The speaker was George Tressady. He was descending the steps of his club in Fall Mall, and found his arm caught by Naseby, who had just dismissed his hansom outside.
"I came back last night. Are you going homewards? I'll walk across the Square with you."
The two men turned into St. James's Square, and Naseby resumed:
"Yes, we had a most lively campaign. Maxwell spoke better than I ever heard him."
"The speeches have been excellent reading, too. And you had good meetings?"
"Splendid! The country is rallying, I can tell you. The North is now strong for Maxwell and the Bill—or seems to be."
"Just as we are going to kick it out in the House! It's very queer—for no one could tell, a month ago, how the big towns were going. And it looked as though London even were deserting them."
"A mere wave, I think. At least, I'll bet you anything they'll win this Stepney election. Shall we get the division on the hours clause to-morrow?"
"They say so."
"If you know your own interests, you'll hurry up," said Naseby, smiling. "The country is going against you."
"I imagine Fontenoy has got his eye on the country! He's been letting the Socialists talk nonsense till now to frighten the steady-going old fellows on the other side or putting up our men to mark time. But I saw yesterday there was a change."
"Between ourselves, hasn't he been talking a good deal of nonsense on his own account?"
Naseby threw a glance of laughing inquiry at his companion. George shrugged his shoulders in silence. It had become matter of public remark during the last few days that Fontenoy was beginning at last to show the strain of the combat—that his speeches were growing hysterical and his rule a tyranny. His most trusted followers were now to be heard grumbling in private over certain aspects of his bearing in the House. He had come into damaging collision with the Speaker on one or two occasions, and had made here and there a blunder in tactics which seemed to show a weakening of self-command. Tressady, indeed, knew enough to wonder that the man's nerve and coolness had maintained themselves in their fulness so long.
"So Maxwell took a party to the North?" said George, dropping the subject of Fontenoy.
"Lady Maxwell, of course—myself, Bennett, and Madeleine Penley. It was a pleasure to see Lady Maxwell. She has been dreadfully depressed in town lately. But those trade-union meetings in Lancashire and Yorkshire were magnificent enough to cheer anyone up."
George shook his head.
"I expect they come too late to save the Bill."
"I daresay. Well, one can't help being tremendously sorry for her. I thought her looking quite thin and ill over it. It makes one doubt about women in politics! Maxwell will take it a deal more calmly, unless one misunderstands his cool ways. But I shouldn't wonder if she had a breakdown."
George made no reply. Naseby talked a little more about Maxwell and the tour, the critical side of him gaining upon the sympathetic with every sentence. At the corner of King Street he stopped.
"I must go back to the club. By the way, have you heard anything of Ancoats lately?"
George made a face.
"I saw him in a hansom last night, late, crossing Regent Circus with a young woman—the young woman, to the best of my belief."
In the few moments' chat that followed Tressady found that Naseby, like Fontenoy, regarded him as the new friend who might be able to do something for a wild fellow, now that mother and old friends were alike put aside and ignored. But, as he rather impatiently declared—and was glad to declare—such a view was mere nonsense. He had tried, for the mother's sake, and could do nothing. As for him, he believed the thing was very much a piece of blague—
"Which won't prevent it from taking him to the devil," said Naseby, coolly; "and his mother, by all accounts, will die of it. I'm sorry for her. He seems to think tremendous things of you. I thought you might, perhaps, have knocked it out of him." George shook his head again, and they parted.
In truth, Tressady was not particularly flattered by Ancoats's fancy for him. He did not care enough about the lad in return. Yet, in response to one or two outbreaks of talk on Ancoats's part—talks full of a stagey railing at convention—he had tried, for the mother's sake, to lecture the boy a little—to get in a word or two that might strike home. But Ancoats had merely stared a moment out of his greenish eyes, had shaken his queer mane of hair, as an animal shakes off the hand that curbs it, had changed the subject at once, and departed. Tressady had seen very little of him since.
And had not, in truth, taken it to heart. He had neither time nor mind to think about Ancoats. Now, as he walked home to dinner, he put the subject from him impatiently. His own moral predicament absorbed him—this weird, silent way in which the whole political scene was changing in aspect and composition under his eyes, was grouping itself for him round one figure—one face.
Had he any beliefs left about the Bill itself? He hardly knew. In truth it was not his reason that was leading him. It now was little more than a passionate boyish longing to wrench himself free from this odious task of hurting and defeating Marcella Maxwell. The long process of political argument was perhaps tending every day to the loosening and detaching of those easy convictions of a young Chauvinism, that had drawn him originally to Fontenoy's side. Intellectually he was all adrift. At the same time he confessed to himself, with perfect frankness, that he could and would have served Fontenoy happily enough, but for another influence—another voice.
