Читать книгу Sir George Tressady (Historical Novel) - Mrs. Humphry Ward - Страница 11

Table of Contents

The following Sunday, somewhere towards five o'clock, George rang the bell of the Maxwells' house in St. James's Square. It was a very fine house, and George's eye, as he stood waiting, ran over the facade with an amused, investigating look.

He allowed himself the same expression once or twice in the hall, as one mute and splendid person relieved him of his coat, and another, equally mute and equally unsurpassable, waited for him on the stairs, while across a passage beyond the hall he saw two red-liveried footmen carrying tea.

"When one is a friend of the people," he pondered as he went upstairs, "is one limited in horses but not in flunkeys? These things are obscure."

He was ushered first into a stately outer drawing-room, filled with old French furniture and fine pictures; then the butler lifted a velvet curtain, pronounced the visitor's name with a voice and emphasis as perfectly trained as the rest of him, and stood aside for George to enter.

He found himself on the threshold of a charming room looking west, and lit by some last beams of February sun. The pale-green walls were covered with a medley of prints and sketches. A large writing-table, untidily heaped with papers, stood conspicuous on the blue self-coloured carpet, which over a great part of the floor was pleasantly void and bare. Flat earthenware pans, planted with hyacinths and narcissus, stood here and there, and filled the air with spring scents. Books ran round the lower walls, or lay piled where-ever there was a space for them; while about the fire at the further end was gathered a circle of chintz-covered chairs—chairs of all shapes and sizes, meant for talking. The whole impression of the pretty, disorderly place, compared with the stately drawing-room behind it, was one of intimity and freedom; the room made a friend of you as you entered.

Half a dozen people were sitting with Lady Maxwell when Tressady was announced. She rose to meet him with great cordiality, introduced him to little Lady Leven, an elfish creature in a cloud of fair hair, and with a pleasant "You know all the rest," offered him a chair beside herself and the tea-table.

"The rest" were Frank Leven, Edward Watton, Bayle, the Foreign Office private secretary who had been staying at Malford House at the time of Tressady's election, and Bennett, the "small, dark man" whom George had pointed out to Letty in the House as a Labour member, and one of the Maxwells' particular friends.

"Well?" said Lady Maxwell, turning to her new visitor as she handed him some tea, "were you as much taken with the grandmother as the grandmother was taken with you? She told me she had never seen a 'more haffable gentleman, nor one as she'd a been more willin to ha done for'!"

George laughed. "I see," he said, "that my report has been anticipated."

"Yes—I have been there. I have found a 'case' in them indeed—alack! The granny—I am afraid she is an unseemly old woman—and the elder girl both work for the Jew son-in-law on the first floor—homework of the most abominable kind—that girl will be dead in a year if it goes on."

George was rapidly conscious of two contradictory impressions—one of pleasure, one of annoyance—pleasure in her tall, slim presence, her white hand, and all the other flashing points of a beauty not to be denied—and irritation that she should have talked "shop" to him with her first breath. Could one never escape this altruistic chatter?

But he was not left to grapple with it alone, for Lady Leven looked up quickly.

"Mr. Watton, will you please take Lady Maxwell's tea away if she mentions the word 'case' again? We gave her fair warning."

Lady Maxwell hastily clasped both her hands round her tea-cup.

"Betty, we have discussed the opera for at least twenty minutes."

"Yes—at peril of our lives!" said Lady Leven. "I never talked so fast before. One felt as though one must say everything one had to say about Melba and the de Reszkes, all in one breath—before one's poor little subject was torn from one—one would never have such a chance again."

Lady Maxwell laughed, but coloured too.

"Am I such a nuisance?" she said, dropping her hands on her knee with a little sigh. Then she turned to Tressady.

"But Lady Leven really makes it out worse than it is. We haven't even approached a Factory Act all the afternoon."

Lady Leven sprang forward in her chair. "Because! because, my dear, we simply declined to let you. We made a league—didn't we, Mr. Bennett?—even you joined it."

Bennett smiled.

"Lady Maxwell overworks herself—we all know that," he said, his look, at once kind, honest, and perennially embarrassed, passing from Lady Leven to his hostess.

"Oh, don't sympathise, for Heaven's sake!" cried Betty. "Wage war upon her—it's our only hope."

"Don't you think Sunday at least ought to be frivolous?" said Tressady, smiling, to Lady Maxwell.

"Well, personally, I like to talk about what interests me on Sunday as well as on other days," she said with a frank simplicity; "but I know I ought to be kept in order—I become a terrible bore."

Frank Leven roused himself from the sofa on which he had languidly subsided.

