you like to call upon me I will be your dutiful son, so long as
this matter is not mentioned between us. And let me implore you not to
bring in third persons. They have already done mischief enough. Against
them I should know how to protect myself."
Maxwell returned the letter with a disgust he could hardly repress.
Everything in it seemed to him as pinchbeck as the passion itself. Mrs.
Allison took it with the same miserable look, which had in it, Marcella
noticed, a certain strange sternness, as of some frail creature nerving
itself to desperate things.
"Now what shall we do?" said Maxwell, abruptly.
Fontenoy moved forward. "I presume you still command the same persons you
set in motion before? Can you get at them to-day?"
Maxwell pondered. "Yes, the clergyman. The solicitor-brother is too far
away. Your idea is to stop the girl from crossing?"
"If it were still possible." Fontenoy dropped his voice, and his gesture
induced Maxwell to follow him to the recess of a distant window.
"The chief difficulty, perhaps," said Fontenoy, resuming, "concerns the
lad himself. His mother, you will understand, cannot run any risk of
being brought in contact with that woman. Nor is she physically fit for
the voyage; but someone must go, if only to content her. There has been
some wild talk of suicide, apparently--mere bombast, of course, like so
much of it, but she has been alarmed."
"Do you propose, then, to go yourself?"
"I am of no use," said Fontenoy, decisively.
Maxwell had cause to know that the statement was true, and did not press
him. They fell into a rapid consultation.
Meanwhile, Marcella had drawn Mrs. Allison to the sofa beside her, and
was attempting a futile task of comfort. Mrs. Allison answered in
monosyllables, glancing hither and thither. At last she said in a low,
swift voice, as though addressing herself, rather than her companion, "If
all fails, I have made up my mind. I shall leave his house. I can take
nothing more from him."
Marcella started. "But that would deprive you of all chance, all hope of
influencing him," she said, her eager, tender look searching the other
woman's face.
"No; it would be my duty," said Mrs. Allison, simply, crossing her hands
upon her lap. Her delicate blue eyes, swollen with weeping, the white
hair, of which a lock had escaped from its usual quiet braids and hung
over her blanched cheeks, her look at once saintly and indomitable--every
detail of her changed aspect made a chill and penetrating impression.
Marcella began to understand what the Christian might do, though the
mother should die of it.
Meanwhile she watched the two men at the other side of the room, with a
manifest eagerness for their return. Presently, indeed, she half rose
and called:
"Aldous!"
Lord Maxwell turned.
"Are you thinking of someone who might go to Trouville?" she asked him.
"Yes, but we can hit on no one," he replied, in perplexity.
She moved towards him, bearing herself with a peculiar erectness
and dignity.
"Would it be possible to ask Sir George Tressady to go?" she said
quietly.
Maxwell looked at her open-mouthed for an instant. Fontenoy, behind him,
threw a sudden, searching glance at the beautiful figure in grey.
"We all know," she said, turning back to the mother, "that Ancoats likes
Sir George."
Mrs. Allison shrunk a little from the clear look. Fontenoy's rage of
defeat, however modified in her presence, had nevertheless expressed
itself to her in phrases and allusions that had both perplexed and
troubled her. _Had_ Marcella indeed made use of her beauty to decoy a
weak youth from his allegiance? And now she spoke his name so simply.
But the momentary wonder died from the poor mother's mind.
"I remember," she said sadly, "I remember he once spoke to me very kindly
about my son."
"And he thought kindly," said Marcella, rapidly; "he is kind at heart.
Aldous! if Cousin Charlotte consents, why not at least put the case to
him? He knows everything. He might undertake what we want, for her
sake,--for all our sakes,--and it might succeed."
The swift yet calm decision of her manner completed Maxwell's
bewilderment.
His eyes sought hers, while the others waited, conscious, somehow, of a
dramatic moment. Fontenoy's flash of malicious curiosity made him even
forget, while it lasted, the little tragic figure on the sofa.
"What do you say, Cousin Charlotte?" said Maxwell at last.
His voice was dry and business-like. Only the wife who watched him
perceived the silent dignity with which he had accepted her appeal.
He went to sit beside Mrs. Allison, stooping over her, while they talked
in a low key. Very soon she had caught at Marcella's suggestion, with an
energy of despair.
