CHAPTER XX

"Did you ring, my lady?"

"Yes. Kenrick, if Lady Maxwell calls to see me to-night, you will say,

please, that I am particularly engaged, and unable to receive anyone."

Letty Tressady had just come in from her river party. Dressed in a

delicate gown of lace and pale green chiffon, she was standing beside her

writing-table with Lady Maxwell's card in her hand. Kenrick had given it

to her on her arrival, together with the message which had accompanied

it, and she had taken a few minutes to think it over. As she gave the man

his order, the energy of the small figure, as it half turned towards the

door, the brightness of the eyes under the white veil she had just thrown

back, no less than the emphasis of her tone, awakened in the butler the

clear perception that neither the expected visit nor his mistress's

directions were to be taken as ordinary affairs. After he left the

drawing-room, Grier passed him on the stairs. He gave her a slight

signal, and the two retired to some nether region to discuss the secrets

of their employers.

Meanwhile Letty, having turned on the electric light in the room, walked

to the window and set it half open behind the curtain. In that way she

would hear the carriage approaching, it was between eight and nine

o'clock. No doubt Lady Maxwell would drive round after dinner.

Then, still holding the card lightly in her hand, she threw herself on

the sofa. She was tired, but so excited that she could not rest--first,

by the memory of the day that had just passed; still more by the thought

of the rebuff she was about to administer to the great lady who had

affronted her. No doubt her letter had done its work. The remembrance of

it tilled her with an uneasy joy. Did George know of it by now? She did

not care. Lady Maxwell, of course, was coming to try and appease her, to

hush it up. There had been a scene, it was to be supposed, between her

and her stiff husband. Letty gloated over the dream of it. Tears,

humiliation, reproaches, she meted them all out in plenty to the woman

she hated. Nor would things end there. Why, London was full of gossip!

Harding's paragraph--for of course it was Harding's--had secured that.

How clever of him! Not a name!--not a thing that could be taken hold

of!--yet so clear. Well!--if she, Letty, was to be trampled on and set

aside, at any rate other people should suffer too.

So George had gone off to France, leaving her alone, without "Good-bye."

She did not believe a word of his excuse; and, if it were true, it was

only another outrage that he should have thought twice of such a matter

at such a crisis. But it was probably a mere device of his and

_hers_--she would find out for what.

Her state of tension was too great to allow her to stay in the same place

for more than a few minutes. She got up, and went to the glass before the

mantelpiece. Taking out the pins that held her large Gainsborough hat,

she arranged her hair with her hands, putting the curls of the fringe in

their right place, fastening up some stray ends. She had given orders, as

we have seen, to admit no one, and was presumably going to bed.

Nevertheless, her behaviour was instinctively the behaviour of one who

expects a guest.

When, more or less to her satisfaction, she had restored the symmetry of

the little curled and crimped head, she took her face between her hands,

and stared at her own reflection. Memories of the party she had just

left, of the hot river, the slowly filling locks, the revelry, the

champagne, danced in her mind, especially of a certain walk through a

wood. She defiantly watched the face in the glass grow red, the eyelids

quiver. Then, like the tremor from some volcanic fire far within, a

shudder ran through her. She dropped her head on her hands. She

hated--_hated_ him! Was it to-morrow evening she had told him he might

come? She would go down to Ferth.

Wheels in the quiet street! Letty flew to the window like an excited

child, her green and white twinkling through the room.

A brougham, and a tall figure in black stepping slowly out of it. Letty

sheltered herself behind a curtain, held her breath, and listened.

Presently her lower lip dropped a little. What was Kenrick about? The

front door had closed, and Lady Maxwell had not re-entered her carriage.

She opened the drawing-room door with care, and was stooping over the

banisters when she saw Kenrick on the stairs. He seemed to be coming

from the direction of George's study.

"What have you been doing?" she asked him in a hard under-voice, looking

at him angrily. "I told you not to let Lady Maxwell in."

"I told her, my lady, that you were engaged and could see no one. Then

her ladyship asked if she might write a few lines to you and send them

up, asking when you would be able to see her. So I showed her into Sir

George's study, my lady, and she is writing at Sir George's desk."

"You should have done nothing of the sort," said Letty, sharply. "What is

that letter?"

She took it from his hand before the butler, somewhat bewildered by the

responsibilities of his position, could explain that he had just found it

in the letterbox, where it might have been lying some little time, as he

had heard no knock.

She let him go downstairs again, to await Lady Maxwell's exit, and

herself ran back to read her letter, her heart beating, for the address

of the sender was on the envelope.

When she had finished she threw it down, half suffocating.

"So I am to be lectured and preached to besides. Good heavens! In his

lofty manner, I suppose, that people talk of. Prig--odious,

insufferable prig! So I have mistaken George, have I? My own husband!

And insulted her--_her_! And she is actually downstairs, writing to me,

in my own house!"

She locked her hands, and began stormily to pace the room again. The

image of her rival, only a few feet from her, bending over George's

table, worked in her with poisonous force. Suddenly she swept to the bell

and rang it. A door opened downstairs. She ran to the landing.

"Kenrick!"

"Yes, my lady." She heard a pause, and the soft rustle of a dress.

"Tell Lady Maxwell, please"--she struggled hard for the right, the

dignified tone--"that if it is not too late for her to stay, I am now

able to see her."

She hurried back into the drawing-room and waited. _Would_ she come?

Letty's whole being was now throbbing with one mad desire. If Kenrick

let her go!

But steps approached; the door was thrown open.

Marcella Maxwell came in timidly, very pale, the dark eyes shrinking from

the sudden light of the drawing-room. She was bareheaded, and wore a long

cloak of black lace over her white evening dress. Letty's flash of

thought as she saw her was twofold: first, hatred of her beauty, then

triumph in the evident nervousness with which her visitor approached her.

Without making the slightest change of position, the mistress of the

house spoke first.

"Will you please tell me," she said, in her sharpest, thinnest voice, "to

what I owe the honour of this visit?"

Marcella paused half-way towards her hostess.

"I read your letter to my husband," she said quietly, though her voice

shook, "and I thought you would hardly refuse to let me speak to you

about it."

"Then perhaps you will sit down," said Letty, in the same voice; and she

seated herself.

If she had wished to heighten the effect of her reception by these small

discourtesies she did not succeed. Rather, Marcella's self-possession

returned under them. She looked round simply for a chair, brought one

forward within speaking distance of her companion, moving once more, in

her thin, tall grace, with all that unconscious dignity Letty had so

often envied and admired from a distance.

But neither dignity nor grace made any bar to the emotion that filled

her. She bent forward, clasping her hands on her knee.

"Your letter to my husband made me so unhappy--that I could not help

coming," she said, in a tone that was all entreaty, all humbleness.

"Not--of course--that it seemed to either of us a true or just account of

what had happened"--she drew herself up gently--"but it made me

realise--though indeed I had realised it before I read it--that in my

friendship with your husband I had been forgetting--forgetting those

things--one ought to remember most. You will let me put things, won't

you, in my own way, as they seem to me? At Castle Luton Sir George

attracted me very much. The pleasure of talking to him there first made

me wish to try and alter some of his views--to bring him across my poor

people--to introduce him to our friends. Then, somehow, a special bond

grew up between him and me with regard to this particular struggle in

which my husband and I"--she dropped her eyes that she might not see

Letty's heated face--"have been so keenly interested. But what I ought to

have felt--from the very first--was, that there could be, there ought to

have been, something else added. Married people "--she spoke hurriedly,

her breath rising and falling--"are not two, but one--and my first step

should have been to come--and--and ask you to let me know you too--to

find out what your feelings were, whether you wished for a

friendship--that--that I had perhaps no right to offer to Sir George

alone. I have been looking into my own heart"--her voice trembled

again--"and I see that fault, that great fault. To be excluded myself

from any strong friendship my husband might make, would be agony to me!"

The frank, sudden passion of her lifted eyes sent a thrill even through

Letty's fierce and hardly, kept silence. "And that I wanted to say to

you, first of all. I wronged my own conception of what marriage should

be, and you were quite, quite right to be angry!"

"Well, I think it's quite clear, isn't it, that you forgot from the

beginning George had a wife?" cried Letty, in her most insulting voice.

"That certainly can't be denied. Anybody could see that at Castle Luton!"

Marcella looked at her in perplexity. What could suggest to her how to

say the right word, touch the right chord? Would she be able to do more

than satisfy her own conscience and then go, leaving this strange little

fury to make what use she pleased of her visit and her avowals?

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

"Perhaps it is of no use for me to ask you to remember how full our

minds--my husband's and mine--have been of one subject--one set of

ideas. But, if I am not keeping you too long, I should like to give you

an account, from my point of view, of the friendship between Sir George

and myself. I think I can remember every talk of ours, from our first

meeting in the hospital down to--down to this morning."

"This morning!" cried Letty, springing up. "This _morning_! He went to

you to-day?"

The little face convulsed with passion raised an intolerable distress

in Marcella.

"Yes, he came to see me," she said, her dark eyes, full of pain, full,

too, once more, of entreaty, fixed upon her interrogator. "But do let me

tell you! I never saw anyone in deeper trouble--trouble about

you--trouble about himself."

Letty burst into a wild laugh.

"Of course! No doubt he went to complain of me--that I flirted--that I

ill-treated his mother--that I spent too much money--and a lot of other

pleasant little things. Oh! I can imagine it perfectly. Besides that, I

suppose he went to be thanked. Well, he deserved _that_. He has thrown

away his career to please you; so if you didn't thank him, you ought!

Everybody says his position in Parliament now isn't worth a straw--that

he must resign--which is delightful, of course, for his wife. And I saw

it all from the beginning--I understood exactly what you _wanted_ to do

at Castle Luton--only I couldn't believe then--I was only six weeks

married--"

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

with a sob.

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

It was the wife as such, slighted and set aside, that appealed to the

imagination, the remorse of this happy, this beloved woman. She rose

quickly, she held out her hands, looking down upon the little venomous

creature who had been pouring these insults upon her.

