Sir George Tressady Volume Ii Part 22

She could make no reply. Intolerable grat.i.tude and pain held her, and he went on speaking, gazing straight into her shrinking face.

"It seems to me," he said slowly, "the people who grow up in the dry and mean habit of mind that I grew up in, break through in all sorts of different ways. Art and religion--I suppose they change and broaden a man. I don't know. I am not an artist--and religion talks to me of something I don't understand. To me, to know you has broken down the walls, opened the windows. It always used to come natural to me--well!

to think little of people, to look for the mean, ugly things in them, especially in women. The only people I admired were men of action--soldiers, administrators; and it often seemed to me that women hampered and belittled them. I said to myself, one mustn't let women count for too much in one's life. And the idea of women troubling their heads with politics, or social difficulties, half amused, half disgusted me. At the same time I was all with Fontenoy in hating the usual philanthropic talk about the poor. It seemed to be leading us to mischief--I thought the greater part of it insincere. Then I came to know you.--And, after all, it seemed a woman could talk of public things, and still be real--the humanity didn't rub off, the colour stood! It was easy, of course, to say that you had a personal motive--other people said it, and I should have liked to echo it. But from the beginning I knew that didn't explain it. All the women,"--he checked himself,--"most of the women I had ever known judged everything by some petty personal standard. They talked magnificently, perhaps, but there was always something selfish and greedy at bottom. Well, I was always looking for it in you! Then instead--suddenly--I found myself anxious lest what I said should displease or hurt you--lest you should refuse to be my friend. I longed, desperately, to make you understand me--and then, after our talks, I hated myself for posing, and going further than was sincere. It was so strange to me not to be scoffing and despising."

Marcella woke from her trance of pain--looked at him with amazement.

But the sight of him--a man, with the perspiration on his brow, struggling now to tell the bare truth about himself and his plight--silenced her. She hung towards him again, as pale as he, bearing what fate had sent her.

"And ever since that day," he went on, putting his hand over his eyes, "when you walked home with me along the river, to be with you, to watch you, to puzzle over you, has built up a new self in me, that strains against and tears the old one. So these things--these heavenly, exquisite things that some men talk of--this sympathy, and purity, and sweetness--were true! They were true because you existed--because I had come to know something of your nature--had come to realise what it might be--for a man to have the right--"

He broke off, and buried his face in his hands, murmuring incoherent things. Marcella rose hurriedly, then stood motionless, her head turned from him, that she might not hear. She felt herself stifled with rising tears. Once or twice she began to speak, and the words died away again.

At last she said, bending towards him:

"I have done very ill--very, _very_ ill. I have been thinking all through of my personal want--of personal victory."

He shook his head, protesting. And she hardly knew how to go on. But suddenly the word of nature, of truth, came; though in the speaking it startled them both.

"Sir George!"--she put out her hand timidly and touched him--"may I tell you what I am thinking of? Not of you, nor of me--of another person altogether!"

He looked up.

"My wife?" he said, almost in his usual voice.

She said nothing; she was struggling with herself. He got up abruptly, walked to the open window, stood there a few seconds, and came back.

"It has to be all thought out again," he said, looking at her appealingly. "I must go away, perhaps--and realise--what can be done. I took marriage as carelessly as I took everything else. I must try and do better with it."

A sudden perception leapt in Marcella, revealing strange worlds. How she could have hated--with what fierceness, what flame!--the woman who taught ideal truths to Maxwell! She thought of the little self-complacent being in the white satin wedding-dress, that had sat beside her at Castle Luton--thought of her with overwhelming soreness and pain. Stepping quickly, her tears driven back, she went across the room to Tressady.

"I don't know what to say," she began, stopping suddenly beside him, and leaning her hand for support on a table while her head drooped. "I have been very selfish--very blind. But--mayn't it be the beginning--of something quite--quite--different? I was thinking only of Maxwell--or myself. But I ought to have thought of you--of my friend. I ought to have seen--but oh! how _could_ I!" She broke off, wrestling with this amazing difficulty of choosing, amid all the thoughts that thronged to her lips, something that might be said--and if said, might heal.

But before he could interrupt her, she went on: "The harm was, in acting all through--by myself--as if only you and I, and Maxwell's work--were concerned. If I had made you known to _him_--if I had remembered--had thought--"

But she stopped again, in a kind of bewilderment. In truth she did not yet understand what had happened to her--how it could have happened to her--to _her_, whose life, soul, and body, to the red ripe of its inmost heart, was all Maxwell's, his possession, his chattel.

Tressady looked at her with a little sad smile.

"It was your unconsciousness," he said, in a low trembling voice, "of what you are--and have--that was so beautiful."

Somehow the words recalled her natural dignity, her n.o.ble pride as Maxwell's wife. She stood erect, composure and self-command returning.

She was not her own, to humble herself as she pleased.

"We must never talk to each other like this again," she said gently, after a little pause. "We must try and understand each other--the _real_ things in each other's lives.--Don't lay a great remorse on me, Sir George!--don't spoil your future, and your wife's--don't give up Parliament! You have great, great gifts! All this will seem just a pa.s.sing misunderstanding--both to you--and me--by and by. We shall learn to be--real friends--you and we--together?"

She looked at him appealing--her face one prayer.

But he, flus.h.i.+ng, shook his head.

"I must not come into your world," he said huskily. "I must go."

The wave of grief rolled upon her again. She turned away, looking across the room with wide dim eyes, as though asking for some help that did not come.

Tressady walked quickly back to the chair where he had been sitting, and took up his hat and gloves. Suddenly, as he looked back to her, he struck one of the gloves across his hand.