"But how can we find him?" she said at last, looking helplessly round
the room, at the very chair, among others, where Tressady had just
been sitting.
Maxwell felt the humour of the situation without relishing it.
"Either at his own house," he said shortly, "or the House of Commons."
"He may have left town this morning. Lord Fontenoy thought"--she looked
timidly at her companion--"that he would be sure to go and explain
himself to his constituents at once."
"Well, we can find out. If you give me instructions,--if you are sure
this is what you want,--we will find out at once. Are you sure?"
"I can think of nothing better," she said, with a piteous gesture.
"And if he goes, I have only one message to give him. Ancoats knows
that I have exhausted every argument, every entreaty. Now let him tell
my son"--her voice grew firm, in spite of her look of anguish--"that
if he insists on surrendering himself to a life of sin I can bear him
company no more. I shall leave his house, and go somewhere by myself,
to pray for him."
Maxwell tried to soothe her, and there was some half-whispered talk
between them, she quietly wiping away her tears from time to time.
Meanwhile, Marcella and Fontenoy sat together a little way off, he at
first watching Mrs. Allison, she silent, and making no attempt to play
the hostess. Gradually, however, the sense of her presence beside him,
the memory of Tressady's speech, of the scene in the House of the night
before, began to work in his veins with a pricking, exciting power. His
family was famous for a certain drastic way with women; his father, the
now old and half-insane Marquis, had parted from his mother while
Fontenoy was still a child, after scenes that would have disgraced an
inn parlour. Fontenoy himself, in his reckless youth, had simply avoided
the whole sex, so far as its reputable members were concerned; till one
woman by sympathy, by flattery perhaps, by the strange mingling in
herself of iron and gentleness, had tamed him. But there were brutal
instincts in his blood, and he became conscious of them as he sat beside
Marcella Maxwell.
Suddenly he broke out, bending forward, one hand on his knee, the other
nervously adjusting the eyeglass without which he was practically blind.
"I imagine your side had foreseen last night better than we had?"
She drew herself together instantly.
"One can hardly say. It was evident, wasn't it, that the House as a whole
was surprised? Certainly, no one could have foreseen the numbers."
She met his look straight, her white hand playing with Mrs.
Allison's card.
"Oh! a slide of that kind once begun goes like the wind," said Fontenoy.
"Well, and are you pleased with your Bill--not afraid of your
promises--of all the Edens you have held out?"
The smile that he attempted roused such ogerish associations in Marcella,
she must needs say something to give colour to the half-desperate laugh
that caught her.
"Did you suppose we should be already _en penitence?_" she asked him.
The man's wrath overcame him. So England--all the serious forces of the
country--were to be more and more henceforward at the mercy of this kind
of thing! He had begun the struggle with a scornful disbelief in current
gossip. He--politically and morally the creation of a woman--had yet not
been able to bring himself to fear a woman. And now he sat there,
fiercely saying to himself that this woman, playing the old game under
new names, had undone him.
"Ah! I see," he said. "You are of the mind of the Oxford don--never
regret, never retract, never apologise?"
The small, reddish eyes, like needle-points, fixed the face before him.
She looked up, her beautiful lips parting. She felt the insult--marvelled
at it! On such an errand, in her own house! Scorn was almost lost in
astonishment.
"A quotation which nobody gets right--isn't it so?" she said calmly. "If
a wise man said it, I suppose he meant, 'Don't explain yourself to the
wrong people,' which is good advice, don't you think?"
She rose as she spoke, and moved away from him, that she might listen to
what her husband was saying. Fontenoy was left to reflect on the folly of
a man who, being driven to ask a kindness of his enemy, cannot keep his
temper in the enemy's house. Yet his temper had been freshly tried since
he entered it. The whole suggestion of Tressady's embassy was to himself
galling in the extreme. "There is a meaning in it," he thought; "of
course she thinks it will save appearances!" There was no extravagance,
no calumny, that this cold critic of other men's fervours was not for the
moment ready to believe.