"Don't--_don't_ believe such things," she said, with sobbing breath. "I

never wronged you consciously for a moment. Can't you believe that Sir

George and I became friends because we cared for the same kind of

questions; because I--I was full of my husband's work and everything that

concerned it; because I liked to talk about it, to win him friends. If it

had ever entered my mind that such a thing could pain and hurt you--"

"Where have you sent him to-day?" cried Letty, peremptorily, interrupting

her, while she drew her handkerchief fiercely across her eyes.

Instantly Marcella was conscious of the difficulty of explaining her own

impulse and Maxwell's action.

"Sir George told me," she said, faltering, "that he must go away from

London immediately, to think out some trouble that was oppressing him.

Only a few minutes after he left our house we heard from Mrs. Allison

that she was in great distress about her son. She came, in fact, to beg

us to help her find him. I won't go into the story, of course; I am sure

you know it. My husband and I talked it over. It occurred to us that if

Maxwell went to him--to Sir George--and asked him to do us and her this

great kindness of going to Ancoats and trying to bring him back to his

mother, it would put everything on a different footing. Maxwell would

get to know him,--as I had got to know him. One would find a way--to

silence the foolish, unjust things--that have been said--I suppose--I

don't know--"

She paused, confused by the difficulties in her path, her cheeks hot and

flushed. But the heart knew its own innocence. She recovered herself; she

came nearer.

"--If only--at the same time--I could make you realise how truly--how

bitterly--I had felt for any pain you might have suffered--if I could

persuade you to look at it all--your husband's conduct and mine--in its

true light, and to believe that he cares--he _must_ care--for nothing in

the world so much as his home--as you and your happiness!"

The nobleness of the speaker, the futility of the speech, were about

equally balanced! Candour was impossible, if only for kindness' sake. And

the story, so told, was not only unconvincing, it was hardly intelligible

even, to Letty. For the two personalities moved in different worlds, and

what had seemed to the woman who was all delicate impulse and romance the

natural and right course, merely excited in Letty, and not without

reason, fresh suspicion and offence. If words had been all, Marcella had

gained nothing.

But a strange tumult was rising in Letty's breast. There was something in

this mingling of self-abasement with an extraordinary moral richness and

dignity, in these eyes, these hands that would have so gladly caught and

clasped her own, which began almost to intimidate her. She broke out

again, so as to hold her own bewilderment at bay:

"What right had you to send him away--to plan anything for _my_ husband

without my consent? Oh, of course you put it very finely; I daresay you

know about all sorts of things _I_ don't know about; I'm not clever, I

don't talk politics. But I don't quite see the good of it, if it's only

to take husbands away from their wives. All the same, I'm not a

hypocrite, and I don't mean to pretend I'm a meek saint. Far from it.

I've no doubt that George thinks he's been perfectly justified from the

beginning, and that I have brought everything upon myself. Well! I don't

care to argue about it. Don't imagine, please, that I have been playing

the deserted wife all the time. If people injure me, it's not my way to

hold my tongue, and I imagine that, after all, I do understand my own

husband, in spite of Lord Maxwell's kind remarks!" She pointed scornfully

to Maxwell's letter on the table. "But as soon as I saw that nothing I

said mattered to George, and that his whole mind was taken up with your

society, why, of course, I took my own measures! There are other men in

the world--and one of them happens to amuse me particularly at this

moment. It's your doing and George's, you see, if he doesn't like it!"

Marcella recoiled in sudden horror, staring at her companion with wide,

startled eyes. Letty braved her defiantly, her dry lips drawn into a

miserable smile. She stood, looking very small and elegant, beside her

writing-table, her hand, blazing with rings, resting lightly upon it, the

little, hot withered face alone betraying the nerve tension behind.

The situation lasted a few seconds, then with a quick step Marcella

hurried to a chair on the further side of the room, sank into it, and

covered her face with her hands.

Letty's heart seemed to dip, as it were, into an abyss. But there was a

frenzied triumph in the spectacle of Marcella's grief and tears.

_Marcella Maxwell_--thus silenced, thus subdued! The famous name, with

all that it had stood for in Letty's mind, of things to be envied and

desired, echoed in her ear, delighted her revenge. She struggled to

maintain her attitude.

"I don't know why what I said should make you so unhappy," she said

coldly, after a pause.

Marcella did not reply. Presently Letty saw that she was resting her

cheek on her hand and gazing before her into vacancy. At last she turned

round, and Letty could satisfy herself that in truth her eyes were wet.

"Is there no one," asked the full, tremulous voice, "whom you care for,

whom you would send for now to advise and help you?"

"Thank you!" said Letty, calmly, leaning against the little

writing-table, and beating the ground slightly with her foot. "I don't

want them. And I don't know why you should trouble yourself about it."

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

tone wavered.

Marcella rose impetuously again, and came towards her.

"When one thinks of all the long years of married life," she said, still

trembling, "of the children that may come--"

Letty lifted her eyebrows.

"If one happened to wish for them. But I don't happen to wish for them,

never did. I daresay it sounds horrid. Anyway, one needn't take that into

consideration."

"And your husband? Your husband, who must be miserable, whose great gifts

will be all spoiled unless you will somehow give up your anger and make

peace. And instead of that, you are only thinking of revenging yourself,

of making more ruin and pain. It breaks one's heart! And it would need

such a _little_ effort on your part, only a few words written or spoken,

to bring him back, to end all this unhappiness!"

"Oh! George can take care of himself," said Letty, provokingly; "so can

I. Besides, you have sent him away."

Marcella looked at her in despair. Then silently she turned away, and

Letty saw that she was searching for some gloves and a handkerchief she

had been carrying in her hand when she came in.

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

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

"I wish I knew why you came to see me at all! They say, of course,

you are very much in love with Lord Maxwell. Perhaps--that made you

sorry for me?"

Marcella's pride leapt at the mention by those lips of her own married

life. Then she drove her pride down.

"You have put it better than I have been able to do, all the time." Her

mouth parted in a slight, sad smile--"Good-night."

Letty took no notice. She sat down on the arm of a chair near her. Her

eyes suddenly blazed, her face grew dead-white.

"Well, if you want to know--" she said--"no, don't go--I don't mean to

let you go just yet--I _am_ about the most miserable wretch going! There,

you may take it or leave it; it's true. I don't suppose I cared much

about George when I married him; plenty of girls don't. But as soon as he

began to care about _you_,--just contrariness, I suppose,--I began to

feel that I could kill anybody that took him from me, and kill myself

afterwards! Oh, good gracious! there was plenty of reason for his getting

tired of me. I'm not the sort of person to let anyone get the whip-hand

of me, and I _would_ spend his money as I liked, and I _would_ ask the

persons I chose to the house; and, above all, I wasn't going to be

pestered with looking after and giving up to his _dreadful_ mother, who

made my life a burden to me. Oh! why do you look so white? Well, I

daresay it does sound atrocious. I don't care. Perhaps you'll be still

more horrified when you know that they came round this afternoon, when I

was out and George was gone, to tell me that Lady Tressady was

frightfully ill--dying, I think my maid said. And I haven't given it

another thought since--not one--till now"--she struck one hand against

the other--"because directly afterwards the butler told me of your visit

this afternoon, and that you were coming again--and I wasn't going to

think of anything else in the world but you, and George. No, don't look

like that, don't come near me--I'm not mad. I assure you I'm not mad! But

that's all by the way. What was I saying? Oh! that George had cause

enough to stop caring about me. Of course he had; but if he's lost to

me--I shall give him a good deal more cause before we've done. That

other man--you know him--Cathedine--gave me a kiss this afternoon, when

we were in a wood together"--the same involuntary shudder overtook her,

while she still held her companion at arm's length. "Oh, he is a

brute--a _brute_! But what do I care what happens to me? It's so strange

I don't--rather creditable, I think--for after all I like parties, and

being asked about. But now George hates me--and let you send him away

from me--why, of course, it's all simple enough! I--Don't--don't come. I

shall never, never forgive--it's just being tired--"

But Marcella sprang forward. Mercifully, there is a limit to nerve

endurance, and Letty in her raving had overpassed it. She sank gasping on

a sofa, still putting out her hand as though to protect herself. But

Marcella knelt beside her, the tears running down her cheeks. She put her

arms--arms formed for tenderness, for motherliness--round the girl's

slight frame. "Don't--don't repulse me," she said, with trembling lips,

and suddenly Letty yielded. She found herself sobbing in Lady Maxwell's

embrace, while all the healing, all the remorse, all the comfort that

self-abandonment and pity can pour out on such a plight as hers,

descended upon her from Marcella's clinging touch, her hurried,

fragmentary words. Assurances that all could be made right entreaties for

gentleness and patience--revelations of her own inmost heart as a wife,

far too sacred for the ears of Letty Tressady--little phrases and

snatches of autobiography steeped in an exquisite experience: the nature

Letty had rained her blows upon, kept nothing back, gave her all its

best. How irrelevant much of it was!--chequered throughout by those

oblivions, and optimisms, and foolish hopes by which such a nature as

Marcella's protects itself from the hard facts of the world. By the time

she had ranged through every note of entreaty and consolation, Marcella

had almost persuaded herself and Letty that George Tressady had never

said a word to her beyond the commonplaces of an ordinary friendship; she

had passionately determined that this blurred and spoiled marriage could

and should be mended, and that it lay with her to do it; and in the

spirit of her audacious youth she had taken upon herself the burden of

Letty's character and fate, vowing herself to a moral mission, to a long

patience. The quality of her own nature, perhaps, made her bear Letty's

violences and frenzies more patiently than would have been possible to a

woman of another type; generous remorse and regret, combined with her

ignorance of Letty's history and the details of Letty's life, led her

even to look upon these violences as the effects of love perverted, the

anguish of a jealous heart. Imagination, keen and loving, drew the

situation for her in rapid strokes, draped Letty in the subtleties and

powers of her own heart, and made forbearance easy.

