"I don't know what else one could expect," he said, laughing.
"Not at all!"—the flush mounted in the delicate hollow of the cheek. "Why should there be any more fuss about a woman's being struck than a man? We don't want any of this extra pity and talk."
"Human nature, I am afraid," said George, raising his shoulders. Did she really suppose that women could mix in the political fight on the same terms as men—could excite no more emotion there than men? Folly!
Then Maxwell, who was standing behind her, came forward, greeted Tressady kindly, and they talked for a few minutes about the evening's debate. The keen look of the elder scanned the younger's face and manner the while with some minuteness. As for George, his dialogue with the Minister, at which more than one passer-by threw looks of interest and amusement, gave him no particular pleasure. Maxwell's qualities were not of the kind that specially appealed to him; nor was he likely to attract Maxwell. Nevertheless, he could have wished their ten minutes' talk to last interminably, merely because of the excuse it gave him to be near her!—played upon by her movements and her tones. He talked to Maxwell of speeches, and votes, and little incidents of the day. And all the time he knew how she was surrounded; how the crowd that was always gathering about her came and went; with whom she talked; above all, how that eager, sensitive charm which she had shown in its fulness to him—perhaps to him only, beside her husband, of all this throng—played through her look, her voice, her congratulations, and her dismays. For had he not seen her in distress and confusion—seen her in tears, wrestling with herself? His heart caressed the thought like a sacred thing, all the time that he was conscious of her as the centre of this political throng—the adored, detested, famous woman, typical in so many ways of changing custom and of an expanding world.
Then, in a flash, as it were, the crowd had thinned, the Maxwells had gone, and George was running down the steps of the members' entrance, into the rain outside. He seemed to carry with him the scent of a rose,—the rose she had worn on her breast,—and his mind was tormented with the question he had already asked himself: "How is it going to end?"
He pushed on through the wet streets, lost in a hundred miseries and exaltations. The sensation was that of a man struggling with a rising tide, carried helplessly in the rush and swirl of it. Yet conscience had very little to say, and, when it did speak, got little but contempt for its pains. What had any clumsy code, social or moral, to do with it? When would Marcella Maxwell, by word or look or thought, betray the man she loved? Not till
A' the seas gang dry, my dear,
An the rocks melt wi' the sun!
How he found his way home he hardly knew; for it was a moment of blind crisis with him. All that crowded, dramatic scene of the House—its lights, its faces, its combinations—had vanished from his mind. What remained was a group of three people, contemplated in a kind of terror—terror of what this thing might grow to! Once, in St. James's Street, the late hour, the soft, gusty night, suddenly reminded him of that other gusty night in February when he had walked home after his parting with Letty, so well content with himself and the future, and had spoken to Marcella Maxwell for the first time amid that little crowd in the Mall. Nothing had been irreparable then. He had his life in his hands.
As for this passion, that was creeping into all his veins, poisoning and crippling all his vitalities, he was still independent enough of it to be able to handle it with the irony it deserved. For it was almost as ludicrous as it was pitiable. He did not want any man of the world, any Harding Watton, to tell him that.
What amazed him was the revelation of his own nature that was coming out of it. He had always been rather proud to think of himself as an easygoing fellow with no particular depths. Other men were proud of a "storm period"—of feasting and drinking deep—made a pose of it. Tressady's pose had been the very opposite. Out of a kind of good taste, he had wished to take life lightly, with no great emotion. And marriage with Letty had seemed to satisfy this particular canon.