Nevertheless, as he threw himself back in his chair, and his eye caught
Mrs. Allison's bent figure on the other side of the room, he knew that he
must needs submit--he did submit--to anything that could give that torn
heart ease. Of his two passions, one, the passion for politics, seemed
for the moment to have lost itself in disgust and disappointment; to the
other he clung but the more strongly. Once or twice in her talk with
Maxwell, Mrs. Allison raised her gentle eyes and looked across to
Fontenoy. "Are you there, my friend?" the glance seemed to say, and a
thrill spread itself through the man's rugged being. Ah, well! the
follies of this young scapegrace must wear themselves out in time, and
either he would marry and so free his mother, or he would so outrage her
conscience that she would separate herself from him. Then would come
other people's rewards.
Presently, indeed, Mrs. Allison rose from her seat and advanced to him
with hurried steps.
"We have settled it, I think; Maxwell will do all he can. It seems hard
to trust so much to a stranger like Sir George Tressady, but if he will
go--if Ancoats likes him? We must do the best, mustn't we?"
She raised to him her delicate, small face, in a most winning dependence.
Fontenoy did not even attempt resistance.
"Certainly--it is not a chance to lose. May I suggest also"--he looked
at Maxwell--"that there is no time to lose?"
"Give me ten minutes, and I am off," said Maxwell, hurriedly carrying a
bundle of unopened letters to a distance. He looked through them, to see
if anything especially urgent required him to give instructions to his
secretary before leaving the house.
"Shall I take you home?" said Fontenoy to Mrs. Allison.
She drew her thick veil round her head and face, and said some tremulous
words, which unconsciously deepened the gloom on Fontenoy's face.
Apparently they were to the effect that before going home she wished to
see the Anglican priest in whom she especially confided, a certain Father
White, who was to all intents and purposes her director. For in his
courtship of this woman of fifty, with her curious distinction and her
ethereal charm, which years seemed only to increase, Fontenoy had not one
rival, but two--her son and her religion.
Fontenoy's fingers barely touched those of Maxwell and his wife. As he
closed the door behind Mrs. Allison, leaving the two together, he said to
himself contemptuously that he pitied the husband.
When the latch had settled, Maxwell threw down his letters and crossed
the room to his wife.
"I only half understood you," he said, a flush rising in his face. "You
really mean that we, on this day of all days--that I--am to personally
ask this kindness of George Tressady?"
"I do!" she cried, but without attempting any caress. "If I could only go
and ask it myself!" "That would be impossible!" he said quickly.
"Then you, dear husband--dear love!--go and ask it for me! Must we
not--oh! do see it as I do!--must we not somehow make it possible to be
friends again, to wipe out that--that half-hour once for all?"--she threw
out her hand in an impetuous gesture. "If you go, he will feel that is
what we mean--he will understand us at once--there is nothing vile in
him--nothing! Dear, he never said a word to me I could resent till this
morning. And, alack, alack! was it somehow my fault?" She dropped her
face a moment on the back of the chair she held. "How I am to play my own
part--well! I must think. But I cannot have such a thing on my heart,
Aldous--I cannot!"
He was silent a moment; then he said:
"Let me understand, at least, what it is precisely that we are doing. Is
the idea that it should be made possible for us all to meet again as
though nothing had happened?"
She shrank a moment from the man's common sense; then replied,
controlling herself:
"Only not to leave the open sore--to help him to forget! He must know--he
does know"--she held herself proudly--"that I have no secrets from you.
So that when the time comes for remembering, for thinking it over, he
will shrink from you, or hate you. Whereas, what I want"--her eyes filled
with tears--"is that he should _know_ you--only that! I ought to have
brought it about long ago."
"Are you forgetting that I owe him this morning my political existence?"
The voice betrayed the inner passion.
"He would be the last person to remember it!" she cried. "Why not take it
quite, quite simply?--behave so as to say to him, without words, 'Be our
friend--join with us in putting out of sight what hurts us no less than
you to think of. Shut the door upon the old room--pass with us into a
new!'--oh! if I could explain!"
She hid her face in her hands again.
"I understand," he said, after a long pause. "It is very like you. I am
not quite sure it is very wise. These things, to my mind, are best left
to end themselves. But I promised Mrs. Allison; and what you ask, dear,
you shall have. So be it."
She lifted her head hastily, and was dismayed by the signs of
agitation in him as he turned away. She pursued him timidly, laying
her hand on his arm.
"And then--"
Her voice sank to its most pleading note. He caught her hand; but she
withdrew herself in haste.
"And then," she went on, struggling for a smile, "then you and I have
things to settle. Do you think I don't know that I have made all your
work, and all your triumph, gall and bitterness to you--do you think I
don't know?"
