Volume Ii Part 22 (1/2)
She could make no reply. Intolerable grat.i.tude and pain held her, and he went on speaking, gazing straight into her shrinking face.
”It seems to me,” he said slowly, ”the people who grow up in the dry and mean habit of mind that I grew up in, break through in all sorts of different ways. Art and religion--I suppose they change and broaden a man. I don't know. I am not an artist--and religion talks to me of something I don't understand. To me, to know you has broken down the walls, opened the windows. It always used to come natural to me--well!
to think little of people, to look for the mean, ugly things in them, especially in women. The only people I admired were men of action--soldiers, administrators; and it often seemed to me that women hampered and belittled them. I said to myself, one mustn't let women count for too much in one's life. And the idea of women troubling their heads with politics, or social difficulties, half amused, half disgusted me. At the same time I was all with Fontenoy in hating the usual philanthropic talk about the poor. It seemed to be leading us to mischief--I thought the greater part of it insincere. Then I came to know you.--And, after all, it seemed a woman could talk of public things, and still be real--the humanity didn't rub off, the colour stood! It was easy, of course, to say that you had a personal motive--other people said it, and I should have liked to echo it. But from the beginning I knew that didn't explain it. All the women,”--he checked himself,--”most of the women I had ever known judged everything by some petty personal standard. They talked magnificently, perhaps, but there was always something selfish and greedy at bottom. Well, I was always looking for it in you! Then instead--suddenly--I found myself anxious lest what I said should displease or hurt you--lest you should refuse to be my friend. I longed, desperately, to make you understand me--and then, after our talks, I hated myself for posing, and going further than was sincere. It was so strange to me not to be scoffing and despising.”
Marcella woke from her trance of pain--looked at him with amazement.
But the sight of him--a man, with the perspiration on his brow, struggling now to tell the bare truth about himself and his plight--silenced her. She hung towards him again, as pale as he, bearing what fate had sent her.
”And ever since that day,” he went on, putting his hand over his eyes, ”when you walked home with me along the river, to be with you, to watch you, to puzzle over you, has built up a new self in me, that strains against and tears the old one. So these things--these heavenly, exquisite things that some men talk of--this sympathy, and purity, and sweetness--were true! They were true because you existed--because I had come to know something of your nature--had come to realise what it might be--for a man to have the right--”
He broke off, and buried his face in his hands, murmuring incoherent things. Marcella rose hurriedly, then stood motionless, her head turned from him, that she might not hear. She felt herself stifled with rising tears. Once or twice she began to speak, and the words died away again.
At last she said, bending towards him:
”I have done very ill--very, _very_ ill. I have been thinking all through of my personal want--of personal victory.”
He shook his head, protesting. And she hardly knew how to go on. But suddenly the word of nature, of truth, came; though in the speaking it startled them both.
”Sir George!”--she put out her hand timidly and touched him--”may I tell you what I am thinking of? Not of you, nor of me--of another person altogether!”
He looked up.
”My wife?” he said, almost in his usual voice.
She said nothing; she was struggling with herself. He got up abruptly, walked to the open window, stood there a few seconds, and came back.
”It has to be all thought out again,” he said, looking at her appealingly. ”I must go away, perhaps--and realise--what can be done. I took marriage as carelessly as I took everything else. I must try and do better with it.”
A sudden perception leapt in Marcella, revealing strange worlds. How she could have hated--with what fierceness, what flame!--the woman who taught ideal truths to Maxwell! She thought of the little self-complacent being in the white satin wedding-dress, that had sat beside her at Castle Luton--thought of her with overwhelming soreness and pain. Stepping quickly, her tears driven back, she went across the room to Tressady.
”I don't know what to say,” she began, stopping suddenly beside him, and leaning her hand for support on a table while her head drooped. ”I have been very selfish--very blind. But--mayn't it be the beginning--of something quite--quite--different? I was thinking only of Maxwell--or myself. But I ought to have thought of you--of my friend. I ought to have seen--but oh! how _could_ I!” She broke off, wrestling with this amazing difficulty of choosing, amid all the thoughts that thronged to her lips, something that might be said--and if said, might heal.
But before he could interrupt her, she went on: ”The harm was, in acting all through--by myself--as if only you and I, and Maxwell's work--were concerned. If I had made you known to _him_--if I had remembered--had thought--”
But she stopped again, in a kind of bewilderment. In truth she did not yet understand what had happened to her--how it could have happened to her--to _her_, whose life, soul, and body, to the red ripe of its inmost heart, was all Maxwell's, his possession, his chattel.
Tressady looked at her with a little sad smile.
”It was your unconsciousness,” he said, in a low trembling voice, ”of what you are--and have--that was so beautiful.”
Somehow the words recalled her natural dignity, her n.o.ble pride as Maxwell's wife. She stood erect, composure and self-command returning.
She was not her own, to humble herself as she pleased.
”We must never talk to each other like this again,” she said gently, after a little pause. ”We must try and understand each other--the _real_ things in each other's lives.--Don't lay a great remorse on me, Sir George!--don't spoil your future, and your wife's--don't give up Parliament! You have great, great gifts! All this will seem just a pa.s.sing misunderstanding--both to you--and me--by and by. We shall learn to be--real friends--you and we--together?”
She looked at him appealing--her face one prayer.
But he, flus.h.i.+ng, shook his head.
”I must not come into your world,” he said huskily. ”I must go.”