Yet his old loyalty to Fontenoy tugged sorely at his will. And with this loyalty of course was bound up the whole question of his own personal honour and fidelity—his pledges to his constituents and his party.
Was there no rational and legitimate way out? He pondered the political situation as he walked along with great coolness and precision. When the division on the hours clause was over the main struggle on the Bill, as he had all along maintained, would be also at an end. If the Government carried the clause—and the probability still was that they would carry it by a handful of votes—the two great novelties of the Bill would have been affirmed by the House. The homework in the scheduled trades would have been driven by law into inspected workshops, and the male workers in these same trades would have been brought under the time-restrictions of the Factory Acts.
Compared to these two great reforms, or revolutions, the remaining clause—the landlords clause—touched, as he had already said to Fontenoy, questions of secondary rank, of mere machinery. Might not a man thereupon—might not he, George Tressady—review and reconsider his whole position?
He had told Fontenoy that his vote was safe; but must that pledge extend to more than the vital stuff, the main proposals of the Bill? The hours clause?—yes. But after it?
Fontenoy, no doubt, would carry on the fight to the bitter end, counting on a final and hard-wrung victory. The sanguine confidence which had possessed him about the time of the second reading was gone. He did not, Tressady knew, reckon with any certainty on turning out the Government in this coming division. The miserable majority with which they had carried the workshops clause would fall again—it would hardly be altogether effaced. That final wiping-out would come—if indeed it were attained—in the last contest of all, to which Fontenoy was already heartening and urging on his followers.
Fontenoy's position, of course, in the matter was clear. It was that of the leader and the irreconcilable.
But for the private member, who had seen cause to modify some of his opinions during the course of debate, who had voted loyally with his party up till now—might not the division on the hours clause be said to mark a new stage in the Bill—a stage which restored him his freedom?
The House would have pronounced on the main points of the Bill; the country was rallying in a remarkable and unexpected way to the Government—might it not be fairly argued that the war had been carried far enough?
He already, indeed, saw signs of that backing down of opposition which he had prophesied to Fontenoy. The key to the whole matter lay, he believed, in the hands of the Old Liberals, that remnant of a once great host, who were now charging the Conservative Government with new and damaging concessions to the Socialist tyranny. These men kept a watchful eye on the country; they had maintained all along that the country had not spoken. George had already perceived a certain weakening among them. And now, this campaign of Maxwell's, this new enthusiasm in the industrial North—no doubt they would have their effect.
He hurried on, closely weighing the whole matter, the prey to a strange and mingled excitement.
Meanwhile the streets through which he walked had the empty, listless air which marks a stage from which the actors have departed. It was nearing the middle of August, and society had fled.
All the same, as he reflected with a relief which was not without its sting, he and Letty would not be alone at dinner. Some political friends were coming, stranded, like themselves, in this West End, which had by now covered up its furniture and shut its shutters.
What a number of smart invitations had been showering upon them during the last weeks of the season, and were now still pursuing them, for the country-house autumn! The expansion of their social circle had of late often filled George with astonishment. No doubt, he said to himself,—though with a curious doubtfulness,—Letty was very successful; still, the recent rush of attentions from big people, who had taken no notice of them on their marriage, was rather puzzling. It had affected her so far more than himself. For he had been hard pressed by Parliament and the strike, and she had gone about a good deal alone—appearing, indeed, to prefer it.
* * * * *
"Come out with me on the Terrace," said Marcella to Betty Leven; "I had rather not wait here. Aldous, will you take us through?"
She and Betty were standing in the inner lobby of the House of Commons. The division had just been called and the galleries cleared. Members were still crowding into the House from the Library, the Terrace, and the smoking-rooms; and all the approaches to the Chamber itself were filled with a throng about equally divided between the eagerness of victory and the anxieties of defeat.
Maxwell took the ladies to the Terrace, and left them there, while he himself went back to the House. Marcella took a seat by the parapet, leant both hands upon it, and looked absently at the river and the clouds. It was a cloudy August night, with a broken, fleecy sky, and gusts of hot wind from the river. A few figures and groups were moving about the Terrace in the flickering light and shade—waiting like themselves.
"Will you be very sad if it goes wrongly?" said Betty, in a low voice, as she took her friend's hand in hers.
"Yes—" said Marcella, simply. Then, after a pause, she added, "It will be all the harder after this time in the North. Everything will have come too late."
There was a silence; then Betty said, not without sheepishness, "Frank's all right."