She gazed at him with a passionate intensity through her tears, yet by
her gesture forbidding him to come near her. What man would not have
endured such discomforts a thousand times for such a look?
He stooped to her.
"We are to talk that out, then, when I come back?--Please give these
letters to Saunders--there is nothing of importance. I will go first to
Tressady's house."
* * * * *
Maxwell drove away through the sultry streets, his mind running on his
task. It seemed to him that politics had never put him to anything so
hard. But he began to plan it with his usual care and precision. The
butler who opened the door of the Upper Brook Street house could only say
that his master was not at home.
"Shall I find him, do you imagine, at the House of Commons?"
The butler could not say. But Lady Tressady was in, though just on the
point of going out. Should he inquire?
But the visitor made it plain that he had no intention of disturbing Lady
Tressady, and would find out for himself. He left his card in the
butler's hands.
"Who was that, Kenrick?" said a sharp voice behind the man as the hansom
drove away. Letty Tressady, elaborately dressed, with a huge white hat
and lace parasol, was standing on the stairs, her pale face peering out
of the shadows. The butler handed her the card, and telling him to get
her a cab at once, she ran up again to the drawing-room.
Meanwhile Maxwell sped on towards Westminster, frowning over his problem.
As he drove down Whitehall the sun brightened to a naked midday heat,
throwing its cloak of mists behind it. The gilding on the Clock Tower
sparkled in the light; even the dusty, airless street, with its withered
planes, was on a sudden flooded with gaiety. Two or three official or
Parliamentary acquaintances saluted the successful minister as he passed;
and each was conscious of a certain impatience with the gravity of the
well-known face. That a great man should not be content to look victory,
as well as win it, seemed a kind of hypocrisy.
In the House of Commons, a few last votes and other oddments of the now
dying session were being pushed through to an accompaniment of empty
benches. Tressady was not there, nor in the library. Maxwell made his way
to the upper lobby, where writing-tables and materials are provided in
the window-recesses for the use of members.
He had hardly entered the lobby before he caught sight at its further end
of the long straight chin and fair head of the man he was in quest of.
And almost at the same moment, Tressady, who was sitting writing amid a
pile of letters and papers, lifted his eyes and saw Lord Maxwell
approaching.
He started, then half rose, scattering his papers. Maxwell bowed as he
neared the table, then stopped beside it, without offering his hand.
"I fear I may be disturbing you," he said, with simple but cold courtesy.
"The fact is I have come down here on an urgent matter, which may perhaps
be my excuse. Could you give me twenty minutes, in my room?"
"By all means," said Tressady. He tried to put his papers together, but
to his own infinite annoyance his hand shook. He seemed hardly to know
what to do with them.
"Do not let me hurry you," said Maxwell, in the same manner. "Will you
follow me at your leisure?"
"I will follow you immediately," said Tressady; "as soon as I have put
these under lock and key."
His visitor departed. Tressady remained standing a moment by the table,
his blue eyes, unusually wide open, fixed absently on the river, a dark
red flush overspreading the face. Then he rapidly threw his papers
together into a black bag that stood near, and walked with them to his
locker in the wall.
For an hour after he left Marcella Maxwell he had wandered blindly up
and down the Green Park; at the end of it a sudden impulse had driven
him to the House, as his best refuge both from Letty and himself. There
he found waiting for him a number of letters, and a sheaf of telegrams
besides from his constituency, with which he had just begun to grapple
when Maxwell interrupted him. Some hours of hard writing and thinking
might, he thought, bring him by reaction to some notion of what to do
with the next days and nights--how to take up the business of his
private life again.
Now, as he withdrew his key from the lock, in a corridor almost empty of
inhabitants, abstraction seized him once more. He leant against the wall
a moment, with his hands in his pockets, seeing her face--the tears on
her cheek--feeling the texture of her dress against his lips. Barely two
hours ago! No doubt she had confided all to Maxwell in the interval. The
young fellow burnt with mingled rage and shame. This interview with the
husband seemed to transform it all to vaudeville, if not to farce. How
was he to get through it with any dignity and self-command? Moreover, a
passionate resentment towards Maxwell developed itself. His telling of
his secret had been no matter for a common scandal, a vulgar jealousy.