As for Letty, her whole being surrendered itself to a mere ebb and flow

of sensations. That she had been able thus to break down the barriers of

Marcella's stateliness filled her all through, in her passion as in her

yielding, with a kind of exultation. A vision of a tall figure in a white

and silver dress, sitting stiff and unapproachable beside her in the

Castle Luton drawing-room, fled through her mind now and then, only

to make the wonder of this pleading voice, these confidences, this

pity, the more wonderful. But there was more than this, and better

than this. Strange up-wellings of feelings long trampled on and

suppressed--momentary awakenings of conscience, of repentance, of

regret--sharp realisations of an envy that was no longer ignoble but

moral, softer thoughts of George, the suffocating, unwilling recognition

of what love meant in another woman's life--these messengers and

forerunners of diviner things passed and repassed through the spaces of

Letty's soul as she lay white and passive under Marcella's yearning look.

There was a marvellous relief besides, much of it a physical relief, in

this mere silence, this mere ceasing from angry railing and offence.

Marcella was still sitting beside her, holding her hands, and talking in

the same low voice, when suddenly the loud sound of a bell clanged

through the house. Letty sprang up, white and startled.

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

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

Kenrick entered.

"Lady Tressady's maid would like to see you, my lady. They want Sir

George's address. The doctors think she will hardly live over to-morrow."

And behind Kenrick, Justine, the French maid, pushed her way in, weeping

and exclaiming. Lady Tressady, it seemed, had been in frightful pain all

the afternoon. She was now easier for the moment, though dangerously

exhausted. But if the heart attacks returned during the next twenty-four

hours, nothing could save her. The probability was that they would

return, and she was asking piteously for her son, who had seen her,

Justine believed, the day before these seizures began, just before his

departure for Paris, and had written. "Et la pauvre âme!" cried the

Frenchwoman at last, not caring what she said to this amazing

daughter-in-law, "elle est là toujours, quand les douleurs s'apaisent un

peu, écoutant, espérant--et personne ne vient--_personne_! Voulez-vous

bien, madame, me dire où on peut trouver Sir George?"

"Poste Restante, Trouville," said Letty, sullenly. "It is the only

address that I know of."

But she stood there irresolute and frowning, while the French girl,

hardly able to contain herself, stared at the disfigured face, demanding

by her quick-breathing silence, by her whole attitude, something else,

something more than Sir George's address.

Meanwhile Marcella waited in the background, obliged to hear what passed,

and struck with amazement. It is perhaps truer of the moral world than

the social that one half of it never conceives how the other half lives.

George Tressady's mother--alone--dying--in her son's absence--and Letty

Tressady knew nothing of her illness till it had become a question of

life and death, and had then actually refused to go--forgotten the

summons even!

When Letty, feverish and bewildered, turned back to the companion

whose heart had been poured out before her during this past hour of

high emotion, she saw a new expression in Lady Maxwell's eyes from

which she shrank.

"Ought I to go?" she said fretfully, almost like a peevish child, putting

her hand to her brow.

"My carriage is downstairs," said Marcella, quickly. "I can take you

there at once. Is there a nurse?" she asked, turning to the maid.

Oh, yes; there was an excellent nurse, just installed, or Justine could

not have left her mistress; and the doctor close by could be got at a

moment's notice. But the poor lady wanted her son, or at least some one

of the family,--Justine bit her lip, and threw a nervous side glance at

Letty,--and it went to the heart to see her. The girl found relief in

describing her mistress's state to this grave and friendly lady, and

showed more feeling and sincerity in speaking of it than might have been

expected from her affected dress and manner.

Meanwhile Letty seemed to be wandering aimlessly about the room. Marcella

went up to her.

"Your hat is here, on this chair. I have a shawl in the carriage. Won't

you come at once, and leave word to your maid to bring after you what

you want? Then I can go on, if you wish it, and send your telegram to

Sir George."

"But you wanted him to do something?" said Letty, looking at her

uncertainly.

"Mothers come first, I think!" said Marcella, with a smile of wonder.

"It is best to write it before we go. Will you tell me what to say?"

She went to the writing-table, and had to write the telegram with small

help from Letty, who in her dazed, miserable soul was still fighting some

demonic resistance or other to the step asked of her. Instinctively and

gradually, however, Marcella took command of her. A few quiet words to

Justine sent her to make arrangements with Grier. Then Letty found a

cloak that had been sent for being drawn round her shoulders, and was

coaxed to put on her hat. In another minute she was in the Maxwells'

brougham, with her hand clasped in Marcella's.

"They will want me to sit up," she said, dashing an irrelevant tear from

her eyes, as they drove away. "I am so tired--and I hate illness!"

"Very likely they won't let you see her to-night. But you will be there

if the illness comes on again. You would feel it terribly if--if she died

all alone, with Sir George away."

"Died!" Letty repeated, half angrily. "But that would be so

horrible--what could I do?"

Marcella looked at her with a strange smile.

"Only be kind, only forget everything but her!"

The softness of her voice had yet a severity beneath it that Letty felt,

but had no spirit to resent, Rather it awakened an uneasy and painful

sense that, after all, it was not she who had come off conqueror in this

great encounter. The incidents of the last half-hour seemed in some

curious way to have reversed their positions. Letty, smarting, felt that

her relation to George's dying mother had revealed her to Lady Maxwell

far more than any wild and half-sincere confessions could have done. Her

vanity felt a deep inner wound, yet of a new sort. At any rate,

Marcella's self-abasement was over, and Letty instinctively realised that

she would never see it again, while at the same time a new and clinging

need had arisen in herself. The very neighbourhood of the personality

beside her had begun to thrill and subjugate her. She had been conscious

enough before--enviously, hatefully conscious--of all the attributes and

possessions that made Maxwell's wife a great person in the world of

London. What was stealing upon her now was glamour and rank and influence

of another kind.

Not unmixed, no doubt, with more mundane thoughts! No ordinary preacher,

no middle-class eloquence perhaps would have sufficed--nothing less

dramatic and distinguished than the scene which had actually passed, than

a Marcella at her feet. Well! there are many modes and grades of

conversion. Whether by what was worst in her, or what was best; whether

the same weaknesses of character that had originally inflamed her had now

helped to subdue her or no, what matter? So much stood--that one short

hour had been enough to draw this vain, selfish nature within a moral

grasp she was never again to shake off.

Meanwhile, as they drove towards Warwick Square Marcella's only thought

was how to hand her over safe to her husband. A sense of agonised

responsibility awoke in the elder woman at the thought of Cathedine. But

no more emotion--only common sense and gentleness.

As they neared Warwick Square, Letty withdrew her hand.

"I don't suppose you will ever want to see me again," she said huskily,

turning her head away.

"Do you think that very possible between two people who have gone

through such a time as you and I have?" said Marcella, pale, but

smiling. "When may I come to see you to-morrow? I shall send to inquire,

of course, very early."

Some thought made Letty's breath come quickly. "Will you come in the

afternoon--about four?" she said hastily. "I suppose I shall be here."

They were just stopping at the door in Warwick Square. "You said you

would tell me--"

"I have a great deal to tell you.... I will come, then, and see if you

can be spared.... Good-night. I trust she will be better! I will go on

and send the telegram."

Letty felt her hand gravely pressed, the footman helped her out, and

in another minute she was mounting the stairs leading to Lady

Tressady's room, having sent a servant on before her to warn the nurse

of her arrival.

The nurse came out, finger on lip. She was very glad to see Lady

Tressady, but the doctor had left word that nothing whatever was to be

allowed to disturb or excite his patient. Of course, if the attack

returned--But just now there was hope. Only it was so difficult to keep

her quiet. Instead of trying to sleep, she was now asking for Justine,

declaring that Justine must read French novels aloud to her, and bring

out two of her evening dresses, that she might decide on some

alteration in the trimmings. "I daren't fight with her," said the

nurse, evidently in much perplexity. "But if she only raises herself in

bed she may kill herself."

She hurried back to her patient, promising to inform the daughter-in-law

at once if there was a change for the worse, and Letty, infinitely

relieved, made her way to the spare room of the house, where Grier was

already unpacking for her.

After a hasty undressing she threw herself into bed, longing for sleep.

But from a short nightmare dream she woke up with a start. Where was she?

In her mother-in-law's house,--she could actually hear the shrill

affected voice laughing and talking in the room next door,--and brought

there by Marcella Maxwell! The strangeness of these two facts kept her

tossing restlessly from side to side. And where was George? Just arrived

at Paris, perhaps. She thought of the glare and noise of the Gare du

Nord--she heard his cab rattling over the long stone-paved street

outside. In the darkness she felt a miserable sinking of heart at the

thought of his going with every minute farther, farther away from her.

Would he ever forgive her that letter to Lord Maxwell, when he knew of

it? Did she want him to forgive her?

A mood that was at once soft and desolate stole upon her, and made her

cry a little. It sprang, perhaps, from a sense of the many barriers she

had heaped up between herself and happiness. The waves of feeling, half

self-assertive, half repentant, ebbed and flowed. One moment she yearned

for the hour when Marcella was to come to her; the next, she hated the

notion of it. So between dream and misery, amid a maze of thought without

a clue, Letty's night passed away. By the time the morning dawned, the

sharp conviction had shaped itself within her that she had grown older,

that life had passed into another stage, and could never again be as it

had been the day before. Two emotions, at least, or excitements, had

emerged from all the rest and filled her mind--the memory of the scene

with Marcella, and the thought of George's return.

PART III

CHAPTER XXI

"My dear, you don't mean to say you have had her here for ten days?"

The speaker was Betty Leven, who had just arrived at Maxwell Court, and

was sitting with her hostess under the cedars in front of the magnificent

Caroline mansion, which it was the never-ending task of Marcella's life

to bring somehow into a democratic scheme of things.

A still September afternoon, lightly charged with autumn mists, lay

gently on the hollows of the park. Betty was in her liveliest mood and

her gayest dress. Her hat, a marvel in poppies, was perched high upon no

less ingenious waves and frettings of hair. Her straw-coloured gown,

which was only simple for the untrained eye, gave added youth even to

her childish figure; and her very feet, clothed in the smallest and most

preposterous of shoes, had something merry and provocative about them,

as they lay crossed upon the wooden footstool Marcella had pushed

towards her.

The remark just quoted followed upon one made by her hostess, to the

effect that Lady Tressady would be down to tea shortly.

