Volume Ii Part 6 (1/2)
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.”