Sir George Tressady Volume Ii Part 2

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

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

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

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

"I say, where are you off to?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

And not the mind of England only. Ireland and Scotland, town and country, talked of it, seethed with it. The new law, if it pa.s.sed, was to be tried, indeed, at first, in London only. But every provincial town and every country district knew that, if it succeeded, there was not a corner of the land that would not ultimately feel the yoke, or the deliverance, of it Every workman's club, every trade-union meeting, every mechanics'

inst.i.tute was ringing with it. Organised labour, dragged down at every point--in London, at any rate--by the compet.i.tion of the starving and struggling crew of home-workers, clamoured for the Bill. The starving and struggling crew themselves were partly voiceless, partly bewildered; now drawn by the eloquence of their trade-union fellows to shout for the revolution that threatened them, now surging tumultuously against it.

On this vital clause, in Fontenoy's belief, the Government would go down.

But if, by amazing good-fortune and good generals.h.i.+p, they should get through with it, then the fight would but rage the more fiercely round the last two sections of the Bill.

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

Fontenoy would say, with that grim, sudden reddening which revealed from moment to moment the feverish tension of the man.

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

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

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

Fontenoy turned upon him, startled.

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

"Because there are always waverers who will accept a _fait accompli_; and you know how opposition has a trick of cooling towards the end of a Bill.

Maxwell has carried his main point, they will say; this is a question of machinery. Besides, many of those Liberals who will be with us on the main point don't love the landlords. No! don't flatter yourself that, if we lose the main engagement, there will be any Prussians to bring up. The thing will be done."

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

George made no reply.

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

Presently Fontenoy said, in another voice:

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

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

"And did he confide in you?"

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

Fontenoy made a sound between a growl and a sigh.

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

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

"Trying to get at the young woman. One can't buy her off, of course.

Ancoats is his own master, and could outbid us. But Maxwell has found a brother--a decent sort of fellow--a country solicitor. And there is a Ritualist curate, a Father somebody,"--Fontenoy raised his shoulders,--"who seems to have an intermittent hold on the girl. When she has fits of virtue she goes to confess to him. Maxwell has got hold of _him_."

"And meanwhile Ancoats is at Bad Wildheim?"

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

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

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

"Or a pose?"

George pondered.

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

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

"Ancoats told me nothing. I have heard some gossip from Harding Watton,"

said George, unwillingly. It was one of his strongest characteristics, this fastidious and even haughty dislike of chatter about other people's private affairs, a dislike which, in the present case, had been strengthened by his growing antipathy to Harding.

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

Yet with Tressady he felt no difficulty in talking over these private affairs; and he did, in fact, report the whole story--that same story with which Marcella had startled Betty Leven on the night in question: how Ancoats on this Sunday evening had decoyed this handsome, impressionable girl, to whom throughout the winter he had been paying decided and even ostentatious court, into a _tete-a-tete_--had poured out to her frantic confessions of his attachment to the theatrical lady--a woman he could never marry, whom his mother could never meet, but with whom, nevertheless, come what might, he was determined to live and die.

She--Madeleine--was his friend, his good angel. Would she go to his mother and break it to her? Would she understand, and forgive him? There must be no opposition, or he would shoot himself. And so on, till the poor girl, worn out with excitement and grief, tottered into Mrs.

Allison's room more dead than alive.

But at that point Fontenoy stopped abruptly.

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

Then, aloud, he said: