Volume Ii Part 14 (1/2)

Her pale, small face contracted with a look of pain. Fontenoy, too, frowned as he looked across at Ancoats, who was leaning against the wall in an affected pose, and quoting bits from a new play to George Tressady.

After a pause, he said:

”I think if I were you I should cultivate Tressady. Ancoats likes him. It might be possible some time for you to work through him.”

The mother a.s.sented eagerly, then said, with a smile:

”But I gather you don't find him much to be depended on in the House?”

Fontenoy shrugged his shoulders.

”Lady Maxwell has bedevilled him somehow. You're responsible!”

”Poor Castle Luton! You must tell me how it and I can make up. But you don't mean that there is any thought of his going over?”

”His vote's all safe--I suppose. He would make too great a fool of himself if he failed us there. But he has lost all heart for the business. And Harding Watton tells me it's all her doing. She has been taking him about in the East End--getting her friends to show him round.”

”And _now_ you are in the mood to put the women down--to show them their place?”

She looked at him with gentle humour--a very delicate high-bred figure, in her characteristic black-and-white. Fontenoy's whole aspect changed as he caught the reference to their own relation. The look of premature old age, of harsh fatigue, was for the moment effaced by something young and ardent as he bent towards her.

”No--I take the rough with the smooth. Lady Maxwell may do her worst. We have the counter-charm.”

A flush showed itself in her lined cheek. She was fourteen years older than he, and had refused a dozen times to marry him. But she would have found it hard to live without his devotion, and she had brought him by now into such good order that she dared to let him know it.

Half an hour later George and Letty mounted another palatial staircase, and at the top of it Letty put on fresh smiles for a new hostess. George, tired out with the drama of the day, could hardly stifle his yawns; but Letty had treated the notion of going home after one party when, they might, if they pleased, ”do” four, with indignant amazement.

So here they were at the house of one of the greatest of bankers, and George stalked through the rooms in his wife's train, taking comparatively little part in the political buzz all about him, and thinking mostly of a hurried little talk with Mrs. Allison that had taken up his last few minutes in her drawing-room. Poor thing! But what could he do for her? The lad was as stage-struck as ever--could barely talk sense on any other subject, and not much on that.

But if he, owing to the clash of an inner struggle, was weary of politics, the world in general could think and speak of nothing else. The rooms were full of politicians and their wives, of members just arrived from the House, of Ministers smiling at each other with lifted eyebrows, like boys escaped from a birching. A tempest of talk surged through the rooms--talk concerned with all manner of great issues, with the fate of a Government, the rousing of a country, the fortunes of individual statesmen. Through it all the little host himself, a small fair-haired man, with the tired eyes and hot-house air of the financier, walked about from group to group, gossiping over the incidents of the division, and now and then taking up some newcomer to be introduced to his pretty and fas.h.i.+onable wife.

Somewhere in the din George stumbled across Lady Leven, who was talking merrily to young Bayle; and found her, notwithstanding, very ready to turn and chat with him.

”Of course we are all waiting for the Maxwells,” she said to him. ”Will they come, I wonder?”

”Why not?”

”Do people show on their way to disaster? I think I should stay at home if I were she.”

”Why, they have to hearten their friends!”

”No good,” said Betty, pursing her pretty lips; ”and they have fought so hard.”

”And may win yet,” said George, an odd sparkle in his eye, as he stood looking over his tiny companion to the door. ”n.o.body is sure of anything, I can tell you.”

”I don't believe _you_ care,” she said audaciously, shaking her golden head at him.

”Pray, why?”