Sir George Tressady — Volume II

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

The maid went, and Letty was left standing with the photograph in her hands.

Two days before Tressady had been in Edward Watton's room in St. James's Street, and had seen this amateur photograph of Marcella Maxwell and her boy on Watton's table. The poetic charm of it had struck him so forcibly that he had calmly put it in his pocket, telling the protesting owner that he in his rôle of great friend could easily procure another, and must beware of a grudging spirit. Watton had laughed and submitted, and Tressady had carried off the picture, honestly meaning to present it to Letty for a collection of contemporary "beauties" she had just begun to make.

Later in the day, as he was taking off his coat in the evening to dress for dinner, Tressady drew out the photograph. A sudden instinct, which he himself could hardly have explained, made him delay handing it over to Letty. He thrust it into the top tray of his collar-and-shirt wardrobe. Two days later the butler, coming in a hurry before breakfast to put out his master's clothes, shook the photograph out of the folds of the shirt, where it had hidden itself, without noticing what he had done. The picture slipped between the wardrobe and the wall of the recess in which it stood, was discovered later in the day by the housemaid, and given to Lady Tressady's maid.

Letty laid the photograph down on the dressing-table, and stood leaning upon her hands, looking at it. Marcella was sitting under one of the cedars of Maxwell Court with her boy beside her. A fine corner of the old house made a background, and the photographer had so dealt with his picture as to make it a whole, full of significance, and culminating in the two faces—the sensitive, speaking beauty of the mother, the sturdy strength of the child. Marcella had never looked more wistful, more attaching. It was the expression of a woman at rest, in the golden moment of her life, yet conscious—as all happiness is conscious—of the common human doom that nothing escapes. Meanwhile the fine, lightly furrowed brow above the eyes spoke action and power; so did the strong waves of black hair blown back by the breeze. A noble, strenuous creature, yet quivering through and through with the simplest, most human instincts. So one must needs read her, as one looked from the eyes to the eager clasp of the arm about the boy.

Letty studied it, as though she would pierce and stab it with looking. Then, with a sudden wild movement, she took up the picture, and tore it into twenty pieces. The pieces she left strewn on the floor, so that they must necessarily strike the eye of anyone coming into the room. And in a few more minutes she was in bed, lying still and wakeful, with her face turned away from the door.

About an hour afterwards there was a gentle knock at her door. She made no answer, and Tressady came in. He stepped softly, thinking she was asleep, and presently she heard him stop, with a stifled exclamation. She made no sound, but from his movement she guessed that he was picking up the litter on the floor. Then she heard it thrown into the basket under her writing-table, and she waited, holding her breath.

Tressady walked to a far window, drew a curtain back softly, and stood looking out at the starlight over the deserted street. Once, finding him so still, she ventured a hasty glance at him over the edge of the sheet. But she could see nothing. And after a time he turned and came to his accustomed place beside her. In twenty minutes at latest, she knew, much to her chagrin, that he was asleep.

She herself had no sleep. She was stung to wakefulness by that recurrent sense of the irrevocable which makes us say to ourselves in wonder, "How can it have happened? Two hours ago—such a little while—it had not happened!" And the mind clutches at the bygone hour, so near, so eternally distant—clutches at its ghost, in vain.

Yet it seemed to her now that she had been jealous from the first moment when she and George had come into contact with Marcella Maxwell. During the long hours of this night her jealousy burnt through her like a hot pain—jealousy, mixed with reluctant memory. Half consciously she had always assumed that it had been a piece of kindness on her part to marry George Tressady at all. She had almost condescended to him. After all, she had played with ambitions so much higher! At any rate, she had taken for granted that he would always admire and be grateful to her—that in return for her pretty self she might at least dispose of him and his as she pleased.

And now, what galled her intolerably was this discernment of the way in which—at least since their honeymoon—he must have been criticising and judging her—judging her by comparison with another woman. She seemed to see at a glance, the whole process of his mind, and her vanity writhed under it.