"Beatus qui amat te, et amicum in te, et inimicum propter te. Solus enim nullum eorum amittit, cui omnes in illo cari sunt qui non amittitur."
He hung over the fire, pondering the two utterances.
"A marvellous music," he thought of the last. "But I know no more what it means than I know what a symphony of Brahms' means. Yet some say they know. Perhaps of her it might be true."
The weeks ran on. Outside, the strike was at its worst, though George still believed the men would give in before Christmas. There was hideous distress, and some bad rioting in different parts of the country. Various attempts had been made by the employers to use and protect non-union labour, but the crop of outrage they had produced had been too threatening: in spite of the exasperation of the masters they had been perforce let drop. The Press and the public were now intervening in good earnest—"every fool thinks he can do our business for us," as George would put it bitterly to Letty. Burrows was speaking up and down the district with a superhuman energy, varied only by the drinking-bouts to which he occasionally succumbed; and George carried a revolver with him when he went abroad.
The struggle wore him to death; the melancholy of his temperament had never been so marked. At the same time Letty saw a doggedness in him, a toughness like Fontenoy's own, which astonished her. Two men seemed to be fighting in him. He would talk with perfect philosophy of the miners' point of view, and the physical-force sanction by which the lawless among them were determined to support it; but at the same time he belonged to the stiffest set among the masters.
Meanwhile, at home, friction and discomfort were constantly recurring. In the course of three or four weeks Lady Tressady had several attacks of illness, and it was evident that her weakness increased rapidly. And with the weakness, alas! the ugly incessant irritability, that dried up the tenderness of nurses, and made a battleground of the sick-room. Though, indeed, she could never be kept in her room; she resented being left a moment alone. She claimed, in spite of the anxieties of the moment, to be constantly amused; and though George could sometimes distract and quiet her, nothing that Letty did, or said, or wore was ever tolerable to a woman who merely saw in this youth beside her a bitter reminder of her own.
At last, one day early in November, came a worse turn than usual. The doctor was in the house most of the day, but George had gone off before the alarm to a place on the further side of the county, and could not be got at till the evening.
He came in to find Letty waiting for him in the hall. There had been a rally; the doctor had gone his way marvelling, and it was thought there was no immediate danger.
"But oh, the pain!" said Letty, under her breath, pressing her hands together, and shivering. Her eyes were red, her cheeks pale; he saw that she was on the point of exhaustion; and he guessed that she had never seen such a sight before.
He ran up to visit his mother, whom he found almost speechless from weakness, yet waiting, with evident signs of impatience and temper, for her evening food. And while he and Letty were at their melancholy dinner together, Justine came flying downstairs in tears. Miladi would not eat what had been taken to her. She was exciting herself; there would be another attack.