"Bores?" he said indignantly, "we're all bores. We all have been bores since people began to think about what they're pleased to call 'social work.' Why should I love my neighbour?—I'd much rather hate him. I generally do."

"Doesn't it all depend," said Tressady, "on whether he happens to be able to make it disagreeable for you in return?"

"That's just it," said Betty Leven, eagerly. "I agree with Frank—it's all so stupid, this 'loving' everybody. It makes one positively hot. We sit under a clergyman, Frank and I, who talks of nothing every Sunday but love—love—like that, long-drawn-out—how our politics should be 'love,' and our shopping should be 'love'—till we long simply to bastinado somebody. I want to have a little real nice cruelty—something sharp and interesting. I should like to stick pins into my maid, only unfortunately, as she has more than once pointed out to me, it would be so much easier for her to stick them into me!"

"You want the time of Miss Austen's novels back again," said young Bayle, stooping to her, with his measured and agreeable smile—"before even the clergy had a mission."

"Ah! but it would be no good," said Lady Leven, sighing, "if she were there!"

She threw out her small hand towards her hostess, and everybody laughed.

Up to the moment of the laugh, Lady Maxwell had been lying back in her chair listening, the beautiful mouth absently merry, and the eyes speaking—Tressady thought—of quite other things, of some hidden converse of her own, going on in the brain behind the eyes. A certain prophetess-air seemed natural to her. Nevertheless, that first impression of her he had carried away from the hospital scene was being somehow blurred and broken up.

She joined in the laugh against herself; then, with a little nod towards her assailant, she said to Edward Watton, who was sitting on her right hand. "You're not taken in, I know."

"Oh, if you mean that I go in for 'cases' and 'causes' too," cried Lady Leven, interrupting, "of course I do—I can't be left alone. I must dance as my generation pipes."

"Which means," said her husband, drily, "that she went for two days filling soda-water bottles the week before last, and a day's shirt-making last week. From the first, I was told that she would probably return to me with an eye knocked out, she being totally inexperienced and absurdly rash. As to the second, to judge from the description she gave me of the den she had been sitting in when she came home, and the headache she had next day, I still expect typhoid. The fortnight isn't up till Wednesday."

There was a shout of mingled laughter and inquiry.

"How did you do it?—and whom did you bribe?" said Bayle to Lady Leven.

"I didn't bribe anybody," she said indignantly. "You don't understand. My friends introduced me."

Then, drawn out by him, she plunged into a lively account of her workshop experiences, interrupted every now and then by the sarcastic comments of her husband and the amusement of the two younger men who had brought their chairs close to her. Betty Leven ranked high among the lively chatterboxes of her day and set.

Lady Maxwell, however, had not laughed at Frank Leven's speech. Rather, as he spoke of his wife's experiences, her face had clouded, as though the blight of some too familiar image, some sad ever-present vision, had descended upon her.

Beimett also did not laugh. He watched the Levens indulgently for a few minutes, then insensibly he, Lady Maxwell, Edward Watton, and Tressady drew together into a circle of their own.

"Do you gather that Lord Fontenoy's speech on Friday has been much taken up in the country?" said Bennett, bending forward and addressing Lady Maxwell. Tressady, who was observing him, noticed that his dress was precisely the "Sunday best" of the respectable workman, and was, moreover, reminded by the expression of the eyes and brow that Bennett was said to have been a well-known "local preacher" in his north-country youth.

Lady Maxwell smiled, and pointed to Tressady.

"Here," she said, "is Lord Fontenoy's first-lieutenant."

Bennett looked at George.

"I should be glad," he said, "to know what Sir George thinks?"

"Why, certainly—we think it has been very warmly taken up," said George, promptly—"to judge from the newspapers, the letters that have been pouring in, and the petitions that seem to be preparing."

Lady Maxwell's eyes gleamed. She looked at Bennett silently a moment, then she said:

"Isn't it amazing to you how strong an impossible case can be made to look?"

"It is inevitable," said Bennett, with a little shrug, "quite inevitable. These social experiments of ours are so young—there is always a strong case to be made out against any of them, and there will be for years to come."

"Well and good," said George; "then we cavillers are inevitable too. Don't attack us—praise us rather; by your own confession, we are as much a part of the game as you are."

Bennett smiled slightly, but did not in reality quite follow. Lady Maxwell bent forward.

"Do you know whether Lord Fontenoy has any personal knowledge of the trades he was speaking about?" she said, in her rich eager voice; "that is what I want so much to find out."

George was nettled by both the question and the manner.

