Volume Ii Part 32 (1/2)

”No,” she said steadily; ”she has told me much about everything--but that.”

He walked restlessly about for a few seconds, then returned, holding out his hands.

”Well, my dear, I said some mad and miserable things. They are as dead now as if they had never been spoken. And they were not love-making--they were crying for the moon. Take me, and forget them. I am an unsatisfactory sort of fellow, but I will do the best I can.”

”Wait a bit,” she said, retreating, and speaking with a hard incisiveness. ”There are plenty of things you don't know. Perhaps you don't know, for instance, that I wrote to Lord Maxwell? I sat up writing it that night--he got it the same morning you saw her.”

”You wrote to Maxwell!” he said in amazement--then, under his breath--”to complain of her. My G.o.d!”

He walked away again, trying to control himself.

”You didn't suppose,” she said huskily, ”I was going to sit down calmly under your neglect of me? I might have been silly in not--not seeing what kind of a woman she was; that's different--besides, of course, she ought to have thought more about me. But _that's_ not all!”

Her hand shook as she stood leaning on the sofa. George turned, and looked at her attentively.

”The day you left I went to Hampton Court with the Lucys. Cathedine was there. Of course I flirted with him all the time, and as we were going through a wood near the river he said abominable things to me, and kissed me.”

Her brows were drawn defiantly. Her eyes seemed to be riveted to his. He was silent a moment, the colour dyeing his pale face deep. Then she heard his long breath.

”Well, we seem to be about quits,” he said, in a bitter voice. ”Have you seen him since?”

”No. That's Grier knocking--you'd better go and dress.”

He paused irresolutely. But Letty said, ”Come in,” and he retreated into his dressing-room.

Husband and wife hurried down together, without another word to each other. When George at last found himself at table between Lady Leven and Mr. Bayle's new and lively wife, he had never been so grateful before to the ease of women's tongues. In his mental and physical fatigue, he could scarcely bear even to let himself feel the strangeness of his presence in this room--at her table, in Maxwell's splendid house. _Not_ to feel!--somehow to recover his old balance and coolness--that was the cry of the inner man.

But the situation conquered him. _Why_ was he here? It was barely a month since in her London drawing-room he had found words for an emotion, a confession it now burnt him to remember. And here he was, breaking bread with her and Maxwell, a few weeks afterwards, as though nothing lay between them but a political incident. Oh! the smallness, the triviality of our modern life!

Was it only four weeks, or nearly? What he had suffered in that time! An instant's shudder ran through him, during an interval, while Betty's unwilling occupation with her left-hand neighbour left memory its chance.

All the flitting scenes of the past month, Ancoats's half-vicious absurdities, the humours of the Trouville beach, the waves of its grey sea, his mother's whims and plaints, the crowd and heat of the little German watering-place where he had left her--was it he, George Tressady, that had been really wrestling with these things and persons, walking among them, or beside them? It seemed hardly credible. What was real, what remained, was merely the thought of some hours of solitude, beside the Norman sea, or among the great beech-woods that swept down the hills about Bad Wildheim. Those hours--they only--had stung, had penetrated, had found the shrinking core of the soul.

What in truth was it that had happened to him? After weeks of a growing madness he had finally lost his self-command, had spoken pa.s.sionately, as only love speaks, to a married woman, who had no thought for any man in the world but her husband, a woman who had immediately--so he had always read the riddle of Maxwell's behaviour--reported every incident of his conversation with her to the husband, and had then tried her best, with an exquisite kindness and compunction, to undo the mischief her own charm had caused. For that effort, in the first instance, George, under the shock of his act and her pain, had been, at intervals, speechlessly grateful to her; all his energies had gone into pitiful, eager response. Now, her attempt, and Maxwell's share in it, seemed to have laid him under a weight he could no longer bear. His acceptance of Maxwell's invitation had finally exhausted his power of playing the superhuman part to which she had invited him. He wished with all his heart he had not accepted it! From the moment of her greeting--with its mixture of shrinking and sweetness--he had realised the folly, the humiliation even, of his presence in her house. He could not rise--it was monstrous, ludicrous almost, that she should wish it--to what she seemed to ask of him.

What had he been in love with? He looked at her once or twice in bewilderment. Had not she herself, her dazzling, unconscious purity, debarred him always from the ordinary hopes and desires of the sensual man? His very thought had moved in awe of her, had knelt before her.

Throughout there had been this half-bitter glorying in the strangeness of his own case. The common judgment in its common vileness mattered nothing to him. He had been in love with love, with grace, with tenderness, with delight. He had seen, too late, a vision of the _best_; had realised what things of enchantment life contains for the few, for the chosen--what woman at her richest can be to man. And there had been a cry of personal longing--personal anguish.

Well!--it was all done with. As for friends.h.i.+p, it was impossible, grotesque. Let him go home, appease Letty, and mend his life. He constantly realised now, with the same surprise, as on the night before his confession, the emergence within himself, independent as it were of his ordinary will, and parallel with the voice of pa.s.sion or grief, of some new moral imperative. Half scornfully he discerned in his own nature the sort of paste that a man inherits from generations of decent dull forefathers who have kept the law as they understood it. He was conscious of the same ”ought” vibrating through the moral sense as had governed their narrower lives and minds. It is the presence or the absence indeed of this dumb compelling power that in moments of crisis differentiates one man from another. He felt it; wondered perhaps that he should feel it; but knew, nevertheless, that he should obey it. Yes, let him go home, make his wife forgive him, rear his children--he trusted to G.o.d there would be children!--and tame his soul. How strange to feel this tempest sweeping through him, this iron stiffening of the whole being, amid this scene, in this room, within a few feet of that magic, that voice--

”Thank goodness I have got rid of my man at last!” said Betty's laughing whisper in his ear. ”Three successive packs of hounds have I followed from their cradles to their graves. Make it up to me, Sir George, at once! Tell me everything I want to know!”

George turned to her smiling.

”About Ancoats?”

”Of course. Now don't be discreet!--I know too much already. How did he receive you?”

George laughed--not noticing that instead of laughing with him, little Betty was staring at him open-eyed over her fan.

”To begin with, he invited me to fight--coffee and pistols before eight, on the following morning, in the garden of his chalet, which would not have been at all a bad place, for he is magnificently installed. I came from his enemies, he said. They had prevented the woman he loved from joining him, and covered him with ridicule. As their representative I ought to be prepared to face the consequences like a man. All this time he was storming up and down, in a marvellous blue embroidered smoking suit--”