Volume Ii Part 28 (1/2)
She shaded her eyes with her hand a moment, thinking. Then she said:
”Perhaps it is of no use for me to ask you to remember how full our minds--my husband's and mine--have been of one subject--one set of ideas. But, if I am not keeping you too long, I should like to give you an account, from my point of view, of the friends.h.i.+p between Sir George and myself. I think I can remember every talk of ours, from our first meeting in the hospital down to--down to this morning.”
”This morning!” cried Letty, springing up. ”This _morning_! He went to you to-day?”
The little face convulsed with pa.s.sion raised an intolerable distress in Marcella.
”Yes, he came to see me,” she said, her dark eyes, full of pain, full, too, once more, of entreaty, fixed upon her interrogator. ”But do let me tell you! I never saw anyone in deeper trouble--trouble about you--trouble about himself.”
Letty burst into a wild laugh.
”Of course! No doubt he went to complain of me--that I flirted--that I ill-treated his mother--that I spent too much money--and a lot of other pleasant little things. Oh! I can imagine it perfectly. Besides that, I suppose he went to be thanked. Well, he deserved _that_. He has thrown away his career to please you; so if you didn't thank him, you ought!
Everybody says his position in Parliament now isn't worth a straw--that he must resign--which is delightful, of course, for his wife. And I saw it all from the beginning--I understood exactly what you _wanted_ to do at Castle Luton--only I couldn't believe then--I was only six weeks married--”
A wave of excitement and self-pity swept over her. She broke off with a sob.
Marcella's heart was wrung. She knew nothing of the real Letty Tressady.
It was the wife as such, slighted and set aside, that appealed to the imagination, the remorse of this happy, this beloved woman. She rose quickly, she held out her hands, looking down upon the little venomous creature who had been pouring these insults upon her.
”Don't--_don't_ believe such things,” she said, with sobbing breath. ”I never wronged you consciously for a moment. Can't you believe that Sir George and I became friends because we cared for the same kind of questions; because I--I was full of my husband's work and everything that concerned it; because I liked to talk about it, to win him friends. If it had ever entered my mind that such a thing could pain and hurt you--”
”Where have you sent him to-day?” cried Letty, peremptorily, interrupting her, while she drew her handkerchief fiercely across her eyes.
Instantly Marcella was conscious of the difficulty of explaining her own impulse and Maxwell's action.
”Sir George told me,” she said, faltering, ”that he must go away from London immediately, to think out some trouble that was oppressing him.
Only a few minutes after he left our house we heard from Mrs. Allison that she was in great distress about her son. She came, in fact, to beg us to help her find him. I won't go into the story, of course; I am sure you know it. My husband and I talked it over. It occurred to us that if Maxwell went to him--to Sir George--and asked him to do us and her this great kindness of going to Ancoats and trying to bring him back to his mother, it would put everything on a different footing. Maxwell would get to know him,--as I had got to know him. One would find a way--to silence the foolish, unjust things--that have been said--I suppose--I don't know--”
She paused, confused by the difficulties in her path, her cheeks hot and flushed. But the heart knew its own innocence. She recovered herself; she came nearer.
”--If only--at the same time--I could make you realise how truly--how bitterly--I had felt for any pain you might have suffered--if I could persuade you to look at it all--your husband's conduct and mine--in its true light, and to believe that he cares--he _must_ care--for nothing in the world so much as his home--as you and your happiness!”
The n.o.bleness of the speaker, the futility of the speech, were about equally balanced! Candour was impossible, if only for kindness' sake. And the story, so told, was not only unconvincing, it was hardly intelligible even, to Letty. For the two personalities moved in different worlds, and what had seemed to the woman who was all delicate impulse and romance the natural and right course, merely excited in Letty, and not without reason, fresh suspicion and offence. If words had been all, Marcella had gained nothing.
But a strange tumult was rising in Letty's breast. There was something in this mingling of self-abas.e.m.e.nt with an extraordinary moral richness and dignity, in these eyes, these hands that would have so gladly caught and clasped her own, which began almost to intimidate her. She broke out again, so as to hold her own bewilderment at bay:
”What right had you to send him away--to plan anything for _my_ husband without my consent? Oh, of course you put it very finely; I daresay you know about all sorts of things _I_ don't know about; I'm not clever, I don't talk politics. But I don't quite see the good of it, if it's only to take husbands away from their wives. All the same, I'm not a hypocrite, and I don't mean to pretend I'm a meek saint. Far from it.
I've no doubt that George thinks he's been perfectly justified from the beginning, and that I have brought everything upon myself. Well! I don't care to argue about it. Don't imagine, please, that I have been playing the deserted wife all the time. If people injure me, it's not my way to hold my tongue, and I imagine that, after all, I do understand my own husband, in spite of Lord Maxwell's kind remarks!” She pointed scornfully to Maxwell's letter on the table. ”But as soon as I saw that nothing I said mattered to George, and that his whole mind was taken up with your society, why, of course, I took my own measures! There are other men in the world--and one of them happens to amuse me particularly at this moment. It's your doing and George's, you see, if he doesn't like it!”
Marcella recoiled in sudden horror, staring at her companion with wide, startled eyes. Letty braved her defiantly, her dry lips drawn into a miserable smile. She stood, looking very small and elegant, beside her writing-table, her hand, blazing with rings, resting lightly upon it, the little, hot withered face alone betraying the nerve tension behind.
The situation lasted a few seconds, then with a quick step Marcella hurried to a chair on the further side of the room, sank into it, and covered her face with her hands.
Letty's heart seemed to dip, as it were, into an abyss. But there was a frenzied triumph in the spectacle of Marcella's grief and tears.
_Marcella Maxwell_--thus silenced, thus subdued! The famous name, with all that it had stood for in Letty's mind, of things to be envied and desired, echoed in her ear, delighted her revenge. She struggled to maintain her att.i.tude.
”I don't know why what I said should make you so unhappy,” she said coldly, after a pause.