"Now, Betty," said Marcella, seriously, though she laughed, "I meant to

have a few words with you on this subject first thing--let's have them.

Do you want to be very kind to me, or do you ever want me to be very

nice to you?"

Betty considered.

"You can't do half as much for me now as you once could, now that Frank's

going to leave Parliament," she remarked, with as much worldly wisdom as

her face allowed. "Nevertheless, the quality of my nature is such that,

sometimes, I might even be nice to you for nothing. But information

before benevolence--why have you got her here?"

"Because she was fagged and unhappy in London, and her husband had gone

to take his mother abroad, after first doing Maxwell a great kindness,"

said Marcella,--not, however, without embarrassment, as Betty saw,--"and

I want you to be kind to her."

"Reasons one and two no reasons at all," said Betty, meditating; "and the

third wants examining. You mean that George Tressady went after Ancoats?"

Marcella raised her shoulders, and was silent.

"If you are going to be stuffy and mysterious," said Betty, with

vivacity, "you know what sort of a hedgehog I can be. How can you expect

me to be nice to Letty Tressady unless you make it worth my while?"

"Betty, you infant! Well, then, he did go after Ancoats--got him safely

away from Trouville, brought him to Paris to join Mrs. Allison, and, in

general, has laid us all under very great obligations. Meanwhile, she was

very much tired out with nursing her mother-in-law--"

"Oh, and such a mother-in-law--such a jewel!" ejaculated Betty.

"And I brought her down here to rest, till he should come back from

Wildheim and take her home. He will probably be here to-night."

The speaker reddened unconsciously during her story, a fact not

lost on Betty.

"Well, I knew most of that before," said Betty, quietly. "And what sort

of a time have you been having this ten days?"

"I have been very glad to have her here," came the quick reply. "I ought

to have known her long ago."

Betty looked at the speaker with a half-incredulous smile.

"You have been 'collecting' her, I suppose, as Hallin collects grasses.

Of course, what I pine to know is what sort of a time _she's_ had. You're

not the easiest person in the world to get on with, my lady."

"I know that," said Marcella, sighing; "but I don't think she has

been unhappy."

Betty's green eyes opened suddenly to the light.

"Are you ever going to tell me the truth? Have you got her under your

thumb? Does she adore you?"

"Betty, don't be an idiot!"

"I expect she does," said Betty, thoughtfully, a myriad thoughts and

conjectures passing through her quick brain as she studied her friend's

face and attitude. "I see exactly what fate is going to happen to you in

middle life. Women couldn't get on with you when you were a girl--you

didn't like them, nor they you; and now everywhere I hear the young women

beginning to talk about you, especially the young married women; and in a

few years you will have them all about you like a cluster of doves,

cooing and confessing, and making your life a burden to you."

"Well, suppose you begin?" said Marcella, with meaning. "I'm quite ready.

How are Frank's spirits since the great decision?"

"Frank's spirits?" said Betty. She leisurely took off her glove. "Frank's

spirits, my dear, if you wish to know, are simply an affront to his wife.

My ruined ambitions appear to affect him as Parrish's food does the baby.

I prophesy he will have gained a stone by Christmas."

For the great step had been taken. Betty had given way, and Frank was to

escape from politics. For three years Betty had held him to his task--had

written his speeches, formed his opinions, and done her very best to

train him for a statesman. But the young man had in truth no opinions,

save indeed whatever might be involved in the constant opinion that

Heaven had intended him for a country gentleman and a sportsman, and for

nothing else. And at last a mixture of revolt and melancholy had served

his purpose. Betty was subdued; the Chiltern Hundreds were in sight. The

young wife, with many sighs, had laid down all dreams of a husband on the

front bench. But--in compensation--she had regained her lover, and the

honeymoon shone once more.

"Frank came to see me yesterday," said Marcella, smiling.

Betty sprang forward.

"What did he say? Didn't he tell you I was an angel? Now there's a

bargain! Repeat to me every single word he said, and I will devote

myself, body and bones, to Letty Tressady."

"Hush!" said Marcella, laying two fingers on the pretty mouth. "Here

she comes."

Letty Tressady, in fact, had just emerged from a side-door of the house,

and was slowly approaching the two friends on the terrace. Lady Leven's

discerning eye ran over the advancing figure. Marcella heard her make

some exclamation under her breath. Then she rose with little, hurrying

steps, and went to greet the newcomer with a charming ease and kindness.

Letty responded rather nervously. Marcella looked up with a smile, and

pointed to a low chair, which Letty took with a certain stiffness. It was

evident to Marcella that she was afraid of Lady Leven, who had, indeed,

shown a marked indifference to her society at Castle Luton.

But Betty was disarmed. The "minx" had lost her colour, and, for the

moment, her prettiness. She looked depressed, and talked little. As to

her relation to Marcella Betty's inquisitive brain indulged itself in a

score of conjectures. "How like her!" she thought to herself, "to forget

the wife's existence to begin with, and then to make love to her by way

of warding off the husband!"

Meanwhile, aloud, Lady Leven professed herself exceedingly dissatisfied

with the entertainment provided for her. Where were the gentlemen? What

was the good of one putting on one's best frock to come down to a Maxwell

Court Saturday to find only a "hen tea-party" at the end? Marcella

protested that there were only too many men somewhere on the premises

already, and more--with their wives--were arriving by the next train.

But Maxwell had taken off such as had already appeared for a long

cross-country walk.

Betty demanded the names, and Marcella gave them obediently. Betty

perceived at once that the party was the party of a political chief

obliged to do his duty. She allowed herself a good many shrugs of her

small shoulders. "Oh, Mrs. Lexham,--very charming, of course,--but what's

the good of being friends with a person who has five hundred people in

London that call her Kelly? Lady _Wendover_? I ought to have had notice.

A good mother? I should think she is! That's the whole point against her.

She always gives you the idea of having reared fifteen out of a possible

twelve. To see her beaming on her offspring makes me positively ashamed

of being in the same business myself. Don't you agree, Lady Tressady?"

But Letty, whose chief joy a month before would have been to dart in on

such a list with little pecking proofs of acquaintance, was leaning back

listlessly in her chair, and could only summon a forced smile for answer.

"And Sir George, too, is coming to-night, isn't he?" said Lady Leven.

"Yes, I expect my husband to-night," said Letty, coldly, without looking

at her questioner. Betty glanced quickly at the expression of the eyes

which were bent upon the further reaches of the park; then, to Letty's

astonishment, she bent forward impulsively and laid her little hand on

Lady Tressady's arm.

"Do you mind telling me," she said in a loud whisper, with a glance over

her shoulder, "your candid opinion of _her_ as a country lady?"

Letty, taken aback, turned and laughed uneasily; but Betty went rattling

on. "Have you found out that she treats her servants like hospital

nurses; that they go off and on duty at stated hours; that she has

workshops and art schools for them in the back premises; and that the

first footman has just produced a cantata which has been sent in to the

committee of the Worcester Festival (Be quiet, Marcella; if it isn't

that, it's something near it); that she teaches the stable boys and the

laundry maids old English dances, and the _pas de quatre_ once a

fortnight, and acts showman to her own pictures for the benefit of the

neighbourhood once a week? I came once to see how she did it, but I found

her and the Gairsley ironmonger measuring the ears of the Holbeins--it

seems you can't know anything about pictures now unless you have measured

all the ears and the little fingers, which I hope you know; I didn't!--so

I fled, as she hadn't a word to throw to me, even as one of the public.

Then perhaps you don't know that she has invented a whole, new, and

original system of game-preserving--she and Frank fight over it by the

hour--that she has upset all the wage arrangements of the county--that,

perhaps, you do know, for it got into the papers--and a hundred other

trifles. Has she revealed these things?"

Letty looked in perplexity from Betty's face, full of sweetness and

mirth, to Marcella's.

"She hasn't talked about them," she said, hesitating. "Of course, I

haven't understood a good many things that are done here--"

"Don't try," said Marcella, first laughing and then sighing.

Nothing appeased, Lady Leven chattered away, while Letty watched her

hostess in silence. She had come down to the Court gloating somewhat, in

spite of her very real unhappiness, over the prospect of the riches and

magnificence she was to find there. And to discover that wealth might be

merely the source of one long moral wrestle to the people who possessed

it, burdening them with all sorts of problems and remorses that others

escaped, had been a strange and, on the whole, jarring experience to her.

Of course there must be rich and poor; of course there must be servants

and masters. Marcella's rebellion against the barriers of life had been a

sort of fatigue and offence to Letty ever since she had been made to feel

it. And daily contact with the simple, and even Spartan, ways of living

that prevailed--for the owners of it, at least--in the vast house, with

the overflowing energy and humanity that often made its mistress a

restless companion, and led her into a fair percentage of mistakes--had

roused a score of half-scornful protests in the small, shrewd mind of her

guest. Nevertheless, when Marcella was kind, when she put Letty on the

sofa, insisting that she was tired, and anxiously accusing herself of

some lack of consideration or other; when she took her to her room at

night, seeing to every comfort, and taking thought for luxuries that in

her heart she despised; or when, very rarely, and turning rather pale,

she said a few words--sweet, hopeful, encouraging--about George's return,

then Letty was conscious of a strange leap of something till then

unknown, something that made her want to sob, that seemed to open to her

a new room in the House of Life. Marcella had not kissed her since the

day of their great scene; they had been "Lady Maxwell" and "Lady

Tressady" to each other all the time, and Letty had but realised her own

insolences and audacities the more, as gradually the spiritual dignity of

the woman she had raved at came home to her. But sometimes when Marcella

stood beside her, unconscious, talking pleasantly of London folk or

Ancoats, or trying to inform herself as to Letty's life at Ferth, a

half-desolate intuition would flash across the younger woman of what it

might be to be admitted to the intimate friendship of such a nature, to

feel those long, slender arms pressed about her once more, not in pity or

remonstrance, as of one trying to exorcise an evil spirit, but in mere

love, as of one asking as well as giving. The tender and adoring

friendship of women for women, which has become so marked a feature of

our self-realising generation, had passed Letty by. She had never known

it. Now, in these unforeseen circumstances, she seemed to be trembling

within reach of its emotion; divining it, desiring it, yet forced onward

to the question, "What is there in me that may claim it?"