_She_ knew that--she could not have so misrepresented him. A sense of the
situation to which he had brought himself on all sides made his pride
feel itself in the grip of something that asked his submission. Yet why,
and to whom?
He walked along through the interminable corridors towards Maxwell's room
in the House of Lords, a prey to what afterwards seemed to him the
meanest moment of his life. Little knowing the pledges that a woman had
given for him, he did say to himself that Maxwell owed him much--that he
was not called upon to bear everything from a man he had given back to
power. And all the time his thoughts built a thorn-hedge about her face,
her pity. Let him see them no more, not even in the mirror of the mind.
Great heaven! what harm could such as he do to her?
By the time he reached Maxwell's door he seemed to himself as hard and
cool as usual. As he entered, the minister was standing by an oriel
window, overlooking the river, turning over the contents of a
despatch-box that had just been brought him. He advanced at once; and
Tressady noticed that he had already dismissed his secretary.
"Will you sit by the window?" said Maxwell. "The day promises to be
extraordinarily hot."
Tressady took the seat assigned him. Maxwell's grey eye ran over the
young man's figure and bearing. Then he bent forward from a chair on the
other side of a small writing-table.
"You will probably have guessed the reason of my intrusion upon you--you
and I have already discussed this troublesome affair--and the kind manner
in which you treated our anxieties then--"
"Ancoats!" exclaimed Tressady, with a start he could not control. "You
wish to consult me about Ancoats?"
A flash of wonder crossed the other's mind. "He imagined--" Instinctively
Maxwell's opening mildness stiffened into a colder dignity.
"I fear we may be making an altogether improper claim upon you," he said
quietly; "but this morning, about an hour ago, Ancoats's mother came to
us with the news that he had left her two days ago, and was now
discovered to be at Trouville, where he has a chalet, waiting for this
girl, of whom we all know, to join him. You will imagine Mrs. Allison's
despair. The entanglement is in itself bad enough. But she--I think you
know it--is no ordinary woman, nor can she bring any of the common
philosophy of life to bear upon this matter. It seems to be sapping her
very springs of existence, and the impression she left upon myself--and
upon Lady Maxwell"--he said the words slowly--"was one of the deepest
pity and sorrow. As you also know, I believe, I have till now been able
to bring some restraining influence to bear upon the girl, who is of
course not a girl, but a very much married woman, with a husband always
threatening to turn up and avenge himself upon her. There is a good man,
one of those High Church clergymen who interest themselves specially in
the stage, who has helped us many times already. I have telegraphed to
him, and expect him here before long. We know that she has not yet left
London, and it may be possible again, at the eleventh hour, to stop her.
But that--"
"Is not enough," said Tressady, quickly, raising his head. "You want
someone to grapple with Ancoats?"
Face and voice were those of another man--attentive, normal, sympathetic.
Maxwell observed him keenly.
"We want someone to go to Ancoats; to represent to him his mother's
determination to leave him for good if this disgraceful affair goes on;
to break the shock of the girl's non-arrival to him, if, indeed, we
succeed in stopping her; and to watch him for a day or two, in case there
should be anything in the miserable talk of suicide with which he seems
to have been threatening his mother."
"Oh! Suicide! Ancoats!" said Tressady, throwing back his head.
"We rate him, apparently, much the same," said Maxwell, drily. "But it
is not to be wondered at that the mother should be differently affected.
She sent you"--the speaker paused a moment--"what seemed to me a
touching message."
Tressady bent forward.
"'Tell him that I have no claim upon him--that I am ashamed to ask this
of him. But he once said some kind words to me about my son, and I know
that Ancoats desired his friendship. His help _might_ save us. I can say
no more.'"
Tressady looked up quickly, reddening involuntarily.
"Was Fontenoy there--did he agree?"
"Fontenoy agreed," said Maxwell, in the same measured voice. "In fact,
you grasp our petition. To speak frankly, my wife suggested it, and I was
deputed to bear it to you. But I need not say that we are quite prepared
to find that you are not able to do what we have ventured to ask of you,
or that your engagements will not permit it."
A strange gulp rose in Tressady's throat. He understood--oh! he
understood her--perfectly.
