Sir George Tressady — Volume II

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

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.