"He may. But the end is not certain!"
"But what can prevent it! The despairing thing for us is, that if the country had been roused earlier, everything might have been different. But now the House—"
"Has got out of hand? It may be; but I find a great many people affected by Lord Maxwell's speeches in the North, and his reception there. To-day's result was inevitable, but, if I'm not mistaken, we shall now see a number of new combinations."
The sensitive face became in a moment all intelligence. She played the politician, and cross-examined him. He hesitated. What he was doing was already a treachery. But he only hesitated to give way. They lingered by the wall together, discussing possibilities and persons; and when Maxwell at last turned from his own conversations to suggest to his wife that it was time to go home, she came forward with a mien of animation that surprised him. He greeted Tressady with friendliness, and then, as though a thought had struck him, suddenly drew the young man aside.
"Ancoats, of course," said George to himself; and Ancoats it was.
Maxwell, without preliminaries, and taking his companion's knowledge of the story for granted—no doubt on Fontenoy's information—said a few words about the renewal of the difficulty. Did he not think it had all begun again? Yes, George had some reason to think so. "If you can do anything for us—"
"Of course! but what can I do? As we all know, Ancoats does not sit still to be scolded."
Their colloquy lasted only a minute or two; yet when it was over, and the Maxwells had gone, George was left with a vivid impression of the great man's quiet strength and magnanimity. No one could have guessed from his anxious and well-considered talk on this private matter that he was in the very heat of a political struggle that must affect all his own fortunes. Tressady had been accustomed to spend his wit on the heavier sides of Maxwell's character. To-night, he said to himself, half in a passion, grudging the confession, that it was not wonderful she loved him!
She! The remembrance of how her whole nature had brightened from its cloud as he drew out for her his own forecast of what might still happen; the sweet confidence and charm that she had shown him; the intimacy of the tone she had allowed between them; the mingling all through of a delicate abstinence from anything touching on his own personal position, with an unspoken recognition of it—the impulse of a generosity that could not help rewarding what seemed to it the yielding of an adversary; these things filled him with a delicious pleasure as he walked home. In a hundred directions—political, social, spiritual—the old horizons of the mind seemed to be lightening and expanding. The cynical, indifferent temper of his youth was breaking down; the whole man was more intelligent, capable, tender. Yet what sadness and restlessness of soul as soon as the brief moment of joy had come and gone!
A few afternoons of Supply encroached upon the eight days that still remained before the last clause of the Bill came to a division. But the whole eight days, nevertheless, were filled with the new permutations and combinations which Tressady had foreseen. The Government carried the Stepney election, and in other quarters the effects of the speechmaking in the North began to be visible. Rumours of the syndicate already formed to take over large numbers of workshops in both the Jewish and Gentile quarters of the East End, and of the hours and wages that were likely to obtain in the new factories, were driving a considerable mass of working-class opinion, which had hitherto held aloof, straight for the Government, and splitting up much of that which had been purely hostile.