Marcella smiled. She knew that little Betty had been much troubled by Frank's tempers of late, and had been haunted by some quite serious qualms about his loyalty to Maxwell and the Bill. Marcella had never shared them. Frank Leven had not grit enough to make a scandal and desert a chief. But Betty's ambition had forced the boy into a life that was not his; had divided him from the streams and fields, from the country gentleman's duties and pleasures, that were his natural sphere. In this hot town game of politics, this contest of brains and ambitions, he was out of place—was, in fact, wasting both time and capacity. Betty would have to give way, or the comedy of a lovers' quarrel might grow to something ill-matched with the young grace and mirth of such a pair of handsome children.
Marcella meant to tell her friend all this in due time. Now she could only wait in silence, listening for every sound, Betty's soft fingers clasping her own, the wind as it blew from the bridge cooling her hot brow.
"Here they are!" said Betty.
They turned to the open doorway of the House. A rush of feet and voices approached, and the various groups on the Terrace hurried to meet it.
"Just saved! By George, what a squeak!" said a man's voice in the distance; and at the same moment Maxwell touched his wife on the shoulder.
"A majority of ten! Nobody knew how it had gone till the last moment."
She put up her face to him, leaning against him.
"I suppose it means we can't pull through?" He bent to her.
"I should think so. Darling, don't take it to heart so much!"
In the darkness he felt the touch of her lips on his hand. Then she turned, with a white cheek and smiling mouth, to meet the greetings and rueful congratulations of the friends that were crowding about them.
The Terrace was soon a moving mass of people, eagerly discussing the details of the division. The lamps, blown a little by the wind, threw uncertain lights on faces and figures, as they passed and re-passed between the mass of building on the one hand and the wavering darkness of the river on the other. To Marcella, as she stood talking to person after person—talking she hardly knew what—the whole scene was a dim bewilderment, whence emerged from time to time faces or movements of special significance.
Now it was Dowson, the Home Secretary, advancing to greet her, with his grey shaven face, eyelids somewhat drooped, and the cool, ambiguous look of one not quite certain of his reception. He had been for long a close ally of Maxwell's. Marcella had thought him a true friend. But certainly, in his conduct of the Bill of late there had been a good deal to suggest the attitude of a man determined to secure himself a retreat, and uncertain how far to risk his personal fortunes on a doubtful issue. So that she found herself talking to him with a new formality, in the tone of those who have been friends, yet begin to foresee the time when they may be antagonists.
Or, again, it was Fontenoy—Fontenoy's great head and overhanging brows, thrown suddenly into light against the windy dusk. He was walking with a young viscount whose curls, clothes, and shoulders were alike unapproachable by the ordinary man. This youth could not forbear an exultant twitching of the lip as he passed the Maxwells. Fontenoy ceremoniously took off his hat. Marcella had a momentary impression of the passionate, bull-like force of the man, before he disappeared into the crowd. His eye had wavered as it met hers. Out of courtesy to the woman he had tried not to look his triumph.
And now it was quite another face—thin, delicately marked, a noticeable chin, an outstretched hand.
She was astonished by her own feeling of pleasure.
"Tell me," she said quickly, as she moved eagerly forward—"tell me! is it about what you expected?"
They turned towards the river. George Tressady hung over the wall beside her.
"Yes. I thought it might be anything from eight to twenty."
"I suppose Lord Fontenoy now thinks the end quite certain."
"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.
Nevertheless, the situation in the House itself was hardly changing with the change in the country. The Socialist members very soon developed the proposal to make the landlords responsible for the carrying-out of the new Act into a furious general attack on the landlords of London. Their diatribes kept up the terrors which had already cost the Government so many men. It was not possible, not seemly, to yield, as Maxwell was yielding, all along the line to these fellows!
But the Old Liberals, or the New Whigs, as George had expected, were restless. They felt the country, and they had no affection for landlords as such. Did a man arise who could give them a lead, there was no saying how soon they might not break away from the Fontenoy combination. Fontenoy felt it, and prowled among them like a Satan, urging them to complete their deed, to give the coup de grÂce.
On the Wednesday afternoon before the Friday on which he thought the final vote would be taken, George let himself into his own house about six o'clock, thankful to feel that he had a quiet evening before him. He had been wandering about the House of Commons and its appurtenances all day, holding colloquies with this person and that, unable to see his way—to come to any decision. And, as was now usual, he and Fontenoy had been engaged in steering out of each other's way as much as possible.