"I regard Fontenoy as a very competent person," he said drily. "I imagine he did his best to inform himself. But there was not much need; the persons concerned—whom you think you are protecting—were so very eager to inform us!"

Lady Maxwell flushed.

"And you think that settles it—the eagerness of the cheap life to be allowed to maim and waste itself? But again and again English law has stepped in to prevent it—and again and again everybody has been thankful."

"It is all a question of balance, of course," said George. "Must a few unwise people be allowed to kill themselves—or thousands lose their liberty?"

His blue eyes scanned her beautiful impetuous face with a certain cool hardness. Internally he was more and more in revolt against a "monstrous regiment of women" and the influence upon the most complex economic problems of such a personality as that before him.

But his word "liberty" pricked her. The look of feeling passed away. Her eyes kindled as sharply and drily as his own.

"Freedom?—let me quote you Cromwell! 'Every sectary saith, "O give me liberty!" But give it him, and to the best of his power he will yield it to no one else.' So with your careless or brutal employer—give him liberty, and no one else shall get it."

"Only by metaphor—not legally," said George, stubbornly. "So long as men are not slaves by law there is always a chance for freedom. Any way we stand for freedom—as an end, not a means. It is not the business of the State to make people happy—not at all!—at least that is our view—but it is the business of the State to keep them free."

"Ah!" said Bennett, with a long breath, "there you've hit the nail—the whole difference between you and us."

George nodded. Lady Maxwell did not speak immediately. But George was conscious that he was being observed, closely considered. Their glances crossed an instant, in antagonism, certainly, if not in dislike.

"How long is it since you came home from India?" she asked him suddenly.

"About six months."

"And you were, I think, a long time abroad?"

"Nearly four years. Does that make you think I have not had much time to get up the things I am going to vote about?" said the young man, laughing. "I don't know! On the broadest issues of politics, one makes up one's mind as well in Asia as in Europe—better perhaps."

"On the Empire, I suppose—and England's place in the world? That's a side which—I know—I remember much too little. You think our life depends on a governing class—and that we and democracy are weakening that class too much?"

"That's about it. And for democracy it is all right. But you—you are the traitors!"

His thrust, however, did not rouse her to any corresponding rhetoric. She smiled merely, and began to question him about his travels. She did it with great deftness, so that after an answer or two both his temper and manner insensibly softened, and he found himself talking with ease and success. His mixed personality revealed itself—his capacity for certain veiled enthusiasms, his respect for power, for knowledge, his pessimist beliefs as to the average lot of men.

Bennett, who listened easily, was glad to help her make her guest talk. Frank Leven left the group near the sofa and came to listen, too. Tressady was more and more spurred, carried out of himself. Lady Maxwell's fine eyes and stately ways were humanised after all by a quick responsiveness, which for most people, however critical, made conversation with her draw like a magnet. Her intelligence, too, was competent, left the mere feminine behind in these connections that Tressady offered her, no less than in others. She had not lived in the world of high politics for nearly five years for nothing; so that unconsciously, and indeed quite against his will, Tressady found himself talking to her, after a while, as though she had been a man and an equal, while at the same time taking more pains than he would ever have taken for a man.

"Well, you have seen a lot!" said Frank Leven at last, with a rather envious sigh.

Bennett's modest face suddenly reddened.

"If only Sir George will use his eyes to as good purpose at home—" he said involuntarily, then stopped. Few men were more unready and awkward in conversation; yet when roused he was one of the best platform speakers of his day.

George laughed.

"One sees best what appeals to one, I am afraid," he said, only to be instantly conscious that he had made a rather stupid admission in face of the enemy.

Lady Maxwell's lip twitched; he saw the flash of some quick thought cross her face. But she said nothing.

Only when he got up to go, she bade him notice that she was always at home on Sundays, and would be glad that he should remember it. He made a rather cold and perfunctory reply. Inwardly he said to himself, "Why does she say nothing of Letty, whom she knows—and of our marriage—if she wants to make friends?"

Nevertheless, he left the house with the feeling of one who has passed an hour not of the common sort. He had done himself justice, made his mark. And as for her—in spite of his flashes of dislike he carried away a strong impression of something passionate and vivid that clung to the memory. Or was it merely eyes and pose, that astonishingly beautiful colour, and touch of classic dignity which she got—so the world said—from some remote strain of Italian blood? Most probably! All the same, she had fewer of the ordinary womanly arts than he had imagined. How easy it would have been to send that message to Letty she had not sent! He thought simply that for a clever woman she might have been more adroit.

