He closed the letter, and then paced restlessly about the little room for a time. It seemed to him that he was caught in a vice—that neither happiness, nor decent daily comfort, nor even the satisfactions of ambition, were ever to be his.
Next day he was off to Euston before Letty was properly awake. She found his letter waiting for her when she descended, and spent the day in a pale excitement. Yet by the end of it she had pretty well made up her mind. She would have to give in on the money question. George's figures and her natural shrewdness convinced her that the ultimate results of fighting him in this matter could only be more uncomfortable for herself than for him. But as to her freedom in choosing her own friends, or as to her jealousy of Lady Maxwell, she would never give in. If George had ceased to court his wife, then he could have nothing to say if she looked for the amusement and admiration that were her due from other people. There was no harm in that. Everybody else did it; and she was not going to be pretty and young for nothing. Whereupon she sat down and wrote a line to Lord Cathedine to tell him that she and "Tully" would be at the Opera on the following night, and to beg him to make sure that she got her "cards for Clarence House." Moreover, she meant to make use of him to procure her a card for a very smart ball, the last of the season, which was coming off in a fortnight. That could be arranged, no doubt, at the Opera.
* * * * *
George returned from the North in a few days looking, if possible, thinner and more careworn than when he went. He had found the strike a very stubborn business. Burrows was riding the storm triumphantly; and while upon his own side Tressady looked in vain for a "man," there was a dogged determination to win among the masters. George's pugnacity shared it fully. But he was beginning to ask himself a number of questions about these labour disputes which, apparently, his co-employers did not ask themselves. Was it that here, no less than in matters that concerned the Bill before Parliament, her influence, helped by the power of an expanding mind, had developed in him that fatal capacity for sympathy, for the double-seeing of compromise, which takes from a man all the joy of battle.
Letty, at any rate, was not troubled by anything of the sort. When he came back he found that she was ready to be on fairly amicable terms with him. Moreover, she had postponed the more expensive improvements and changes she had begun to make at Perth against his will; nor was there any sign of the various new purchases for the London house with which she had threatened him. On the other hand, she ceased to consult him about her own engagements; and she let him know, though without any words on the subject, that she had entirely broken with his mother—would neither see her nor receive her. As her attitude on this point involved—or, apparently, must involve—a refusal to accept her husband's statement made solemnly under strong emotion, George's pride took it in absolute silence. No doubt it was her revenge upon him for their crippled income—and for Lady Maxwell.
The effect of her behaviour on this point was to increase his own pity for his mother. He told her frankly that Letty could not get over the inroads upon their income and the shortening of their resources produced by the Shapetsky debt, just at a time when they should have been able to spend, and were already hampered by the state of the coal trade. It would be better that she and Letty should not meet for a time. He would do his best to make it up.
Lady Tressady took his news with a curious equanimity.
"Well, she always hated me!" she said—"I don't exactly know why—and was a little jealous of my gowns, too, I think. Don't mind, George. I must say it out. You know, she doesn't really dress very well—Letty doesn't. Though, my goodness, the bills! Wait till you see them before you call me extravagant. You should make her go to that new woman—what do they call her? She's a darling, and such a style! Never mind about Letty; you needn't bother. I daresay she isn't very nice to you about it. But if you don't come and see me, I shall cut my throat, and leave a note on the dressing-table. It would spoil your career dreadfully, so you'd better take care."
But, indeed, George came, without any pressing, almost every day. He saw her in her bursts of gaiety and affectation, when the habits of a lifetime asserted themselves as strongly as ever; and he saw her in her moments of pain and collapse, when she could hide the omens of inexorable physical ill neither from herself nor him. By the doctor's advice, he ceased to press her to give in, to resign herself to bed and invalidism. It was best, even physically, to let her struggle on. And he was both astonished and touched by her pluck. She had never been so repellent to him as on those many occasions in the past when she had feigned illness to get her way. Now that Death was really knocking, the half-gay, half-frightened defiance with which she walked the palace of life, one moment listening to the sounds at the gate, the next throwing herself passionately into the revelry within, revealed to the son a new fact about her—a fact of poetry unutterably welcome.
Even her fawning dependents, the Fullertons, ceased to annoy him. They were poor parasites, but she thought for them, and they professed to love her in return. She had emptied her life of finer things, but this relation of patron and flatterer, such as it was, did something to fill the vacancy; and George made no further effort to disturb it.