As he went upstairs he noticed a letter lying on the step. He took it up, and found an open note, which he read, at first without thinking of it:
"My dear Lady,—Chatsworth can't be done. I have thrown my flies with great skill, but—no go! I don't seem to have influence enough in that quarter. But I have various other plans on hand. You shall have a jolly autumn, if I can manage it. There are some Scotch invitations I can certainly get you—and I should like to show you the ways of those parts. By the way, I hope your husband shoots decently. People are very particular. And you really must consult me about your gowns—I'm deuced clever at that sort of thing! I shall come to-morrow, when I have packed off my family to the country. Don't know why God made families!
"Yours always,
"CATHEDINE."
"George! is that you?" cried Letty from above him, in a voice half angry, half hesitating; "and—and—that's my note. Please give it me at once."
He finished it under her eyes, then handed it to her with formal courtesy. They walked into the drawing-room, and George shut the door. He was very pale, and Letty quailed a little.
"So Cathedine has been introducing us into society," he said, "and advising you as to your gowns. Was that—quite necessary—do you think?"
"It's very simple what he has been doing," was her angry reply. "You never take any pains to make life amusing to me, so I must look elsewhere, if I want society—that's all."
"And it never occurs to you that you are thereby incurring an unseemly obligation to a man whom I dislike, whom I have warned you against, who bears everywhere an evil name? You think I am likely to enjoy—to put up with, even—the position of being asked on sufferance—as your appendage—provided I 'shoot decently'?"
His tone of scorn, his slight figure, imperiously drawn up, sent her a challenge, which she answered with sullen haste.
"That's all nonsense, of course! And he wouldn't be rude to you if you weren't always rude to him."
"Rude to him!" He smiled. "But now, let us get to the bottom of this thing. Did Cathedine get us the cards for Clarence House—and that Goodwood invitation?"
Letty made no answer. She stared at him defiantly, twisting and untwisting the ribbons of her blue dress.
George reddened hotly. His personal pride in matters of social manners was one of his strongest characteristics.
"Let me beg you, at any rate, to write and tell Lord Cathedine that we will not trouble him for any more of these kind offices. And, moreover, I shall not go to any of these houses in the autumn unless I am quite certain he has had nothing to do with it."
"I have accepted," said Letty, breathing hard.
"I cannot help that. You should have been frank with me. I am not going to do what would destroy my own self-respect."
"No—you prefer making love to Lady Maxwell!"
He looked steadily a moment at her pallor and her furious eyes. Then he said, in another tone:
"Letty, does it ever occur to you that we have not been married yet five months? Are our relations to each other to go on for ever like this? I think we might make something better of them."
"That's your lookout. But as to these invitations, I have accepted them, and I shall go."
"I don't think you will. You would find it wouldn't do. Anyway, Cathedine must be written to."
"I shall do nothing of the kind!" she cried.
"Then I shall write myself."
She rose, quivering with passion, supporting herself on the arm of her chair.
"If you do, I will find some way of punishing you for it. Oh, if I had never made myself miserable by marrying you!"
Their eyes met. Then he said:
"I think I had better go and dine at the club. We are hardly fit to be together."
"Go, for heaven's sake!" she said, with a disdainful gesture.
Outside the door he paused a moment, head bent, hands clenched. Then a wild, passionate look overspread his young face. "It is her evening," he said to himself. "Letty turns me out. I will go."
Meanwhile Letty stood where he had left her till she had heard the street-door close. The typical, significant sound knelled to her heart. She began to walk tempestuously up and down, crying with excitement.
Time passed on. The August evening closed in; and in this deserted London nobody came to see her. She dined alone, and afterwards spent what seemed to her interminable hours pacing the drawing-room and meditating. At last there was a pause in the rush of selfish or jealous feeling which had been pulsing through her for weeks past, dictating all her actions, fevering all her thoughts. And there is nothing so desolate as such a pause, to such a nature. For it means reflection; it means putting one's life away from one, and looking at it as a whole. And to the Lettys of this world there is no process more abhorrent—none they will spend more energy in escaping.
It was inexplicable, intolerable that she should be so unhappy. What was it that tortured her so—hatred of Marcella Maxwell, or pain that she had lost her husband? But she had never imagined herself in love with him when she married him. He had never obtained from her before a tenth part of the thought she had bestowed upon him during the past six weeks. During all the time that she had been flirting with Cathedine, and recklessly placing herself in his power by the favours she asked of him, she saw now, with a kind of amazement, that she had been thinking constantly of George, determined to impress him with her social success, to force him to admire her and think much of her.
Cathedine? Had he any real attraction for her? Why, she was afraid of him, she knew him to be coarse and brutal, even while she played with him and sent him on her errands. When she compared him with George—even George as she had just seen him in this last odious scene—she felt the tears of anger and despair rising.