He leant back in his chair, looking through the open window to the
Thames. A breeze had risen and was breaking up the thunderous sky into
gay spaces of white and blue. The river was surging and boiling under the
tide, and strings of barges were mounting with the mounting water,
slipping fast along the terrace wall. The fronts of the various buildings
opposite rose in shadow against the dazzling blue and silver of the
water. Here over the river, even for this jaded London, summer was still
fresh; every mast and spar, every track of boat or steamer in the burst
of light, struck the eye with sharpness and delight.
Each line and hue printed itself on Tressady's brain. Then he turned
slowly to his companion. Maxwell sat patiently waiting for his reply; and
for the first time Tressady received, as it were, a full impression of a
personality he had till now either ignored or disliked. In youth Maxwell
had never passed for a handsome man. But middle life and noble habit were
every year giving increased accent and spiritual energy to the youth's
pleasant features; and Nature as she silvered the brown hair, and drove
deep the lines of thought and experience, was bringing more than she took
away. A quiet, modest fellow Maxwell would be to the end; not witty; not
brilliant; more and more content to bear the yoke of the great
commonplaces of life as subtlety and knowledge grew; saying nothing of
spiritual things, only living them--yet a man, it seemed, on whom England
would more and more lay the burden of her fortunes.
Tressady gazed at him, shaken with new reverences, new compunctions.
Maxwell's eyes were drawn to his--mild, penetrating eyes, in which for an
instant Tressady seemed to read what no words would ever say to him. Then
he sprang up.
"There is an afternoon train put on this month. I can catch it. Tell me,
if you can, a few more details."
Maxwell took out a half-sheet of notes from his pocket, and the two men
standing together beside the table went with care into a few matters it
was well for Tressady to know. Tressady threw a quick intelligence into
his questions that inevitably recalled to Maxwell the cut-and-thrust of
his speech on the preceding evening; nor behind his rapid discussion of a
vulgar business did the constrained emotion of his manner escape his
companion.
At last all was settled. At the last moment an uneasy question rose in
Maxwell's mind. "Ought _we_, at such a crisis, to be sending him away
from his wife?" But he could not bring himself to put it, even lightly,
into words, and as it happened Tressady did not leave him in doubt.
"I am glad you caught me," he said nervously, in what seemed an awkward
pause, while he looked for his hat, forgetting where he had put it. "I
was intending to leave London to-night. But my business can very well
wait till next week. Now I think I have everything."
He gathered up a new Guide-Chaix that Maxwell had put into his hand, saw
that the half-sheet of notes was safely stowed into his pocket-book, and
took up his hat and stick. As he spoke, Maxwell had remembered the
situation and Mrs. Allison's remark. No doubt Tressady had proposed to go
north that night on a mission of explanation to his Market Malford
constituents, and it struck one of the most scrupulous of men with an
additional pang, that he should be thus helping to put private motives in
the way of public duty. But what was done was done. And it seemed
impossible that either should speak a word of politics.
"I ought to say," said Tressady, pausing once more as they moved
together towards the door, "that I have not ultimately much hope for
Mrs. Allison. If this entanglement is put aside, there will be something
else. Trouville itself, in August, I should imagine, is a place of
_bonnes fortunes_ for the man who wants them, and Ancoats's mind runs to
such things."
He spoke with a curious eagerness, like one who pleads that his good-will
shall not be judged by mere failure or success.
Maxwell raised his shoulders.
"Nothing that can happen will in the least affect our gratitude to
_you_," he said gravely.
"Gratitude!" muttered the young man under his breath. His lip trembled.
He looked uncertainly at his companion. Maxwell did not offer his hand,
yet as he opened the door for his visitor there was a quiet cordiality
and kindness in his manner that made his renewed words of thanks sound
like a strange music in Tressady's ears.
* * * * *
When the minister was once more alone he walked back to the window, and
stood looking down thoughtfully on the gay pageant of the river. She was
right--she was always right. There was nothing vile in that young fellow,
and his face had a look of suffering it pained Maxwell to remember. Why
had he personally not come to know him better? "I think too little of
men, too much of machinery," he said to himself, despondently;
"unconsciously I leave the dealing with human beings far too often to
her, and then I wonder that a man sees and feels her as she is!"
Yet as he stood there in the sunshine a feeling of moral relief stole
upon him, the feeling that rewards a man who has tried to deal greatly
with some common and personal strait. Some day, not yet, he would make
Tressady his friend. He calmly felt it to be within his power.