Marcella, indeed, after their first stormy interview, had once more

returned to the subject of it. She had told the story of her friendship

with George Tressady, very gently and plainly, in a further conversation,

held between them at the elder Lady Tressady's house during that odd

lady's very odd convalescence; till, indeed, she reached the last scene.

She could not bring herself to deliver the truth of that. Nor was it

necessary. Letty's jealousy had guessed it near enough long ago. But when

all else was told, Letty had been conscious at first of a half-sore

resentment that there was so little to tell. In her secret soul she knew

very well what had been the effect on George. Her husband's mind had been

gradually absorbed by another ideal in which she had no part; nor could

she deny that he had suffered miserably. The memory of his face as he

asked her to "forgive him" when she fled past him on that last wretched

night was enough. But suffered for what? A few talks about politics, a

few visits to poor people, an office of kindness after a street accident

that any stranger must have rendered, a few meetings in the House and

elsewhere!

Letty's vanity was stabbed anew by the fact that Lady Maxwell's

offence was so small. It gave her a kind of measure of her own hold

upon her husband.

Once, indeed, Marcella's voice and colour had wavered when she made

herself describe how, on the Mile End evening, she had been conscious of

pressing the personal influence to gain the political end. But good

heavens!--Letty hardly understood what the speaker's evident compunction

was about. Why, it was all for Maxwell! What had she thought of all

through but Maxwell? Letty's humiliation grew as she understood, and as

in the quiet of Maxwell Court she saw the husband and wife together.

Her anger and resentment might very well only have transferred themselves

the more hotly to George. But this new moral influence upon her had a

kind of paralysing effect. The incidents of the weeks before the crisis

excited in her now a sick, shamed feeling whenever she thought of them.

For contact with people on a wholly different plane of conduct, if such

persons as Letty can once be brought to submit to it, will often produce

effects, especially on women, like those one sees produced every day by

the clash of two standards of manners. It means simply the recognition

that one is unfit to be of certain company, and perhaps there are few

moral ferments more penetrating. Probably Letty would have gone to her

grave knowing nothing of it, but for the accident which had opened to her

the inmost heart of a woman with whom, once known, not even her vanity

dared measure itself.

George and she had already met since the day when he had gone off to

Paris in search of Ancoats. The telegram sent to him by Marcella on the

night of his mother's violent illness had, indeed, been recalled next

day. Lady Tressady, following the idiosyncrasies of her disease, sprang

from death to life--and life of the sprightliest kind--in the course of a

few hours. The battered, grey-haired woman--so old, do what she would,

under the betraying hand of physical decay!--no sooner heard that George

had been sent for than she at once and peremptorily telegraphed to him

herself to stay away. "I'm not dead yet," she wrote to him afterwards,

"in spite of all the fuss they've made with me. I was simply ashamed to

own such a cadaverous-looking wretch as you were when you came here last,

and if you take my advice you'll stay at Trouville with Lord Ancoats and

amuse yourself. As to that young man, of course it's no good, and his

mother's a great fool to suppose that you or anybody else can prevent

his enjoying himself. But these High Church women are so extraordinary."

Letty, indeed, remembering her mother-in-law's old ways, and finding

them little changed as far as she herself was concerned, was puzzled and

astonished by the new relations between mother and son. On the smallest

excuse or none, Lady Tressady, a year before, would have been ready to

fetch him back from furthest land without the least scruple. Now,

however, she thought of him, or for him, incessantly. And one day Letty

actually found her crying over an official intimation from the lawyer

concerned that another instalment of the Shapetsky debt would be due

within a month. But she angrily dried her tears at sight of Letty, and

Letty said nothing.

George, however, came back within about ten days of his departure, having

apparently done what he was commissioned to do, though Letty took so

little interest in the Ancoats affair that she barely read those portions

of his letters in which he described the course of it. His letters,

indeed, with the exception of a few ambiguous words here and there, dealt

entirely with Trouville, Ancoats, or the ups and downs of public opinion

on the subject of his action and speech in the House. Letty could only

gather from a stray phrase or two that he enjoyed nothing; but evidently

he could not yet bring himself to speak of what had happened.

When he did come back, the husband and wife saw very little of each

other. It was more convenient that he should stay in Upper Brook Street

while she remained at her mother-in-law's; and altogether he was hardly

three days in London. He rushed up to Market Malford to deliver his

promised speech to his constituents, and immediately afterwards, on the

urgent advice of the doctors, he went off to Wildheim with his mother and

the elderly cousin whose aid he had already invoked. Before he went, he

formally thanked his wife--who hardly spoke to him unless she was

obliged--for her attention to his mother, and then lingered a little,

looking no less "cadaverous," certainly, than when he had gone away, and

apparently desiring to say more.

"I suppose I shall be away about a fortnight," he said at last, "if one

is to settle her comfortably. You haven't told me yet what you would like

to do. Couldn't you get Miss Tulloch to go down with you to Ferth, or

would you go to your people for a fortnight?"

He was longing to ask her what had come of that promised visit of Lady

Maxwell's. But neither by letter nor by word of mouth had Letty as yet

said a word of it. And he did not know how to open the subject. During

the time that he was with his wife and mother, nothing was seen of

Marcella in Warwick Square, and an interview that he was to have had with

Maxwell, by way of supplement to his numerous letters, had to be

postponed because of overcrowded days on both sides. So that he was still

in the dark.

Letty at first made no answer to his rather lame proposals for her

benefit. But just as he was turning away with a look of added

worry, she said:

"I don't want to go home, thank you, and I still less want to go

to Ferth."

"But you can't stay in London. There isn't a soul in town; and it would

be too dull for you."

He gazed at her in perplexity, praying, however, that he might not

provoke a scene, for the carriage that was to take him and his mother to

the station was almost at the door.

Letty rose slowly, and folded up some embroidery she had been

playing with. Then she took a note from her work-basket, and laid it

on the table.

"You may read that if you like. That's where I'm going."

And she quickly went out of the room.

George read the note. His face flushed, and he hurriedly busied himself

with some of his preparations for departure. When his wife came into the

room again he went up to her.

"You could have done nothing so likely to save us both," he said huskily,

and then could think of nothing more to say. He drew her to him as though

to kiss her, but a blind movement of the old rage with him or

circumstance leapt in her, and she pulled herself away. The thought of

that particular moment had done more perhaps than anything else to thin

and whiten her since she had been at Maxwell Court.

And now he would be here to-night. She knew both from her host himself

and from George's letters that Lord Maxwell had specially written to him

begging him to come to the Court on his return, in order to join his wife

and also to give that oral report of his mission for which there had been

no time on his first reappearance. Maxwell had spoken to her of his wish

to see her husband, without a tone or a word that could suggest anything

but the natural friendliness and good-will of the man who has accepted a

signal service from his junior. But Letty avoided Maxwell when she could;

nor would he willingly have been left alone with this thin, sharp-faced

girl whose letter to him had been like the drawing of an ugly veil from

nameless and incredible things. He was sorry for her; but in his strong,

deep nature he felt a repulsion for her he could not explain; and to

watch Marcella with her amazed him.

* * * * *

Immediately after tea, Lady Leven's complaints of her entertainment

became absurd. Guests poured in from the afternoon train, and a variety

of men, her husband foremost among them, were soon at her disposal,

asking nothing better than to amuse her.

Letty Tressady meanwhile looked on for a time at the brilliant crowd

about her on the terrace, with a dull sense of being forgotten and of no

account. She said to herself sullenly that of course no one would want to

talk to her; it was not her circle, and she had even few acquaintances

among them.

Then, to her astonishment, she began to find herself the object of an

evident curiosity and interest to many people among the throng. She

divined that her name was being handed from one to the other, and she

soon perceived that Marcella had been asked to introduce to her this

person and that, several of them men and women whose kindness, a few

weeks before, would have flattered her social ambitions to the highest

point. Colour and nerve returned, and she found herself sitting up,

forgetting her headache, and talking fast.

"I am delighted to have this opportunity of telling you, Lady Tressady,

how much I admired your husband's great speech," said the deep and

unctuous voice of the grey-haired Solicitor-General as he sank into a

chair beside her. "It was not only that it gave us our Bill, it gave the

House of Commons a new speaker. Manner, voice, matter--all of it

excellent! I hope there'll be no nonsense about his giving up his seat.

Don't you let him! He will find his feet and his right place before long,

and you'll be uncommonly proud of him before you've done."

"Lady Tressady, I'm afraid you've forgotten me," said a plaintive voice;

and, on turning, Letty saw the red-haired Lady Madeleine asking with

smiles to be remembered. "Do you know, I was lucky enough to get into the

House on the great day? What a scene it was! You were there, of course?"

When Letty unwillingly said "No," there was a little chorus of

astonishment.

"Well, take my advice, my dear lady," said the Solicitor-General,

speaking with lazy patronage somewhere from the depths of comfort,--he

was accustomed to use these paternal modes of speech to young

women,--"don't you miss your husband's speeches. We can't do without our

domestic critics. But for the bad quarters of an hour that lady over

there has given me, I should be nowhere."

And he nodded complacently towards the wife as stout as himself, who was

sitting a few yards away. She, hearing her name, nodded back, with smiles

aside to the bystanders. Most of the spectators, however, were already

acquainted with a conjugal pose which was generally believed to be not

according to facts, and no one took the cue.

Then presently Mr. Bennett--the workmen's member from the North--was at

Letty's elbow saying the most cordial things of the absent George. Bayle,

too, the most immaculate and exclusive of private secretaries, who was at

the Court on a wedding visit with a new wife, chose to remember Lady

Tressady's existence for the first time for many months, and to bestow

some of his carefully adapted conversation upon her. While, last of all,

Edward Watton came up to her with a cousinly kindness she had scarcely

yet received from him, and, drawing a chair beside her, overflowed with

talk about George, and the Bill, and the state of things at Market

Malford. In fact, it was soon clear even to Letty's bewildered sense that

till her husband should arrive she was perhaps, for the moment, the

person of most interest to this brilliant and representative gathering of

a victorious party.