* * * * *

The door had no sooner closed behind Tressady than Betty Leven, with a quick look after him, bent across to her hostess, and said in a stage whisper:

"Who? Post me up, please."

"One of Fontenoy's gang," said her husband, before Lady Maxwell could answer. "A new member, and as sharp as needles. He's been exactly to all the places where I want to go, Betty, and you won't let me."

He glanced at his wife with a certain sharpness. For Tressady had spoken in passing of nilghai-shooting in the Himalayas, and the remark had brought the flush of an habitual discontent to the young man's cheek.

Betty merely held out a white child's wrist.

"Button my glove, please, and don't talk. I have got ever so many questions to ask Marcella."

Leven applied himself rather sulkily to his task while Betty pursued her inquiries.

"Isn't he going to marry Letty Sewell?"

"Yes," said Lady Maxwell, opening her eyes rather wide. "Do you know her?"

"Why, my dear, she's Mr. Watton's cousin—isn't she?" said Betty, turning towards that young man. "I saw her once at your mother's."

"Certainly she is my cousin," said that young man, smiling, "and she is going to marry Tressady at Easter. So much I can vouch for, though I don't know her so well, perhaps, as the rest of my family do."

"Oh!" said Betty, drily, releasing her husband and crossing her small hands across her knee. "That means—Miss Sewell isn't one of Mr. Watton's favourite cousins. You don't mind talking about your cousins, do you? You may blacken the character of all mine. Is she nice?"

"Who—Letty? Why, of course she is nice," said Edward Watton, laughing.

"All young ladies are."

"Oh goodness!" said Betty, shaking her halo of gold hair. "Commend me to cousins for letting one down easy."

"Too bad, Lady Leven!" said Watton, getting up to escape. "Why not ask Bayle? He knows all things. Let me hand you over to him. He will sing you all my cousin's charms."

"Delighted!" said Bayle as he, too, rose—"only unfortunately I ought at this moment to be at Wimbledon."

He had the air of a typical official, well dressed, suave, and infinitely self-possessed, as he held out his hand—deprecatingly—to Lady Leven.

"Oh! you private secretaries!" said Betty, pouting and turning away from him.

"Don't abolish us," he said, pleading. "We must live."

"Je n'en vois pas la nécessité!" said Betty, over her shoulder.

"Betty, what a babe you are!" cried her husband, as Bayle, Watton, and Bennett all disappeared together.

"Not at all!" cried Betty. "I wanted to get some truth out of somebody.

For, of course, the real truth is that this Miss Sewell is—"

"Is what?" said Leven, lost in admiration all the time, as Lady Maxwell saw, of his wife's dainty grace and rose-leaf colour.

"Well—a—minx!" said Betty, with innocent slowness, opening her blue eyes very wide; "a mischievous—rather pretty—hard-hearted—flirting—little minx!"

"Really, Betty!" cried Lady Maxwell. "Where have you seen her?"

"Oh, I saw her last year several times at the Wattons' and other places," said Betty, composedly. "And so did you too, please, madam. I remember very well one day Mrs. Watton brought her into the Winterbournes' when you and I were there, and she chattered a great deal."

"Oh yes!—I had forgotten."

"Well, my dear, you'll soon have to remember her! so you needn't talk in that lofty tone. For they're going to be married at Easter, and if you want to make friends with the young man, you'll have to realise the wife!"

"Married at Easter? How do you know?"

"In the first place Mr. Watton said so, in the next there are such things as newspapers. But of course you didn't notice such trifles, you never do."

"Betty, you're very cross with me to-day!" Lady Maxwell looked up at her friend with a little pleading air.

"Oh no! only for your good. I know you're thinking of nothing in the world but how to make that man take a reasonable view of Maxwell's Bill. And I want to impress upon you that he's probably thinking a great deal more about getting married than about Factory Bills. You see, your getting married was a kind of accident. But other people are different. And oh, dear, you do know so little about them when they don't live hi four pair backs! There, don't defend yourself—you sha'n't!"

And, stooping, Betty stifled her friend's possible protest by kissing her.

"Now then, come along, Frank—you've got your speech to write—and I've got to copy it out. Don't swear! you know you're going to have two whole days' golfing next week. Good-bye, Marcella! My love to Aldous—and tell him not to be so late next time I come to tea. Good-bye!"

And off she swept, pausing, however, on the landing to open the door again and put in an eager face.

"Oh! and, by the way, the young man has a mother—Frank reminded me. His womenkind don't seem to be his strong point—but as she doesn't earn even four-and-sixpence a week—very sadly the contrary—I won't tell you any more now, or you'll forget. Next time!"