But to be forced to dismiss him at George's word, to submit in this matter of the invitations, to let herself be trampled on, while George gave all his homage, all his best mind, to Lady Maxwell—something scorching flew through her veins as she thought of it. Never! never! She would find, she had already thought of, a startling way of avenging herself.
Late at night George came home. She had locked her door, and he turned into his dressing-room. When the house was quiet again, she pressed her face into the pillows, and wept till she was amazed at her own pain, and must needs turn her rage upon herself.
* * * * *
When Tressady arrived at the house in Mile End Road he found the pretty, bare room where Marcella held her gatherings full of guests. The East End had not "gone out of town." The two little workhouse girls, in the whitest of caps and aprons, were carrying round trays of coffee and cakes; and beyond the open window was a tiny garden, backed by a huge Board School and some tall warehouses, yet as pleasant within its own small space as a fountain and flowers, constantly replenished from Maxwell Court, could make it.
Amid the medley of workmen, union officials, and members of Parliament that the room contained, George was set first of all to talk to a young schoolmaster or two, but he had never felt so little able to adjust his mind to strangers. The thought of his home miseries burnt within him. When could he get his turn with her? He was thirsty for the sound of her voice, the kindness of her eyes.
She had received him with unusual warmth, and an eagerness of look that seemed to show she had at least as much to say to him as he to her. And at last his turn came. She took some of her guests into the garden. George followed, and they found themselves side by side. He noticed that she was very pale. Yet how was it that fatigue and anxiety instead of marring her physical charm, only increased it? This thin black dress in which the tall figure moved so finely, the black lace folded in a fashion all her own about her neck and breast, the waving lines of hair above the delicate stateliness of the brow—those slight tragic hollows in cheek and temple with their tale of spirit and passionate feeling, and all the ebb and flow of noble life—he had never felt her so rare, so adorable.
"Well! what do you think of it all to-day? Are you still inclined to prophesy?" she asked him, smiling.
"I might be—if I saw any chance of the man you want. But he doesn't seem to be forthcoming, and—"
"And to-morrow is the end!"
"The Government has quite made up its mind not to take defeat—not to accept modifications?"
She shook her head.
They were standing at the end of the garden, looking into the brightly lit windows of the Board School, where evening-classes were going on. She gave a long sigh.
"As for us personally, we can only be thankful to have it over. Neither of us could have borne it much longer. I suppose, when the crisis is all over, we shall go away for a long time."
By "the crisis" she meant, of course, the resignation of Ministers and a change of Government. So that a few days hence she would be no longer within his reach at all. Maxwell, once out of office, would, no doubt, for a long while to come prefer to spend the greater part of his time in Brookshire, away from politics. A sudden sharp perception woke in Tressady of what it would mean to him to find himself in a world where, on going out of a morning, it would be no longer possible to come across her.
At last she broke the silence.
"How little I really thought, in spite of all one's anxiety, that Lord Fontenoy was going to win! He has played his cards amazingly well."
George took no notice. Thoughts were whirling in his brain.
"What would you say to me, I wonder," he said at last, "if I were to try the part?"
He spoke in a bantering tone, poking at the black London earth with his stick.
"What part?"
"Well, it seems to me I might put the case. One wants to argue the thing in a common-sense way. I don't feel towards this clause as I did towards the others. I know a good many men don't."
He turned to her with a light composure.
She stared in bewilderment.
"I don't understand."
"Well; why shouldn't one put the case? We have always counted on the hostility of the country. But the country seems to be coming round. Some of us now feel the Bill should have its chance—we are inclined to let Ministers take the responsibility. But, gracious heavens!—to suppose the House would pay any attention to me!"
He took up a stone and jerked it over the wall. She did not speak for a moment. At last she said:
"It would be a grave thing for you to do."
He turned, and their eyes met, hers full of emotion, and his hesitating and reflective. Then he laughed, his pride stung a little by her expression.
"You think I should do myself more harm, than good to anybody else?"
"No.—Only it would be serious," she repeated after a pause.
Instantly he dropped the subject as far as his own action was concerned. He led her back into discussion of other people, and of the situation in general.
Then suddenly, as they talked, a host of thoughts fled cloud-like, rising and melting, through Marcella's memory. She remembered with what prestige—considering his youth and inexperience—he had entered Parliament, the impression made by the short and brilliant campaign of his election. Now, since the real struggle of the session had begun, his energies seemed to have been unaccountably in abeyance, and eclipse. People she noticed had ceased to talk of him. But supposing, after all, there had been a crisis of mind and conviction underlying it?—supposing that now, at the last moment, in a situation that cried out for a leader, something should suddenly release his powers and gifts to do their proper work—
It vexed her to realise her own excitement, together with an odd shrinking and reluctance that seemed to be fighting with it. All in a moment, to Tressady's astonishment, she recalled the conversation to the point where it had turned aside.