Meanwhile she was made constantly aware that her hostess remembered her.

Once, as Marcella passed her, after introducing someone to her, Letty

felt a hand gently laid on her shoulder and then withdrawn. Strange waves

of emotion ran through the girl's senses. When would George be here?

About seven, she thought, when they would all have gone up to dress. He

would have arrived from Wildheim in the morning, and was to spend the day

doing business in town.

CHAPTER XXII

Letty was lying on a sofa in her bedroom. Her maid was to come to her

shortly, and she was impatiently listening to every sound that approached

or passed her door. The great clock in the distant hall struck seven, and

it seemed to her intolerably long before she heard movements in the

passage, and then Maxwell's voice outside.

"Here is your room, Sir George. I hope you don't mind a few ghosts! It is

one of the oldest bits of the house."

Letty sprang up. She heard the shutting of the passage door, then

immediately afterwards the door from the dressing-room opened, and George

came through.

"Well!" she said, staring at him, her face flushing; "surely you are

very late?"

He came up to her, and put his arms round her, while she stood passive.

"Not so very," he said, and she could hear that his voice was unsteady.

"How are you? Give me a kiss, little woman--be a little glad to see me!"

He looked down upon her wistfully. On the journey he had been conscious

of great weariness of mind and body, a longing to escape from struggle,

to give and receive the balm of kind looks and soft words. He had come

back full of repentance towards her, if she had only known, full too of a

natural young longing for peace and good times.

She let him kiss her, but as he stooped to her it suddenly struck her

that she had never seen him look so white and worn. Still; after all this

holiday-making! Why? For love of a woman who never gave him a thought,

except of pity. Bitterness possessed her. She turned away indifferently.

"Well, you'll only just have time to dress. Is someone unpacking for

you?"

He looked at her.

"Is that all you have to say?"

She threw back her head and was silent.

"I was very glad to come back to you," he said, with a sigh, "though I--I

wish it were anywhere else than here. But, all things considered, I did

not see how to refuse. And you have been here the whole fortnight?"

"Yes."

"Have you"--he hesitated--"have you seen a great deal of Lady Maxwell?"

"Well, I suppose I have--in her own house." Then she broke out, her

heart leaping visibly under her light dressing-gown. "I don't blame

_her_ any more, if you want to know that; she doesn't think of anyone in

the world but him."

The gesture of her hand seemed to pursue the voice that had been just

speaking in the corridor.

He smiled.

"Well, at least I'm glad you've come to see that!" he said quietly. "And

is that all?"

He had walked away from her, but at his renewed question he turned

back quickly, his hands in his pockets. Something in the look of him

gave her a moment of pleasure, a throb of possession. But she showed

nothing of it.

"No, it's not all"--her pale blue eyes pierced him. "Why did you go and

see her that morning, and why have you never told me since?"

He started, and shrugged his shoulders.

"If you have been seeing much of her," he replied, after a pause, "you

probably know as much as I could tell you."

"No," she said steadily; "she has told me much about

everything--but that."

He walked restlessly about for a few seconds, then returned, holding out

his hands.

"Well, my dear, I said some mad and miserable things. They are as dead

now as if they had never been spoken. And they were not love-making--they

were crying for the moon. Take me, and forget them. I am an

unsatisfactory sort of fellow, but I will do the best I can."

"Wait a bit," she said, retreating, and speaking with a hard

incisiveness. "There are plenty of things you don't know. Perhaps you

don't know, for instance, that I wrote to Lord Maxwell? I sat up writing

it that night--he got it the same morning you saw her."

"You wrote to Maxwell!" he said in amazement--then, under his breath--"to

complain of her. My God!"

He walked away again, trying to control himself.

"You didn't suppose," she said huskily, "I was going to sit down calmly

under your neglect of me? I might have been silly in not--not seeing what

kind of a woman she was; that's different--besides, of course, she ought

to have thought more about me. But _that's_ not all!"

Her hand shook as she stood leaning on the sofa. George turned, and

looked at her attentively.

"The day you left I went to Hampton Court with the Lucys. Cathedine was

there. Of course I flirted with him all the time, and as we were going

through a wood near the river he said abominable things to me, and

kissed me."

Her brows were drawn defiantly. Her eyes seemed to be riveted to his. He

was silent a moment, the colour dyeing his pale face deep. Then she heard

his long breath.

"Well, we seem to be about quits," he said, in a bitter voice. "Have you

seen him since?"

"No. That's Grier knocking--you'd better go and dress."

He paused irresolutely. But Letty said, "Come in," and he retreated into

his dressing-room.

Husband and wife hurried down together, without another word to each

other. When George at last found himself at table between Lady Leven and

Mr. Bayle's new and lively wife, he had never been so grateful before to

the ease of women's tongues. In his mental and physical fatigue, he could

scarcely bear even to let himself feel the strangeness of his presence in

this room--at her table, in Maxwell's splendid house. _Not_ to

feel!--somehow to recover his old balance and coolness--that was the cry

of the inner man.

But the situation conquered him. _Why_ was he here? It was barely a month

since in her London drawing-room he had found words for an emotion, a

confession it now burnt him to remember. And here he was, breaking bread

with her and Maxwell, a few weeks afterwards, as though nothing lay

between them but a political incident. Oh! the smallness, the triviality

of our modern life!

Was it only four weeks, or nearly? What he had suffered in that time! An

instant's shudder ran through him, during an interval, while Betty's

unwilling occupation with her left-hand neighbour left memory its chance.

All the flitting scenes of the past month, Ancoats's half-vicious

absurdities, the humours of the Trouville beach, the waves of its grey

sea, his mother's whims and plaints, the crowd and heat of the little

German watering-place where he had left her--was it he, George Tressady,

that had been really wrestling with these things and persons, walking

among them, or beside them? It seemed hardly credible. What was real,

what remained, was merely the thought of some hours of solitude, beside

the Norman sea, or among the great beech-woods that swept down the hills

about Bad Wildheim. Those hours--they only--had stung, had penetrated,

had found the shrinking core of the soul.

What in truth was it that had happened to him? After weeks of a growing

madness he had finally lost his self-command, had spoken passionately,

as only love speaks, to a married woman, who had no thought for any man

in the world but her husband, a woman who had immediately--so he had

always read the riddle of Maxwell's behaviour--reported every incident

of his conversation with her to the husband, and had then tried her

best, with an exquisite kindness and compunction, to undo the mischief

her own charm had caused. For that effort, in the first instance,

George, under the shock of his act and her pain, had been, at intervals,

speechlessly grateful to her; all his energies had gone into pitiful,

eager response. Now, her attempt, and Maxwell's share in it, seemed to

have laid him under a weight he could no longer bear. His acceptance of

Maxwell's invitation had finally exhausted his power of playing the

superhuman part to which she had invited him. He wished with all his

heart he had not accepted it! From the moment of her greeting--with its

mixture of shrinking and sweetness--he had realised the folly, the

humiliation even, of his presence in her house. He could not rise--it

was monstrous, ludicrous almost, that she should wish it--to what she

seemed to ask of him.

What had he been in love with? He looked at her once or twice in

bewilderment. Had not she herself, her dazzling, unconscious purity,

debarred him always from the ordinary hopes and desires of the sensual

man? His very thought had moved in awe of her, had knelt before her.

Throughout there had been this half-bitter glorying in the strangeness of

his own case. The common judgment in its common vileness mattered nothing

to him. He had been in love with love, with grace, with tenderness, with

delight. He had seen, too late, a vision of the _best_; had realised

what things of enchantment life contains for the few, for the

chosen--what woman at her richest can be to man. And there had been a cry

of personal longing--personal anguish.

Well!--it was all done with. As for friendship, it was impossible,

grotesque. Let him go home, appease Letty, and mend his life. He

constantly realised now, with the same surprise, as on the night before

his confession, the emergence within himself, independent as it were of

his ordinary will, and parallel with the voice of passion or grief, of

some new moral imperative. Half scornfully he discerned in his own nature

the sort of paste that a man inherits from generations of decent dull

forefathers who have kept the law as they understood it. He was conscious

of the same "ought" vibrating through the moral sense as had governed

their narrower lives and minds. It is the presence or the absence indeed

of this dumb compelling power that in moments of crisis differentiates

one man from another. He felt it; wondered perhaps that he should feel

it; but knew, nevertheless, that he should obey it. Yes, let him go home,

make his wife forgive him, rear his children--he trusted to God there

would be children!--and tame his soul. How strange to feel this tempest

sweeping through him, this iron stiffening of the whole being, amid this

scene, in this room, within a few feet of that magic, that voice--

* * * * *

"Thank goodness I have got rid of my man at last!" said Betty's laughing

whisper in his ear. "Three successive packs of hounds have I followed

from their cradles to their graves. Make it up to me, Sir George, at

once! Tell me everything I want to know!"

George turned to her smiling.

"About Ancoats?"

"Of course. Now don't be discreet!--I know too much already. How did he

receive you?"

George laughed--not noticing that instead of laughing with him, little

Betty was staring at him open-eyed over her fan.

"To begin with, he invited me to fight--coffee and pistols before

eight, on the following morning, in the garden of his chalet, which

would not have been at all a bad place, for he is magnificently

installed. I came from his enemies, he said. They had prevented the

woman he loved from joining him, and covered him with ridicule. As

their representative I ought to be prepared to face the consequences

like a man. All this time he was storming up and down, in a marvellous

blue embroidered smoking suit--"

"Of course, to go with the hair," put in Betty.

"I said I thought he'd better give me some dinner before we talked it

out. Then he looked embarrassed and said there were friends coming. I

replied, '_Tant mieux.'_ He inquired fiercely whether it was the part of

a gentleman to thrust himself where he wasn't wanted. I kept my temper,

and said I was too famished to consider. Then he haughtily left the room,

and presently a servant came and asked for my luggage, which I had left

at the station, and showed me a bedroom. Ancoats, however, appeared again

to invite me to withdraw, and to suggest the names of two seconds who

would, he assured me, be delighted to act for me. I pointed out to him

that I was unpacked, and that to turn me out dinnerless would be simply

barbarous. Then, after fidgeting about a little, he burst out laughing in

an odd way, and said, 'Very well--only, mind, I didn't ask you.' Sure

enough, of course I found a party."

