And the letters were written with such abandonment! As a rule Marcella was a hasty or impatient correspondent. She thought letters a waste of time; life was full enough without them. But here, with Letty, she lingered, she took pains. The mistress of Les Rochers writing to her absent, her exacting Pauline, could hardly have been more eager to please. She talked—at leisure—of all that concerned her—husband, child, high politics, the persons she saw, the gaieties she bore with, the books she read, the schemes in which she was busied; then, with greater tenderness, greater minuteness, of the difficulties and tediums of Letty's life at Ferth, as they had been dismally drawn out for her in Letty's own letters. The animation, the eager kindness of it all went for much; the amazing self-surrender, self-offering, implied in every page for much more.
Strange!—as he read the letters George felt his own heart beating. Were they in some hidden way meant for him too?—he seemed to hear in them a secret message—a woman's yearning, a woman's response.
At any rate, the loving, reconciling effort had done its work. Letty could not be insensible to such a flattery, a compliment so unexpected, so bewildering—the heart of a Marcella Maxwell poured out to her for the taking. She neither felt it so profoundly, nor so delicately as hundreds of other women could have felt it. Nevertheless the excitement of it had thrilled and broken up the hardnesses of her own nature. And with each yielding on her part had come new capacity for yielding, new emotions that amazed herself; till she found herself, as it were, groping in a strange world, clinging to Marcella's hand, trying to express feelings that had never visited her before, one moment proud of her new friend with a pride half moral, half selfish, the next, ill at ease with her, and through it all catching dimly the light of new ideals.
One day, as George walked into Letty's sitting-room, to discuss some small business of the afternoon, he saw on her writing-table that same photograph of Lady Maxwell and her boy, whereof an earlier copy had come to such a tragic end in Letty's hands. He walked up to it with an exclamation; Letty was not in the room. Suddenly, however, she came in. He made no attempt whatever to disguise that he had been looking at the photograph; he bent over it indeed a moment longer, deliberately. Then, walking away to the window, he began speaking of the matter which had brought him to look for his wife. Letty answered absently. The colour had rushed to her face. Her hands fidgeted with the books and papers on her table, and her mind was full of fevered remembrance.
Presently George, having settled the little point he came to speak of, fell silent. But he still stood by the window, looking out through the rain-splashed glass to the wintry valley below with its chimneys and straggling village. Letty, who was pretending to write a note, raised her head, looked at him—the quick breath beating through the parted lips, the blue eyes half wild, half miserable. She was not nearly so pretty as she had been a year before. George had often noticed it; it made part of his remorse. But the face was more troubling, infinitely more human; and, in truth, he knew it much better, was more sensitively alive to it, so to speak, than he ever had been in the days of their courtship.
Before he left the room he came back to her, put his arm round her shoulders and kissed her hair. She did not raise her head or say anything. But when he had gone she looked up with a sudden fierce sob, took the photograph from its place, and thrust it angrily into the drawer in front of her. Afterwards she sat for some minutes, motionless, with her handkerchief at her lips, trying to choke down the tears that had seized her. And last of all, with trembling fingers, she took out the picture again, wrapped it in some soft tissue paper that lay near, as though propitiating it, and once more put it out of sight.
What had made her first ask Marcella for it, and then place it on her table where George might, nay, must see it? Some vague wish, no doubt, to "make up"; to punish herself, while touching him. But the recollection of him, bending over the picture, tortured her, gripped her at the heart for many a day afterwards. She let it be seen no more. Yet that week she wrote more fully, more incoherently, more piteously to Marcella than ever before. She talked, not without bitterness and injustice, of her bringing up, asked what she should read, spread out her puzzles with the poor, or with her household—half angrily, as though she were accusing someone. For the first time, as it were, she was seeking a teacher in the art of living. And though the tone was still querulous, she knew, and Marcella presently dared to guess, that the ugly house on the hill had in truth ceased to be in the least dull or burdensome to her. George went in and out of it. And for the woman that has come to hunger for her husband's step, there is no more ennui.
* * * * *
Letty indeed hardly knew the strength of her own position. The reading of Lady Maxwell's letters to his wife had cleared a number of relics and fragments from George's mind. The day of passion was done. Yes!—but to see her frequently, to be brought back into any of the old social or political relations to her and Maxwell, from this his pride shrank no less than his conscience. Yet there was a large party in his constituency, and belonging to it some of the men whose probity and intelligence he had come to rate most highly, who were pressing him hard not to resign in February, and, indeed, not to resign at all. The few public meetings he had so far addressed had been stormy indeed, but on the whole decidedly friendly to him, and it was urged that he must at least present himself for re-election, in which case his expenses should be borne, and he should be left as unpledged as possible. Since the passage of the Bill Fontenoy's reactionary movement had lost ground largely in the constituency; and the position of independent member with a general leaning to the Government was no doubt easily open to George Tressady.
But his whole soul shrank from such a renewal of the effort of politics—probably because of that something in him, that enfeebling, paralysing something, which in all directions made him really prefer the half to the whole, and see barriers in the way of all enthusiasms. Nevertheless, the arguments he had to meet, and the kind persuasions he had to rebut, made these weeks all the more trying to him.