"And you think—you really think"—her voice had a nervous appealing note—"that even at this eleventh hour—No, I don't understand!—I can't understand!—why, or how you should still think it possible to change things enough!"
He felt a sting of pleasure, and the passing sense of hurt pride was soothed. At least he had conquered her attention, her curiosity!
"I am sure that anything might still happen," he said stubbornly.
"Well, only let it be settled!" she said, trying to speak lightly, "else there will be nothing left of some of us."
She raised her hand, and pushed back her hair with a childish gesture of weariness, that was quite unconscious, and therefore touching.
As she spoke, indeed, the thought of a strong man harassed with overwork, and patiently preparing to lay down his baffled task, and all his cherished hopes, captured her mind, brought a quick rush of tears even to her eyes. Tressady looked at her; he saw the moisture in the eyes, the reddening of the cheek, the effort for self-control.
"Why do you let yourself feel it so much?" he said resentfully; "it is not natural, nor right."
"That's our old quarrel, isn't it?" she answered, smiling.
He was staring at the ground again, poking with his stick.
"There are so many things one must feel," he said in a bitter low voice; "one may as well try to take politics calmly."
She looked down upon him, understanding, but not knowing how to meet him, how to express herself. His words and manner were a confession of personal grief,—almost an appeal to her,—the first he had ever made. Yet how to touch the subject of his marriage! She shrank from it painfully. What ominous, disagreeable things she had heard lately of the young Lady Tressady from people she trusted! Why, oh! why had he ruined his own life in such a way!
And with the yearning towards all suffering which was natural to her, there mingled so much else—inevitable softness and gratitude for that homage towards herself, which had begun to touch and challenge all the loving, responsive impulse which was at the root of her character—an eager wish to put out a hand and guide him—all tending to shape in her this new longing to rouse him to some critical and courageous action, action which should give him at least the joy that men get from the strenuous use of natural powers, from the realisation of themselves. And through it all the most divinely selfish blindness to the real truth of the situation! Yet she tried not to think of Maxwell—she wished to think only of and for her friend.
After his last words they stood side by side in silence for a few moments. But the expression of her eyes, of her attitude, was all sympathy. He must needs feel that she cared, she understood, that his life, his pain, his story mattered to her. At last she said, turning her face away from him, and from the few people who had not yet left the garden to go and listen to some music that was going on in the drawing-room:
"Sometimes, the best way to forget one's own troubles—don't you think?—is to put something else first for a time—perhaps in your case, the public life and service. Mightn't it be? Suppose you thought it all really out, what you have been saying to me—gave yourself up to it—and then determined. Perhaps afterwards—"
She paused—overcome with doubt, even shyness—and very pale too, as she turned to him again. But so beautiful! The very perplexity which spoke in the gently quivering face as it met his, made her lovelier in his eyes. It seemed to strike down some of the barrier between them, to present her to him as weaker, more approachable.
But after waiting a moment, he gave a little harsh laugh.
"Afterwards, when one has somehow settled other people's affairs, one might see straighter in one's own? Is that what you mean?"
"I meant," she said, speaking with difficulty, "what I have often found—myself—that it helps one sometimes, to throw oneself altogether into something outside one's own life, in a large disinterested way. Afterwards, one comes back to one's own puzzles—with a fresh strength and hope."
"Hope!" he said despondently, with a quick lifting of the shoulders. Then, in another tone—
"So that's your advice to me—to take this thing seriously—to take myself seriously—to think it out?"
"Yes, yes," she said eagerly; "don't trifle with it—with what you might think and do—till it is too late to think and do anything."
Suddenly it flashed across them both how far they had travelled since their first meeting in the spring. Her mind filled with a kind of dread, an uneasy sense of responsibility—then with a tremulous consciousness of power. It was as though she felt something fluttering like a bird in her hands. And all the time there echoed through her memory a voice speaking in a moonlit garden—"You know—you don't mind my saying it?—nobody is ever converted—politically—nowadays."
No, but there may be honest advance and change—why not? And if she had influenced him—was it not Maxwell's work and thought that had spoken through her?
"Well, anyway," said Tressady's voice beside her, "whatever happens—you'll believe—"
"That you won't help to give us the coup de grÂce unless you must?" she said, half laughing, yet with manifest emotion. "Anyway, I should have believed that."
"And you really care so much?" he asked her again, looking at her wondering.
She suddenly dropped her head upon her hands. They were alone now in the moonlit garden, and she was leaning over the low wall that divided them from the school enclosure. But before he could say anything—before he could even move closer to her—she had raised her face again, and drawn her hand rapidly across her eyes.