George paused.

"You needn't tell me much about the party," said Betty, nervously,

"unless it's necessary."

"Well, it wasn't a very reputable affair, and two young women were

present."

"No need to talk about the young women," said Betty, hastily.

George bowed submission.

"I only mentioned them because they are rather necessary to the story.

Anyway, by the time the company was settled Ancoats suddenly threw off

his embarrassment, and, with some defiant looks at me, behaved himself, I

imagine, much as he would have done without me. When all the guests were

gone, I asked him whether he was going to keep up the farce of a _grande

passion_ any more. He got in a rage and vowed that if 'she' had come, of

course all those creatures, male and female, would be packed off. I

didn't suppose that he would allow the woman he loved to come within a

mile of them? I shrugged my shoulders and declined to suppose anything

about his love affairs, which seemed to me too complicated. Then, of

course, I had to come to plain speaking, and bring in his mother."

"That she should have produced such a being!" cried Betty; "that he

should have any right in her at all!"

"That she should keep such a heart for him!" said George, raising his

eyebrows. "He turned rather white, I was relieved to see, when I told him

from her that she would leave his house if the London affair went on.

Well, we walked up and down in his garden, smoking, the greater part of

the night, till I could have dropped with fatigue. Every now and then

Ancoats would make a dash for the brandy and soda on the verandah; and in

between I had to listen to tirades against marriage, English prudery, and

English women,--quotations from Gautier and Renan,--and Heaven knows

what. At last, when we were both worn out, he suddenly stood still and

delivered his ultimatum. 'Look here--if you think I've no grievances,

you're much mistaken. Go back and tell my mother that if she'll marry

Fontenoy straight away I'll give up Marguerite!' I said I would deliver

no such impertinence. 'Very well,' he said; 'then I will. Tell her I

shall be in Paris next week, and ask her to meet me there. When are you

going?' 'Well,' I said, rather taken aback, 'there is such an institution

as the post. Now I've come so far, suppose you show me Trouville for a

few days?' He muttered something or other, and we went to bed.

Afterwards, he behaved to me quite charmingly, would not let me go, and I

ended by leaving him at the door of an hotel in Paris where he was to

meet his mother. But on the subject of Fontenoy it is an _idée fixe_. He

chafes under the whole position, and will yield nothing to a man who, as

he conceives, has no _locus standi_. But if his pride were no longer

annoyed by its being said that his mother had sacrificed her own

happiness to him, and if the situation were defined, I _think_ he might

be more amenable. I think they might marry him."

"That's how the man puts it!" said Betty, tightening her lip. "Of course

_any_ marriage is desirable for _any_ woman!"

"I was thinking of Mrs. Allison," said George, defensively. "One can't

think of a Lady Ancoats till she exists."

"_Merci!_ Never mind. Don't apologise for the masculine view. It has to

be taken with the rest of you. Do you understand that matrimony is in the

air here to-night? Have you been talking to Lady Madeleine?"

"No, not yet. But how handsome she's grown! I see Naseby's not far off."

George turned smiling to his companion. But, as he did so, again

something cold and lifeless in his own face and in the expression

underlying the smile pricked little Betty painfully. Marcella had made

her no confidences, but there had been much gossip, and Letty Tressady's

mere presence at the Court set the intimate friend guessing very near

the truth.

She did her best to chatter on, so as to keep him at least

superficially amused. But both became more and more conscious of two

figures, and two figures only, at the crowded table--Letty Tressady,

who was listening absently to Edward Watton with oppressed and indrawn

eyes, and Lady Maxwell.

George, indeed, watched his wife constantly. He hungered to know more of

that first scene between her and Lady Maxwell, or he thought with bitter

repulsion of the letter she had confessed to him. Had he known of it,--in

spite of that strange, that compelling letter of Maxwell's, so reticent,

and yet in truth so plain,--he could hardly have come as a guest to

Maxwell's house. As for her revelations about Cathedine, he felt little

resentment or excitement. For the future a noxious brute had to be kept

in order--that was all. It was his own fault, he supposed, much more than

hers. The inward voice, as before, was clear enough. "I must just take

her home and be good to her. _She_ shirked nothing--now, no doubt, she

expects me to do my part."

"Do you notice those jewels that Lady Maxwell is wearing to-night?" said

Betty at last, unable to keep away from the name.

"I imagine they are a famous set?"

"They belonged to Marie Antoinette. At last Maxwell has made her have

them cleaned and reset. What a pity to have such desperate scruples as

she has about all your pretty things!"

"Must diamonds and rubies, then, perish out of the world?" he asked her,

absently, letting his eyes rest again upon the beautiful head and neck.

Betty made some flippant rejoinder, but as she watched him, she

was not gay.

* * * * *

George had had but a few words with his hostess before dinner, and

afterwards a short conversation was all that either claimed. She had

hoped and planned so much! On the stage of imagination before he

came--she had seen his coming so often. All was to be forgotten and

forgiven, and this difficult visit was to lead naturally and without

recall to another and happier relation. And now that he was here she felt

herself tongue-tied, moving near him in a dumb distress. Both realised

the pressure of the same necessities, the same ineluctable facts; and

tacitly, they met and answered each other, in the common avoidance of a

companionship which could after all avail nothing. Once or twice, as they

stood together after dinner, he noticed amid her gracious kindness, her

inquiries after Mrs. Allison or his mother, the search her eyes made for

Letty, and presently she began to talk with nervous, almost appealing,

emphasis--with a marked significance and intensity indeed--of Letty's

fatigue after her nursing, and the need she had for complete change and

rest. George found himself half resenting the implications of her manner,

as the sentences flowed on. He felt her love of influence, and was not

without a hidden sarcasm. In spite of his passionate gratitude to her, he

must needs ask himself, did she suppose that a man or a marriage was to

be remade in a month, even by her plastic fingers? Women envisaged these

things so easily, so childishly, almost.

When he moved away, a number of men who had already been talking to him

after dinner, and some of the most agreeable women of the party besides,

closed about him, making him, as it were, the centre of a conversation

which was concerned almost entirely with the personalities and chances

of the political moment. He was scarcely less astonished than Letty had

been by his own position amongst the guests gathered under Maxwell's

roof. Never had he been treated with so much sympathy, so much deference

even. Clearly, if he willed it so, what had seemed the dislocation might

only be the better beginning of a career. Nonsense! He meant to throw it

all up as soon as Parliament met again in February. The state of his

money affairs alone determined that. The strike was going from bad to

worse. He must go home and look after his own business. It was a folly

ever to have attempted political life. Meanwhile he felt the stimulus of

his reception in a company which included some of the keenest brains in

England. It appealed to his intelligence and virility, and they

responded. Letty once, glancing at him, saw that he was talking briskly,

and said to herself, with contradictory bitterness, that he was looking

as well as ever, and was going, she supposed, to behave as if nothing

had happened.

"What is the matter with you to-night, my lady?" said Naseby, taking a

seat beside his hostess. "May I be impertinent and guess?--you don't like

your gems? Lady Leven has been telling me tales about them. They are the

most magnificent things I ever saw. I condole with you."

She turned rather listlessly to meet his bantering look.

"'Come you in friendship, or come you in war?'" she said, pointing to a

seat beside her. "I have no fight in me. But I have a great many things

to say to you."

He reddened for an instant, then recovered himself.

"So have I to you," he said briskly. "In the first place, I have some

fresh news from Mile End."

She half laughed, as who should say, "You put me off," then surrendered

herself with eagerness to the pleasure of his report. At the moment of

his approach, under pretence of talking to an elderly cousin of

Maxwell's, she had been lost in such an abstraction of powerless pity for

George Tressady--whose fair head, somehow, never escaped her, wherever it

moved--that she had hardly been able to bear with her guests or the

burden of the evening.

But Naseby roused her. And, indeed, his story so far was one to set the

blood throbbing in the veins of a creature who, on one side pure woman,

was on the other half poet, half reformer. Since the passage of the

Maxwell Bill, indeed, Naseby and a few friends of his, some "gilded

youths" like himself, together with some trade-union officials of a long

experience, had done wonders. They had been planning out the industrial

reorganisation of a whole district, through its two staple trades, with

the enthusiastic co-operation of the workpeople themselves; and the

result so far struck the imagination. Everywhere the old workshops were

to be bought up, improved, or closed; everywhere factories in which life

might be decent, and work more than tolerable, were to be set up;

everywhere the prospective shortening of hours, and the doing away with

the most melancholy of the home trades was working already like the

incoming of a great slowly surging tide, raising a whole population on

its breast to another level of well-being and of hope.

Most of what had been done or designed was of course already well known

to Maxwell's wife; she had indeed given substantial help to Naseby

throughout. But Naseby had some fresh advances to report since she was

last in East London, and she drank them in with an eagerness, which

somehow assuaged a hidden smart; while he wondered a little perhaps in

his philosopher's soul at the woman of our English day, with her

compunctions and altruisms, her entanglement with the old scheme of

things, her pining for a new. It had often seemed to him that to be a

Nihilist nurse among a Russian peasantry would be an infinitely easier

task than to reconcile the social remorses and compassions that tore his

companion's mind with the social pageant in which her life, do what she

would, must needs be lived. He knew that, intellectually, she no more

than Maxwell saw any way out of unequal place, unequal spending, unequal

recompense, if civilisation were to be held together; but he perceived

that morally she suffered. Why? Because she and not someone else had been

chosen to rule the palace and wear the gems that yet must be? In the end,

Naseby could but shrug his shoulders over it. Yet even his sceptical

temper made no question of sincerity.

When all his budget was out, and her comments made, she leant back a

little in her chair, studying him. A smile came to play about her lips.

"What do you want to say to me?" he asked her quickly.

She looked round her to see that they were not overheard.

"When did you see Madeleine last?"

