Volume Ii Part 28 (2/2)
Marcella did not reply. Presently Letty saw that she was resting her cheek on her hand and gazing before her into vacancy. At last she turned round, and Letty could satisfy herself that in truth her eyes were wet.
”Is there no one,” asked the full, tremulous voice, ”whom you care for, whom you would send for now to advise and help you?”
”Thank you!” said Letty, calmly, leaning against the little writing-table, and beating the ground slightly with her foot. ”I don't want them. And I don't know why you should trouble yourself about it.”
But for the first time, and against its owner's will, the hard tone wavered.
Marcella rose impetuously again, and came towards her.
”When one thinks of all the long years of married life,” she said, still trembling, ”of the children that may come--”
Letty lifted her eyebrows.
”If one happened to wish for them. But I don't happen to wish for them, never did. I daresay it sounds horrid. Anyway, one needn't take that into consideration.”
”And your husband? Your husband, who must be miserable, whose great gifts will be all spoiled unless you will somehow give up your anger and make peace. And instead of that, you are only thinking of revenging yourself, of making more ruin and pain. It breaks one's heart! And it would need such a _little_ effort on your part, only a few words written or spoken, to bring him back, to end all this unhappiness!”
”Oh! George can take care of himself,” said Letty, provokingly; ”so can I. Besides, you have sent him away.”
Marcella looked at her in despair. Then silently she turned away, and Letty saw that she was searching for some gloves and a handkerchief she had been carrying in her hand when she came in.
Letty watched her take them up, then said suddenly, ”Are you going away?”
”It is best, I think. I can do nothing.”
”I wish I knew why you came to see me at all! They say, of course, you are very much in love with Lord Maxwell. Perhaps--that made you sorry for me?”
Marcella's pride leapt at the mention by those lips of her own married life. Then she drove her pride down.
”You have put it better than I have been able to do, all the time.” Her mouth parted in a slight, sad smile--”Good-night.”
Letty took no notice. She sat down on the arm of a chair near her. Her eyes suddenly blazed, her face grew dead-white.
”Well, if you want to know--” she said--”no, don't go--I don't mean to let you go just yet--I _am_ about the most miserable wretch going! There, you may take it or leave it; it's true. I don't suppose I cared much about George when I married him; plenty of girls don't. But as soon as he began to care about _you_,--just contrariness, I suppose,--I began to feel that I could kill anybody that took him from me, and kill myself afterwards! Oh, good gracious! there was plenty of reason for his getting tired of me. I'm not the sort of person to let anyone get the whip-hand of me, and I _would_ spend his money as I liked, and I _would_ ask the persons I chose to the house; and, above all, I wasn't going to be pestered with looking after and giving up to his _dreadful_ mother, who made my life a burden to me. Oh! why do you look so white? Well, I daresay it does sound atrocious. I don't care. Perhaps you'll be still more horrified when you know that they came round this afternoon, when I was out and George was gone, to tell me that Lady Tressady was frightfully ill--dying, I think my maid said. And I haven't given it another thought since--not one--till now”--she struck one hand against the other--”because directly afterwards the butler told me of your visit this afternoon, and that you were coming again--and I wasn't going to think of anything else in the world but you, and George. No, don't look like that, don't come near me--I'm not mad. I a.s.sure you I'm not mad! But that's all by the way. What was I saying? Oh! that George had cause enough to stop caring about me. Of course he had; but if he's lost to me--I shall give him a good deal more cause before we've done. That other man--you know him--Cathedine--gave me a kiss this afternoon, when we were in a wood together”--the same involuntary shudder overtook her, while she still held her companion at arm's length. ”Oh, he is a brute--a _brute_! But what do I care what happens to me? It's so strange I don't--rather creditable, I think--for after all I like parties, and being asked about. But now George hates me--and let you send him away from me--why, of course, it's all simple enough! I--Don't--don't come. I shall never, never forgive--it's just being tired--”
But Marcella sprang forward. Mercifully, there is a limit to nerve endurance, and Letty in her raving had overpa.s.sed it. She sank gasping on a sofa, still putting out her hand as though to protect herself. But Marcella knelt beside her, the tears running down her cheeks. She put her arms--arms formed for tenderness, for motherliness--round the girl's slight frame. ”Don't--don't repulse me,” she said, with trembling lips, and suddenly Letty yielded. She found herself sobbing in Lady Maxwell's embrace, while all the healing, all the remorse, all the comfort that self-abandonment and pity can pour out on such a plight as hers, descended upon her from Marcella's clinging touch, her hurried, fragmentary words. a.s.surances that all could be made right entreaties for gentleness and patience--revelations of her own inmost heart as a wife, far too sacred for the ears of Letty Tressady--little phrases and s.n.a.t.c.hes of autobiography steeped in an exquisite experience: the nature Letty had rained her blows upon, kept nothing back, gave her all its best. How irrelevant much of it was!--chequered throughout by those oblivions, and optimisms, and foolish hopes by which such a nature as Marcella's protects itself from the hard facts of the world. By the time she had ranged through every note of entreaty and consolation, Marcella had almost persuaded herself and Letty that George Tressady had never said a word to her beyond the commonplaces of an ordinary friends.h.i.+p; she had pa.s.sionately determined that this blurred and spoiled marriage could and should be mended, and that it lay with her to do it; and in the spirit of her audacious youth she had taken upon herself the burden of Letty's character and fate, vowing herself to a moral mission, to a long patience. The quality of her own nature, perhaps, made her bear Letty's violences and frenzies more patiently than would have been possible to a woman of another type; generous remorse and regret, combined with her ignorance of Letty's history and the details of Letty's life, led her even to look upon these violences as the effects of love perverted, the anguish of a jealous heart. Imagination, keen and loving, drew the situation for her in rapid strokes, draped Letty in the subtleties and powers of her own heart, and made forbearance easy.
As for Letty, her whole being surrendered itself to a mere ebb and flow of sensations. That she had been able thus to break down the barriers of Marcella's stateliness filled her all through, in her pa.s.sion as in her yielding, with a kind of exultation. A vision of a tall figure in a white and silver dress, sitting stiff and unapproachable beside her in the Castle Luton drawing-room, fled through her mind now and then, only to make the wonder of this pleading voice, these confidences, this pity, the more wonderful. But there was more than this, and better than this. Strange up-wellings of feelings long trampled on and suppressed--momentary awakenings of conscience, of repentance, of regret--sharp realisations of an envy that was no longer ign.o.ble but moral, softer thoughts of George, the suffocating, unwilling recognition of what love meant in another woman's life--these messengers and forerunners of diviner things pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed through the s.p.a.ces of Letty's soul as she lay white and pa.s.sive under Marcella's yearning look.
There was a marvellous relief besides, much of it a physical relief, in this mere silence, this mere ceasing from angry railing and offence.
Marcella was still sitting beside her, holding her hands, and talking in the same low voice, when suddenly the loud sound of a bell clanged through the house. Letty sprang up, white and startled.
”What can it be? It's past ten o'clock. It can't be a telegram.”
Then a guilty remembrance struck her. She hurried to the door as Kenrick entered.
”Lady Tressady's maid would like to see you, my lady. They want Sir George's address. The doctors think she will hardly live over to-morrow.”
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