When Marcella Maxwell was at last left alone, she began to pace slowly up and down the large bare room, as it was very much her wont to do.

She was thinking of George Tressady, and of the personality his talk had seemed to reveal.

"His heart is all in power—in what he takes for magnificence." she said to herself. "He talks as if he had no humanity, and did not care a rap for anybody. But it is a pose—I think it is a pose. He is interesting—he will develop. One would like—to show him things."

After another pensive turn or two she stopped beside a photograph that stood upon her writing-table. It was a photograph of her husband—a tall, smoothfaced man, with pleasant eyes, features of no particular emphasis, and the free carriage of the country-bred Englishman. As she looked at it her face relaxed unconsciously, inevitably; under the stimulus of some habitual and secret joy. It was for his sake, for his sake only that she was still thinking of George Tressady, still pondering the young man's character and remarks.

So much at least was true—no other member of Fontenoy's party had as yet given her even the chance of arguing with him. Once or twice in society she had tried to approach Fontenoy himself, to get somehow into touch with him. But she had made no way. Lord Fontenoy had simply turned his square-jawed face and red-rimmed eyes upon her with a stupid irresponsive air, which Marcella knew perfectly well to be a mask, while it protected him none the less effectively for that against both her eloquence and her charm. The other members of the party were young aristocrats, either of the ultra-exclusive or of the sporting type. She had made her attempts here and there among them, but with no more success. And once or twice, when she had pushed her attack to close quarters, she had been suddenly conscious of an underlying insolence in her opponent—a quick glance of bold or sensual eyes which seemed to relegate the mere woman to her place.

But this young Tressady, for all his narrowness and bitterness, was of a different stamp—or she thought so.

She began to pace up and down again, lost in reverie, till after a few minutes she came slowly to a stop before a long Louis Quinze mirror—her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes half consciously studying what she saw.

Her own beauty invariably gave her pleasure—though very seldom for the reasons that would have affected other women. She felt instinctively that it made life easier for her than it could otherwise have been; that it provided her with a natural and profitable "opening" in any game she might wish to play; and that even among the workmen, unionist leaders, and officials of the East End it had helped her again and again to score the points that she wanted to make. She was accustomed to be looked at, to be the centre, to feel things yielding before her; and without thinking it out, she knew perfectly well what it was she gained by this "fair seeming show" of eye and lip and form. Somehow it made nothing seem impossible to her; it gave her a dazzling self-confidence.

The handle of the door turned. She looked round with a smiling start, and waited.

A tall man in a grey suit came in, crossed the room quickly, and put his arms round her. She leant back against his shoulder, putting up one hand to touch his cheek caressingly.

"Why, how late you are! Betty left reproaches for you."

"I had a walk with Dowson. Then two or three people caught me on the way back—Rashdell among others." (Lord Rashdell was Foreign Secretary.) "There are some interesting telegrams from Paris—I copied them out for you."

The country happened to be at the moment in the midst of one of its periodical difficulties with France. There had been a good deal of diplomatic friction, and a certain amount of anxiety at the Foreign Office. Marcella lit the silver kettle again and made her man some fresh tea, while he told her the news, and they discussed the various points of the telegrams he had copied for her, with a comrade's freedom and vivacity. Then she said:

"Well, I have had an interesting time too! That young Tressady has been to tea."

"Oh! has he? They say there is a lot of stuff in him, and he may do us a great deal of mischief. How did you find him?"

"Oh, very clever, very limited—and a mass of prejudices," she said, laughing. "I never saw an odder mixture of knowledge and ignorance."

"What? Knowledge of India and the East?—that kind of thing?"

She nodded.

"Knowledge of everything except the subject he has come home to fight about! Do you know, Aldous—"

She paused. She was sitting on a stool beside him, her arm upon his knee.

"What do I know?" he said, his hand seeking hers.

"Well, I can't help feeling that that man might live and learn. He isn't a mere obstructive block—like the rest."

Maxwell laughed.

"Then Fontenoy is not as shrewd as usual. They say he regards him as their best recruit."

"Never mind. I rather wish you'd try to make friends with him."

Maxwell, however, helped himself to cake and made no response. On the two or three occasions on which he had met George Tressady, he had been conscious, if the truth were told, of a certain vague antipathy to the young man.

Marcella pondered.

"No," she said, "no—I don't think after all he's your sort. Suppose I see what can be done!"

And she got up with her flashing smile—half love, half fun—and crossed the room to summon her little boy, Hallin, for his evening play. Maxwell looked after her, not heeding at all what she was saying, heeding only herself, her voice, the atmosphere of charm and life she carried with her.