"I suppose one is tired and foolish after all these weeks," she said, with a breaking voice—"I apologise. You see when one comes to see everything through another's eyes—to live in another's life—" He felt a sudden stab, then a leap of joy—hungry, desolate joy—that she should thus admit him to the very sanctuary of her heart—let him touch the "very pulse of the machine." At the same moment that it revealed the eternal gulf between them, it gave him a delicious passionate sense of intimity—of privilege.
"You have—a marvellous idea of marriage"—he said, under his breath, as he moved slowly beside her towards the house.
She made no answer. In another minute she was talking to him of indifferent things, and immediately afterwards he found himself parted from her in the crowd of the drawing-room.
When the party dispersed and he was walking alone towards Aldgate through the night, he could do nothing but repeat to himself fragments of what she had said to him—lost all the time in a miserable yearning memory of her eyes and voice.
His mind was made up. And as he lay sleepless and solitary through the night, he scarcely thought any more of the strait to which his married life had come. Forty-eight hours hence he should have time for that. For the present he had only to "think out" how it might be possible for him to turn doubt and turmoil into victory, and lay the crown of it at Marcella Maxwell's feet.
Meanwhile Marcella, on her return to St. James's Square, put her hands on Maxwell's shoulders, and said to him, in a voice unlike herself: "Sir George Tressady was at the party to-night. I think he may be going to throw Lord Fontenoy over. Don't be surprised if he speaks in that sense to-morrow."
Maxwell looked extraordinarily perturbed.
"I hope he will do nothing of the kind," he said, with decision. "It will do him enormous harm. All the conviction he has ever shown has been the other way. It will be thought to be a mere piece of caprice and indiscipline."
Marcella said nothing. She walked away from him, her hands clasped behind her, her soft skirt trailing—a pale muse of meditation—meditation in which for once she did not invite him to share.
"Tressady, by all that's wonderful!" said a member of Fontenoy's party to his neighbour. "What's he got to say?"
The man addressed bent forward, with his hands on his knees, to look eagerly at the speaker.
"I knew there was something up," he said. "Every time I have come across Tressady to-day he has been deep with one or other of those fellows"—he jerked his head towards the Liberal benches. "I saw him buttonholing Green in the Library, then with Speedwell on the Terrace. And just look at their benches! They're as thick as bees! Yes, by George! there is something up."
His young sportsman's face flushed with excitement, and he tried hard through the intervening heads to get a glimpse of Fontenoy. But nothing was to be seen of the leader but a hat jammed down over the eyes, a square chin, and a pair of folded arms.
The House, indeed, throughout the day had worn an aspect which, to the experienced observer—to the smooth-faced Home Secretary, for instance, watching the progress of this last critical division—meant that everything was possible, the unexpected above all. Rumours gathered and died away. Men might be seen talking with unaccustomed comrades; and those who were generally most frank had become discreet. It was known that Fontenoy's anxiety had been growing rapidly; and it was noticed that he and the young viscount who acted as the Whip of the party had kept an extraordinarily sharp watch on all their own men through the dinner-hour.
Fontenoy himself had spoken before dinner, throwing scorn upon the clause, as the ill-conceived finish of an impossible Bill. So the landlords were to be made the executants, the police, of this precious Act? Every man who let out a tenement-house in workmen's dwellings was to be haled before the law and punished if a tailor on his premises did his work at home, if a widow took in shirtmaking to keep her children. Pass, for the justice or the expediency of such a law in itself. But who but a madman ever supposed you could get it carried out! What if the landlords refused or neglected their part? Quis custodiet? And was Parliament going to make itself ridiculous by setting up a law, which, were it a thousand times desirable, you simply could not enforce?
The speech was delivered with amazing energy. It abounded in savage epigram and personality; and a month before it would have had great effect. Every Englishman has an instinctive hatred of paper reforms.
During the dinner-hour Tressady met Fontenoy in the Lobby, and suddenly stopped to speak. The young man was deeply flushed and holding himself stiffly erect. "If you want me," he said—"you will find me in the Library. I don't want to spring anything upon you. You shall know all I know."
"Thank you," said the other with slow bitterness—"but we can look after ourselves. I think you and I understood each other this morning."
The two men parted abruptly. Tressady walked on, stung and excited afresh by the memory of the hateful half hour he had spent that morning in Fontenoy's library. For after all, when once he had come to his decision, he had tried to behave with frankness, with consideration.
Fontenoy hurried on to look for the young viscount with the curls and shoulders, and the two men stood about the inner lobby together, Fontenoy sombrely watching everybody who came out or in.
