Sir George Tressady Volume Ii Part 6

But she did not mean to faint, and little by little her will answered to her call upon it. Presently she said, with eyes shut and brow contracted:

"I _trust_ the others are safe. Oh! what a failure--what a failure! I am afraid I have done Aldous harm!"

The tone of the last words touched Tressady deeply. Evidently she could hardly restrain her tears.

"They were not worthy you should go and speak to them," he said quickly.

"Besides, it was only a noisy minority."

She did not speak again till they drew up before the house in the Mile End Road. Then she turned to him.

"I was to have stayed here for the night, but I think I must go home.

Aldous might hear that there had been a disturbance. I will leave a message here, and drive home."

"I trust you will let me go with you. We should none of us be happy to think of you as alone just yet. And I am due at the House by eleven."

She smiled, a.s.senting, then descended, leaning heavily upon him in her weakness.

When she reappeared, attended by her two little servants, all frightened and round-eyed at their mistress's mishap, she had thrown a thick lace scarf round her head, which hid the bandage and gave to her pale beauty a singularly touching, appealing air.

"I wish I could see Madeleine," she said anxiously, standing beside the cab and looking up the road. "Ah!"

For she had suddenly caught sight of a cab in the distance driving smartly up. As it approached, Naseby and Lady Madeleine were plainly to be seen inside it. The latter jumped out almost at Marcella's feet, looking more scared than ever as she saw the bandage and the black scarf twisted round the white face. But in a few moments Marcella had soothed her, and given her over, apparently, to the care of another lady staying in the house. Then she waved her hand to Naseby, who, with his usual coolness, asked no questions and made no remarks, and she and Tressady drove off.

"Madeleine will stay the night," Marcella explained as they sped towards Aldgate. "That was our plan. My secretary will look after her. She has been often here with me lately, and has things of her own to do. But I ought not to have taken her to-night. Lady Kent would never have forgiven me if she had been hurt. Oh! it was all a mistake--all a great mistake! I suppose I imagined--that is one's folly--that I could really do some good--make an effect."

She bit her lip, and the furrow reappeared in the white brow.

Tressady felt by sympathy that her heart was all sore, her moral being shaken and vibrating. After these long months of labour and sympathy and emotion, the sudden touch of personal brutality had unnerved her.

Mere longing to comfort, to "make-up," overcame him.

"You wouldn't talk of mistake--of failing--if you knew how to be near you, to listen to you, to see you, touches and illuminates some of us!"

His cheek burnt, but he turned a manly, eager look upon her.

Her cheek, too, flushed, and he thought he saw her bosom heave.

"Oh no!--no!" she cried. "How _impossible!_--when one feels oneself so helpless, so clumsy, so useless. Why couldn't I do better? But perhaps it is as well. It all prepares one--braces one--against--"

She paused and leaned forward, looking out at the maze of figures and carriages on the Mansion House crossing, her tight-pressed lips trembling against her will.

"Against the last inevitable disappointment." That, no doubt, was what she meant.

"If you only understood how loth some of us are to differ from you," he cried,--"how hard it seems to have to press another view,--to be already pledged."

"Oh yes!--_please_--I know that you are pledged," she said, in hasty distress, her delicacy shrinking as before from the direct personal argument.

They were silent a little. Tressady looked out at the houses in Queen Victoria Street, at the lamplit summer night, grudging the progress of the cab, the approach of the river, of the Embankment, where there would be less traffic to bar their way--clinging to the minutes as they pa.s.sed.

"Oh! how could they put up that woman?" she said presently, her eyes still shut, her hand shaking, as it rested on the door. "How _could_ they? It is the thought of women like that--the hundreds and thousands of them--that goads one on. A clergyman who knows the East End well said to me the other day, 'The difference between now and twenty years ago is that the women work much more, the men less.' I can never get away from the thought of the women! Their lives come to seem to me the mere refuse, the rags and shreds, that are thrown every day into the mill and ground to nothing--without a thought--without a word of pity, an hour of happiness! Cancer--three children left out of nine--and barely forty, though she looked sixty! They tell me she may live eighteen months. Then, when the parish has buried her, the man has only to hold up his finger to find someone else to use up in the same way. And she is just one of thousands."

