"Oh! a slide of that kind once begun goes like the wind," said Fontenoy. "Well, and are you pleased with your Bill—not afraid of your promises—of all the Edens you have held out?"
The smile that he attempted roused such ogerish associations in Marcella, she must needs say something to give colour to the half-desperate laugh that caught her.
"Did you suppose we should be already en penitence?" she asked him.
The man's wrath overcame him. So England—all the serious forces of the country—were to be more and more henceforward at the mercy of this kind of thing! He had begun the struggle with a scornful disbelief in current gossip. He—politically and morally the creation of a woman—had yet not been able to bring himself to fear a woman. And now he sat there, fiercely saying to himself that this woman, playing the old game under new names, had undone him.
"Ah! I see," he said. "You are of the mind of the Oxford don—never regret, never retract, never apologise?"
The small, reddish eyes, like needle-points, fixed the face before him. She looked up, her beautiful lips parting. She felt the insult—marvelled at it! On such an errand, in her own house! Scorn was almost lost in astonishment.
"A quotation which nobody gets right—isn't it so?" she said calmly. "If a wise man said it, I suppose he meant, 'Don't explain yourself to the wrong people,' which is good advice, don't you think?"
She rose as she spoke, and moved away from him, that she might listen to what her husband was saying. Fontenoy was left to reflect on the folly of a man who, being driven to ask a kindness of his enemy, cannot keep his temper in the enemy's house. Yet his temper had been freshly tried since he entered it. The whole suggestion of Tressady's embassy was to himself galling in the extreme. "There is a meaning in it," he thought; "of course she thinks it will save appearances!" There was no extravagance, no calumny, that this cold critic of other men's fervours was not for the moment ready to believe.
Nevertheless, as he threw himself back in his chair, and his eye caught Mrs. Allison's bent figure on the other side of the room, he knew that he must needs submit—he did submit—to anything that could give that torn heart ease. Of his two passions, one, the passion for politics, seemed for the moment to have lost itself in disgust and disappointment; to the other he clung but the more strongly. Once or twice in her talk with Maxwell, Mrs. Allison raised her gentle eyes and looked across to Fontenoy. "Are you there, my friend?" the glance seemed to say, and a thrill spread itself through the man's rugged being. Ah, well! the follies of this young scapegrace must wear themselves out in time, and either he would marry and so free his mother, or he would so outrage her conscience that she would separate herself from him. Then would come other people's rewards.
Presently, indeed, Mrs. Allison rose from her seat and advanced to him with hurried steps.