It was about ten o'clock when Tressady caught the Speaker's eye. He rose in a crowded House, a House conscious not only that the division shortly to be taken would decide the fate of a Government, but vaguely aware, besides, that something else was involved—one of those personal incidents that may at any moment make the dullest piece of routine dramatic, or rise into history by the juxtaposition of some great occasion.
The House had not yet made up its opinion about him as a speaker. He had done well; then, not so well. And, moreover, it was so long since he had taken any part in debate that the House had had time to forget whatever qualities he might once have shown.
His bearing and voice won him a first point. For youth, well-bred and well-equipped, the English House of Commons has always shown a peculiar indulgence. Then members began to bend eagerly forward, to crane necks, to put hands to ears. The Treasury Bench was seen to be listening as one man.
Before the speech was over many of those present had already recognised in it a political event of the first order. The speaker had traced with great frankness his own relation to the Bill—from an opinion which was but a prejudice, to a submission which was still half repugnance. He drew attention to the remarkable and growing movement in support of the Maxwell policy which was now spreading throughout the country, after a period of coolness and suspended judgment; he pointed to the probable ease with which, as it was now seen, the "harassed trades" would adapt themselves to the new law; he showed that the House, in at least three critical divisions, and under circumstances of enormous difficulty, had still affirmed the Bill; that the country, during the progress of the measure, had rallied unmistakably to the Government, and that all that remained was a question of machinery. That being so, he—and, he believed, some others—had reconsidered their positions. Their electoral pledges, in their opinion, no longer held, though they would be ready at any moment to submit themselves to consequences, if consequences there were to be.
Then, taking up the special subject-matter of the clause, he threw himself upon his leader's speech with a nervous energy, an information, and a resource which held the House amazed. He tore to pieces Fontenoy's elaborate attack, showed what practical men thought of the clause, and with what careful reliance upon their opinion and their experience it had been framed; and, finally—with a reference not lacking in a veiled passion that told upon the House, to those "dim toiling thousands" whose lot, "as it comes to work upon the mind, is daily perplexing if not transforming the thoughts and ideals of such men as I"—he, in the plainest terms, announced his intention of voting with the Government, and sat down, amid the usual mingled storm, in a shouting and excited House.
The next hour passed in a tumult. One speaker after another got up from the Liberal benches—burly manufacturers and men of business, who had so far held a strong post in the army of resistance—to tender their submission, to admit that the fight had gone far enough, that the country was against them, and that the Bill must be borne. What use, too, in turning out a Government which would either be sent back with redoubled strength or replaced by combinations that had no attractions whatever from men of moderate minds? Sadness reigned in the speeches of this Liberal remnant; nor could the House from time to time forbear to jeer them. But they made their purpose plain, and the Government Whip, standing near the door, gleefully struck off name after name from his Opposition list.
Then followed the usual struggle between the division that all men wanted and the speakers that no man could endure. But at last the bell was rung, the House cleared. As Tressady turned against the stream of his party, Fontenoy, with a sarcastic smile, stood elaborately aside to let him pass.
"We shall soon know what you have cost us," he said hoarsely in Tressady's ear; then, advancing a little towards the centre of the floor, he looked up markedly and deliberately at the Ladies' Gallery. Tressady made no reply. He held his fair head higher than usual as he passed on his unaccustomed way to the Aye Lobby. Many an eager eye strained back to see how many recruits would join him as he reached the Front Opposition Bench; many a Parliamentary Nestor watched the young man's progress with a keenness born of memory—memory that burnt anew with the battles of the past.
"Do you remember Chandos," said one old man to another—"young Chandos, that went for Peel in '46 against his party? It was my first year in Parliament. I can see him now. He was something like this young fellow."
"But his ratting changed nothing," said his companion, with an uneasy laugh; and they both struggled forward among the Noes.
Twenty minutes later the tellers were at the table, and the moment that was to make or mar a great Ministry had come.
"Ayes, 306; Noes, 280. The Ayes have it!"
"By Jove, he's done it!—the Judas!" cried a young fellow, crimson with excitement, who was standing beside Fontenoy!
"Yes—he's done it!" said Fontenoy, with grim composure, though the hand that held his hat shook. "The curtain may now fall."
"Where is he?" shouted the hot bloods around him, hooting and groaning, as their eyes searched the House for the man who had thus, in an afternoon, pulled down and defeated all their hopes.
But Tressady was nowhere to be seen. He had left the House just as the great news, surging like a wave through Lobby and corridor, reached a group of people waiting in a Minister's private room—and Marcella Maxwell knew that all was won.