"I can only reply by the old, stale question," said Tressady, st.u.r.dily.

"Did we make the mill? Can we stop its grinding? And if not, is it fair even to the race that has something to gain from courage and gaiety--is it _reasonable_ to take all our own poor little joy and drench it in this horrible pain of sympathy, as you do! But we have said all these things before."

He bent over to her, smiling. But she did not look up. And he saw a tear which her weakness, born of shock and fatigue, could not restrain, steal from the lashes on the cheek. Then he added, still leaning towards her:

"Only, what I never have said--I think--is what is true to-night. At last you have made one person feel--if that matters anything!--the things you feel. I don't know that I am particularly grateful to you! And, practically, we may be as far apart as ever. But I was without a sense when I went into this game of politics; and now--"

His heart beat. What would he not have said, mad youth!--within the limits imposed by her nature and his own dread--to make her look at him, to soften this preposterous sadness!

But it needed no more. She opened her eyes, and looked at him with a wild sweetness and grat.i.tude which dazzled him, and struck his memory with the thought of the Southern, romantic strain in her.

"You are very kind and comforting!" she said; "but then, from the first--somehow--I knew you were a friend to us. One felt it--through all difference."

The little sentences were steeped in emotion--emotion springing from many sources, fed by a score of collateral thoughts and memories--with which Tressady had, in truth, nothing to do. Yet the young man gulped inwardly. She had been a tremulous woman till the words were said.

Now--strange!--through her very gentleness and gratefulness, a barrier had risen between them. Something stern and quick told him this was the very utmost of what she could ever say to him--the farthest limit of it all.

They pa.s.sed under Charing Cross railway bridge. Beside them, as they emerged, the moon shone out above the darks and silvers of the river, and in front, the towers of Westminster rose purplish grey against a west still golden.

"How were things going in the House this afternoon?" she asked, looking at the towers. "Oh! I forgot. You see, the clock says close on eleven.

Please let me drop you here. I can manage by myself quite well."

He protested, and she yielded, with a patient kindness that made him sore. Then he gave his account, and they talked a little of Monday's division and of the next critical votes in Committee--each of them, so he felt in his exaltation, a blow dealt to her--that he must help to deal.

Yet there was a fascination in the topic. Neither could get away from it.

Presently, Pall Mall being very full of traffic, they had to wait a moment at the corner of the street that turns into St. James's Square. In the pause Tressady caught sight of a man on the pavement. The man smiled, looked astonished, and took off his hat. Lady Maxwell bowed coldly, and immediately looked away. Tressady recognised Harding Watton. But neither he nor she mentioned his name.

In another minute he had seen her vanish within the doors of her own house. Her hand had rested gently, willingly, in his.

"I am so grateful!" she had said; "so will Maxwell be. We shall meet soon, and laugh over our troubles!"

And then she was gone, and he was left standing a moment, bewildered.

Eleven? What had he to do?

Then he remembered his pair, and that he had promised to call for Letty at a certain house, and take her on to a late ball. The evening, in fact, instead of ending, was just beginning. He could have laughed, as he got back into his cab.

Meanwhile Marcella had sped through the outer hall into the inner, where one solitary light, still burning, made a rather desolate dark-in-light through the broad, pillared s.p.a.ce. A door opened at the farther side.

"Aldous!"

"You!"

He came out, and she flew to him. He felt her trembling as she touched him. In ten words she told him something of what had happened. Then he saw the bandage round her temple. His countenance fell. She knew that he turned white, and loved him for it. How few things had power to move him so!

He wanted to lead her back into his library, where he was at work. But she resisted.