"At her brother's house, a fortnight ago."

"Was she nice to you?"

He bit his lip, and drew his brows a little together, under her scrutiny.

"Do you imagine I am going to be cross-examined like this?"

"Yes--reply!"

"Well, I don't know what her conception of 'niceness' may be; it didn't

fit mine. She had got it into her head that I 'pitied' her, which seemed

to be a crime. I didn't see how to disprove it, so I came away."

He spoke with a dry lightness, but she perceived anxiety and unrest under

his tone. She bent forward.

"Do you know where Madeleine is now?"

"Not in the least."

"In the Long Gallery. I sent her there."

"Upon my word!" he said, after a pause. "Do you want to rule us all?"

His cheek had flushed again; his look was half rebellious.

A flash of pain struck through her brightness.

"No, no!" she said, protesting. "But I know--you don't!"

He rose deliberately, and bowed with the air of obeying her commands.

Then suddenly he bent down to her.

"I knew perfectly well that she was in the Long Gallery! But I also knew

that Mrs. Bayle had chosen to join her there. The coast, you may

perceive, is now clear."

He walked away. Marcella looked round, and saw an elegant little bride,

Mr. Bayle's new wife, rustling into the room again. She leant back in

her chair, half laughing, yet her eyes were wet. The new joy brought a

certain ease to old regrets. Only that word "rule" rankled a little.

Yet the old regrets were all sharp and active again. It seemed to be

impossible now to talk with George Tressady, to make any real breach in

the barrier between them; but how impossible also not to think of

him!--of the young fellow, who had given Maxwell his reward, and said to

herself such sad, such agitating things! She did think of him. Her heart

ached to serve him. The situation made a new and a very troubling appeal

to her womanhood.

* * * * *

The night was warm, and still, and the windows were open to it as they

had been on that May night at Castle Luton. Maxwell came to look for

Tressady, and took him out upon a flagged terrace that ran the length of

the house.

They talked first of the Ancoats incident, George supplementing his

letters by some little verbal pictures of Ancoats's life and surroundings

that made Maxwell laugh grimly from time to time. As to Mrs. Allison,

Maxwell reported that Ancoats seemed to have gained his point. There was

talk of the marriage coming off some time in the winter.

"Well, Fontenoy has earned his prize," said George.

"There are more than twelve years between them. But she seems to be one

of the women who don't age. I have seen her go through griefs that

would kill most women; and it has been like the passage of a storm over

a flower."

"Religion, I suppose, carried to that point, protects one a good deal,"

said George, not, in truth, feeling much interest in the matter or in

Mrs. Allison now that his task was done.

"And especially religion of the type that allows you to give your soul

into someone else's keeping. There is no such anodyne," said Maxwell,

musing. "I have often noticed how Catholic women keep their youth and

softness. But now, do allow me a few words about yourself. Is what I hear

about your withdrawal from Parliament irrevocable?"

George's reply led to a discussion in which Maxwell, without any attempt

at party proselytism, endeavoured to combat all that he could understand

of the young man's twofold disgust, disgust with his own random

convictions no less than with the working of the party machine.

"Where do I belong?" he said. "I don't know myself. I ought never to have

gone in. Anyway, I had better stand aside for a time."

"But evidently the Malford people want to keep you."

"Well, and of course I shall consult their convenience as much as I can,"

said George, unwillingly, but would say no more.

Nothing, indeed, could be more flattering, more healing, than all that

was implied in Maxwell's earnestness, in the peculiar sympathy and

kindness with which the elder man strove to win the younger's confidence;

but George could not respond. His whole inner being was too sore; and his

mind ran incomparably more upon the damnable letter that must be lying

somewhere in the archives of the memory of the man talking to him, than

upon his own political prospects. The conversation ended for Maxwell in

mere awkwardness and disappointment,--deep disappointment if the truth

were known. Once roused his idealism was little less stubborn, less

wilful than Marcella's.

When the ladies withdrew, a brilliant group of them stood for a moment on

the first landing of the great oak staircase, lighting candles and

chattering. Madeleine Penley took her candle absently from Marcella's

hand, saying nothing. The girl's curious face under its crown of gold-red

hair was transformed somehow to an extraordinary beauty. The frightened

parting of the lips and lifting of the brows had become rather a look of

exquisite surprise, as of one who knows at last "the very heart of love."

"I am coming to you, presently," murmured Marcella, laying her cheek

against the girl's.

"Oh, _do_ come!" said Madeleine, with a great breath, and she walked

away, unsteadily, by herself, into the darkness of the tapestried

passage, her white dress floating behind her.

Marcella looked after her, then turned with shining eyes to Letty

Tressady. Her expression changed.

"I am afraid your headache has been very bad all the evening," she said

penitently. "Do let me come and look after you."

She went with Letty to her room, and put her into a chair beside the wood

fire, that even on this warm night was not unwelcome in the huge place.

Letty, indeed, shivered a little as she bent towards it.

"Must you go so early?" said Marcella, hanging over her. "I heard Sir

George speak of the ten o'clock train."

"Oh, yes," said Letty, "that will be best."

She stared into the fire without speaking. Marcella knelt down

beside her.

"You won't hate me any more?" she said, in a low, pleading voice, taking

two cold hands in her own.

Letty looked up.

"I should like," she said, speaking with difficulty, "if you cared--to

see you sometimes."

"Only tell me when," said Marcella, laying her lips lightly on the hands,

"and I will come." Then she hesitated. "Oh, do believe," she broke out at

last, but still in the same low voice, "that all can be healed! Only show

him love,--forget everything else,--and happiness must come. Marriage is

so difficult--such an art--even for the happiest people, one has to learn

it afresh day by day."

Letty's tired eyes wavered under the other's look.

"I can't understand it like that," she said. Then she moved restlessly in

her chair. "Ferth is a terrible place! I wonder how I shall bear it!"

* * * * *

An hour later Marcella left Madeleine Penley and went back to her own

room. The smile and flush with which she had received the girl's last

happy kisses disappeared as she walked along the corridor. Her head

drooped, her arms hung listlessly beside her.

Maxwell found her in her own little sitting-room almost in the dark. He

sat down by her and took her hand.

"You couldn't make any impression on him as to Parliament?" she asked

him, almost whispering.

"No. He persists that he must go. I think his private circumstances at

Ferth have a great deal to do with it."

She shook her head. She turned away from him, took up a paper-knife, and

let it fall on the table beside her. He thought that she must have been

in tears, before he found her, and he saw that she could find no words in

which to express herself. Lifting her hand to his lips, he held it there,

silently, with a touch all tenderness.

"Oh, why am I so happy!" she broke out at last, with a sob, almost

drawing her hand away. "Such a life as mine seems to absorb and batten

upon other people's dues--to grow rich by robbing their joy, joy that

should feed hundreds and comes all to me! And that besides I should

actually bruise and hurt--"

Her voice failed her.

"Fate has a way of being tolerably even, at last," said Maxwell, slowly,

after a pause. "As to Tressady, no one can say what will come of it. He

has strange stuff in him--fine stuff I think. He will pull himself

together. And for the wife--probably, already he owes you much! I saw her

look at you to-night--once as you touched her shoulder. Dear!--what

spells have you been using?"

"Oh! I will do all I can--all I can!" Marcella repeated in a low,

passionate voice, as one who makes a vow to her own heart.

"But after to-morrow he will not willingly come across us again," said

Maxwell, quietly. "That I saw."

She gave a sad and wordless assent.

CHAPTER XXIII

Letty Tressady sat beside the doorway of one of the small red-brick

houses that make up the village of Ferth. It was a rainy October

afternoon, and through the door she could see the black main street

--houses and road alike bedabbled in wet and mire. At one point in the

street her eye caught a small standing crowd of women and children, most

of them with tattered shawls thrown over their heads to protect them from

the weather. She knew what it meant. They were waiting for the daily

opening of the soup kitchen, started in the third week of the great

strike by the Baptist minister, who, in the language of the Tory paper,

was "among the worst firebrands of the district." There was another soup

kitchen further down, to which George had begun to subscribe immediately

on his return to the place. She had thought it a foolish act on his part

thus to help his own men to fight him the better. But--now, as she

watched the miserable crowd outside the Baptist chapel, she felt the

teasing pressure of those new puzzles of her married life which had so

far done little else, it seemed, than take away her gaiety and her power

of amusing herself.

Near her sat an oldish woman with an almost toothless mouth, who was

chattering to her in a tone that Letty knew to be three parts

hypocritical.

"Well, the treuth is the men is that fool 'ardy when they gets a thing

into their yeds, there's no taakin wi un. There's plenty as done like the

strike, my lady, but they dursent say so--they'd be afeard o' losin the

skin off their backs, for soom o' them lads o' Burrows's is a routin

rough lot as done keer what they doos to a mon, an yo canna exspeck a

quiet body to stan up agen 'em. Now, my son, ee comes in at neet all

slamp and downcast, an I says to 'im, 'Is there noa news yet o' the Jint

Committee, John?' I ses to un. 'Noa, mither,' ee says, 'they're just

keepin ov it on.' An ee do seem so down'earted when ee sees the poor

soart ov a supper as is aw I can gie un to 'is stomach. Now, _I'm_ wun o'

thoase as _wants_ nuthin. The doctor ses, 'Yo've got no blude in yer,

Missus 'Ammersley, what 'ull yer 'ave?' An I says, '_Nuthin!_ it's sun

cut, an it's sun cooked, _nuthin!_' Noa, I've niver bin on t' parish--an

I _might_--times. An I don't 'old wi strikes. Lor, it is a poor pleace,

is ours--ain't it?--an nobbut a bit o' bread an drippin for supper."

The old woman threw her eyes round her kitchen, bringing them back slyly

to Letty's face. Letty ended by leaving some money with her, and walking

away as dissatisfied with her own charity as she was with its recipient.

Perhaps this old body was the only person in the village who would have

begged of "Tressady's wife" at this particular moment. Letty, moreover,

had some reason to believe that her son was one of the roughest of

Burrows's bodyguard; while the old woman was certainly no worse off than

any of her neighbours.