Unless the wife!--He threw up his hand, and turned back to his
writing-table. What was to be done with that letter? Had Tressady
any knowledge of it? Maxwell could not conceive it possible that he
had. But, no doubt, it would come to his knowledge, as well as
Maxwell's reply.
For he meant to reply, and as he glanced at the clock on his table he saw
that he had just half an hour before his clergyman-visitor arrived.
Instantly, in his methodical way, he sat down to his task, labouring it,
however, with toil and difficulty, when it was once begun.
The few words he ultimately wrote ran as follows:
"Dear Lady Tressady,--Your letter was a great surprise and a great pain
to me. I believe you will recognise before long that you wrote it under a
delusion, and that you have said in it both unkind and unjust things of
one who is totally incapable of wronging you or anyone else. My wife read
your letter, for she and I have no secrets. She will try and see you at
once, and I trust you will not refuse to see her. She will prove to you,
I think, that you have been giving yourself quite needless torture, for
which she has no responsibility, but for which she is none the less
sorrowful and distressed.
"I have treated your letter in this way because it is impossible to
ignore the pain and trouble which drove you to write. I need not say that
if it became necessary for me to write or act in another way, I should
think only of my wife. But I will trust to the effect upon you of her own
words and character; and I cannot believe that you will misconstrue the
generosity that prompts her to go to you.
"Is it not possible, also, that your misunderstanding of your husband
may be in its own way as grave as your misunderstanding of Lady Maxwell?
Forgive an intrusive question, and believe me,
"Yours faithfully,
"MAXWELL."
He read it anxiously over and over, then took a hasty copy of it, and
finally sealed and sent it. He was but half satisfied with it. How was
one to write such a letter without argument or recrimination? The poor
thing had a vulgar, spiteful, little soul; that was clear from her
outpouring. It was also clear that she was miserable; nor could Maxwell
disguise from himself that in a sense she had ample cause. From that hard
fact, with all its repellent and unpalatable consequences, a weaker man
would by now have let his mind escape, would at any rate have begun to
minimise and make light of George Tressady's act of the morning. In
Maxwell, on the contrary, after a first movement of passionate resentment
which had nothing whatever in common with ordinary jealousy, that act was
now generating a compelling and beneficent force, that made for healing
and reparation. Marcella had foreseen it, and in her pain and penitence
had given the impulse. For all things are possible to a perfect
affection, working through a nature at once healthy and strong.
Yet when Maxwell was once more established in his room at the Privy
Council, overwhelmed with letters, interviews, and all the routine of
official business, those who had to do with him noticed an unusual
restlessness in their even-tempered chief. In truth, whenever his work
left him free for a moment, all sorts of questions would start up in his
mind: "Is she there? Is that woman hurting and insulting her? Can I do
nothing? My love! my poor love!"
* * * * *
But Marcella's plans so far had not prospered.
When George Tressady, after hastily despatching his most urgent business
at the House, drove up to his own door in the afternoon just in time to
put his things together and catch a newly-put-on dining-train to Paris,
he found the house deserted. The butler reminded him that Letty
accompanied by Miss Tulloch had gone to Hampton Court to join a river
party for the day. George remembered; he hated the people she was to be
with, and instinct told him that Cathedine would be there.
A rush of miserable worry overcame him. Ought he to be leaving her?
Then, in the darkness of the hall, he caught sight of a card lying on the
table. _Her card_! Amazement made him almost dizzy, while the man at his
arm explained.
"Her ladyship called just after luncheon. She thought she would have
found my lady in--before she went out. But her ladyship is coming again,
probably this evening, as she wished to see Lady Tressady particularly."
Tressady gave the man directions to pack for him immediately, then took
the card into his study, and stood looking at it in a tumult of feeling.
Ah! let him begone--out of her way! Oh, heavenly goodness and compassion!
It seemed to him already that an angel had trodden this dark house, and
that another air breathed in it.
That was his first thought. Then the rush of sore longing, of unbearable
self-contempt, stirred all his worser self to life again. Had she not
better after all have left him and Letty alone! What did such lives as
theirs matter to her?
He ran upstairs to make his last preparations, wrote a few lines to Letty
describing Mrs. Allison's plight and the errand on which he was bound,
and in half an hour was at Charing Cross.