"What a _coward_--what a mean whining wretch I was to come to you this morning! I said to myself--like a hypocrite--that I could come--and go--without a word. My G.o.d--if I had!"--the low hoa.r.s.e voice became a cry of pain--"I might still have taken some joy--"

He wrestled with himself.

"It was mad selfishness," he said at last, recovering himself by a fierce effort. "Mad it must have been--or I could never have come here to give you pain. Some demon drove me. Oh, forgive me!--forgive me! Good-bye! I shall bless you while I live. But you--you must never think of me, never speak of me--again."

She felt his grasp upon her fingers. He stooped, pa.s.sionately kissed her hand and a fold of her dress. She rose hurriedly; but the door had closed upon him before she had found her voice or choked down the sob in her throat.

She could only drop back into her chair, weeping silently, her face hidden in her hands.

A few minutes pa.s.sed. There was a step outside. She sprang up and listened, ready to fly to the window and hide herself among the curtains.

Then the colour flooded into her cheek. She waited. Maxwell came in. He, too, looked disturbed, and as he entered the room he thrust a letter into his pocket, almost with violence. But when his eyes fell on his wife a pang seized him. He hurried to her, and she leant against him, saying in a sobbing voice:

"George Tressady has been here. I seem to have done him a wrong--and his wife. I am not fit to help you, Aldous. I do such rus.h.i.+ng, blind, foolish things--and all that one hoped and worked for turns to mere selfishness and misery. Whom shall I hurt next? You, perhaps--_you_!"

And she clung to him in despair.

A few minutes later the husband and wife were in conference together, Marcella sitting, Maxwell standing beside her. Marcella's tears had ceased; but never had Maxwell seen her so overwhelmed, so sad, and he felt half ashamed of his own burning irritation and annoyance with the whole matter.

Clearly, what he had dimly foreseen on the night of her return from the Mile End meeting had happened. This young man, ill-balanced, ill-mated, yet full of a sensitive ability and perception, had fallen in love with her; and Maxwell owed his political salvation to his wife's charm.

The more he loved her, the more odious the situation was to him. That any rational being should have even the shred of an excuse for regarding her as the political coquette, using her beauty for a personal end, struck him as a kind of sacrilege, and made him rage inwardly. Nevertheless, the idea struck him--struck and kindled him all at once that the very perfectness of this tie that bound them together weakened her somewhat as a woman in her dealing with the outside world. It withdrew from her some of a woman's ordinary intuitions with regard to the men around her. The heart had no wants, and therefore no fears. To any man she liked she was always ready, as she came to know him, to show her true self with a freedom and loveliness that were like the freedom and loveliness of a n.o.ble child. To have supposed that such a man could have any feelings towards her other than those she gave to her friends would have seemed to her a piece of ill-bred vanity. Such contingencies lay outside her ken; she would have brushed them away with a laughing contempt had they been presented to her. Her life was at once too happy and too busy for such things. How could anyone fall in love with Aldous's wife? Why should they?--if one was to ask the simplest question of all.

Yet Maxwell, as he stood looking down upon her, conscious of a certain letter in his inner pocket, felt with growing yet most unwilling determination that he must somehow try and make her turn her eyes upon this dingy world and see it as it is.

For it was not the case merely of a spiritual drama in which a few souls, all equally sincere and void of offence, were concerned. That, in Maxwell's eyes, would have been already disagreeable and tragic enough.

But here was this keen, spiteful crowd of London society watching for what it might devour--those hateful newspapers!--not to speak of the ordinary fool of everyday life.

There had not been wanting a number of small signs and warnings. The whole course of the previous day's debate, the hour of Tressady's speech, while Maxwell sat listening in the Speaker's Gallery overhead, had been for him--for her, too--poisoned by a growing uneasiness, a growing distaste for the triumph laid at their feet. She had come down to him from the Ladies' Gallery pale and nervous, shrinking almost from the grasp of his hand.

"What will happen? Has he made his position in Parliament impossible?"

she had said to him as they stood together for a moment in the Home Secretary's room; and he understood, of course, that she was speaking of Tressady. In the throng that presently overwhelmed them he had no time to answer her; but he believed that she, too, had been conscious of the peculiar note in some of the congratulations showered upon them on their way through the crowded corridors and lobbies. On the steps of St.

Stephen's entrance an old white-haired gentleman, the friend and connection of Maxwell's father, had clapped the successful Minister on the back, with a laughing word in his ear: "Upon my word, Aldous, your beautiful lady is a wife to conjure with! I hear she has done the whole thing--educated the young man, brought him to his bearings, spoilt all Fontenoy's plans, broken up the group, in fact. Glorious!" and the old man looked with eyes half sarcastic, half admiring at the form of Lady Maxwell standing beside the carriage-door.

"I imagine the group has broken itself up," said Maxwell, shortly, shaking off his tormentor. But as he glanced back from, the carriage-window to the crowded doorway, and the faces looking after them, the thought of the talk that was probably pa.s.sing amid the throng set every nerve on edge.

Meanwhile she sat beside him, unconsciously a little more stately than usual, but curiously silent--till at last, as they were nearing Trafalgar Square, she threw out her hand to him, almost timidly:

"You _do_ rejoice?"

"I do," he said, with a long breath, pressing the hand. "I suppose nothing ever happens as one has foreseen it. How strange, when one looks back to that Sunday!"

She made no reply, and since then Tressady's name had been hardly mentioned between them. They had discussed every speech but his--even when the morning papers came, reflecting the astonishment and excitement of the public. The pang in Marcella's mind was--"Aldous thinks I asked a personal favour--_Did_ I?" And memory would fall back into anxious recapitulation of the scene with Tressady. Had she indeed pressed her influence with him too much--taken advantage of his Parliamentary youth and inexperience? In the hours of the night that followed the division, merely to ask the question tormented a conscience as proud as it was delicate.