Volume Ii Part 33 (1/2)
George had had but a few words with his hostess before dinner, and afterwards a short conversation was all that either claimed. She had hoped and planned so much! On the stage of imagination before he came--she had seen his coming so often. All was to be forgotten and forgiven, and this difficult visit was to lead naturally and without recall to another and happier relation. And now that he was here she felt herself tongue-tied, moving near him in a dumb distress. Both realised the pressure of the same necessities, the same ineluctable facts; and tacitly, they met and answered each other, in the common avoidance of a companions.h.i.+p which could after all avail nothing. Once or twice, as they stood together after dinner, he noticed amid her gracious kindness, her inquiries after Mrs. Allison or his mother, the search her eyes made for Letty, and presently she began to talk with nervous, almost appealing, emphasis--with a marked significance and intensity indeed--of Letty's fatigue after her nursing, and the need she had for complete change and rest. George found himself half resenting the implications of her manner, as the sentences flowed on. He felt her love of influence, and was not without a hidden sarcasm. In spite of his pa.s.sionate grat.i.tude to her, he must needs ask himself, did she suppose that a man or a marriage was to be remade in a month, even by her plastic fingers? Women envisaged these things so easily, so childishly, almost.
When he moved away, a number of men who had already been talking to him after dinner, and some of the most agreeable women of the party besides, closed about him, making him, as it were, the centre of a conversation which was concerned almost entirely with the personalities and chances of the political moment. He was scarcely less astonished than Letty had been by his own position amongst the guests gathered under Maxwell's roof. Never had he been treated with so much sympathy, so much deference even. Clearly, if he willed it so, what had seemed the dislocation might only be the better beginning of a career. Nonsense! He meant to throw it all up as soon as Parliament met again in February. The state of his money affairs alone determined that. The strike was going from bad to worse. He must go home and look after his own business. It was a folly ever to have attempted political life. Meanwhile he felt the stimulus of his reception in a company which included some of the keenest brains in England. It appealed to his intelligence and virility, and they responded. Letty once, glancing at him, saw that he was talking briskly, and said to herself, with contradictory bitterness, that he was looking as well as ever, and was going, she supposed, to behave as if nothing had happened.
”What is the matter with you to-night, my lady?” said Naseby, taking a seat beside his hostess. ”May I be impertinent and guess?--you don't like your gems? Lady Leven has been telling me tales about them. They are the most magnificent things I ever saw. I condole with you.”
She turned rather listlessly to meet his bantering look.
”'Come you in friends.h.i.+p, or come you in war?'” she said, pointing to a seat beside her. ”I have no fight in me. But I have a great many things to say to you.”
He reddened for an instant, then recovered himself.
”So have I to you,” he said briskly. ”In the first place, I have some fresh news from Mile End.”
She half laughed, as who should say, ”You put me off,” then surrendered herself with eagerness to the pleasure of his report. At the moment of his approach, under pretence of talking to an elderly cousin of Maxwell's, she had been lost in such an abstraction of powerless pity for George Tressady--whose fair head, somehow, never escaped her, wherever it moved--that she had hardly been able to bear with her guests or the burden of the evening.
But Naseby roused her. And, indeed, his story so far was one to set the blood throbbing in the veins of a creature who, on one side pure woman, was on the other half poet, half reformer. Since the pa.s.sage of the Maxwell Bill, indeed, Naseby and a few friends of his, some ”gilded youths” like himself, together with some trade-union officials of a long experience, had done wonders. They had been planning out the industrial reorganisation of a whole district, through its two staple trades, with the enthusiastic co-operation of the workpeople themselves; and the result so far struck the imagination. Everywhere the old workshops were to be bought up, improved, or closed; everywhere factories in which life might be decent, and work more than tolerable, were to be set up; everywhere the prospective shortening of hours, and the doing away with the most melancholy of the home trades was working already like the incoming of a great slowly surging tide, raising a whole population on its breast to another level of well-being and of hope.
Most of what had been done or designed was of course already well known to Maxwell's wife; she had indeed given substantial help to Naseby throughout. But Naseby had some fresh advances to report since she was last in East London, and she drank them in with an eagerness, which somehow a.s.suaged a hidden smart; while he wondered a little perhaps in his philosopher's soul at the woman of our English day, with her compunctions and altruisms, her entanglement with the old scheme of things, her pining for a new. It had often seemed to him that to be a Nihilist nurse among a Russian peasantry would be an infinitely easier task than to reconcile the social remorses and compa.s.sions that tore his companion's mind with the social pageant in which her life, do what she would, must needs be lived. He knew that, intellectually, she no more than Maxwell saw any way out of unequal place, unequal spending, unequal recompense, if civilisation were to be held together; but he perceived that morally she suffered. Why? Because she and not someone else had been chosen to rule the palace and wear the gems that yet must be? In the end, Naseby could but shrug his shoulders over it. Yet even his sceptical temper made no question of sincerity.
When all his budget was out, and her comments made, she leant back a little in her chair, studying him. A smile came to play about her lips.
”What do you want to say to me?” he asked her quickly.
She looked round her to see that they were not overheard.
”When did you see Madeleine last?”
”At her brother's house, a fortnight ago.”
”Was she nice to you?”
He bit his lip, and drew his brows a little together, under her scrutiny.
”Do you imagine I am going to be cross-examined like this?”
”Yes--reply!”
”Well, I don't know what her conception of 'niceness' may be; it didn't fit mine. She had got it into her head that I 'pitied' her, which seemed to be a crime. I didn't see how to disprove it, so I came away.”
He spoke with a dry lightness, but she perceived anxiety and unrest under his tone. She bent forward.
”Do you know where Madeleine is now?”
”Not in the least.”
”In the Long Gallery. I sent her there.”
”Upon my word!” he said, after a pause. ”Do you want to rule us all?”
His cheek had flushed again; his look was half rebellious.