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Doesn't he remind you of Mr. Bayley?" She beckoned to the handsome child of sixteen who had sat on George Tressady's left hand at dinner, and, taking up a pinch of rose-leaves that had dropped from a vase beside her, she flung them at the dog, calling him to her.
He stopped involuntarily in the darkness of his own room, and listened. What a contrast between this Letty and the Letty of the drawing-room! They were chattering fast, discussing Lady Tressady, and Lady Tressady's gowns, and Lady Tressady's affairs. What eagerness, what malice, what feminine subtlety and acuteuess!
Drew that he feared George Tressady's Parliamentary conduct "was inconceivable in a man of honor"; and I was only comforted by the emphatic and laughing dissent of Lord Peel, to whom I repeated the verdict. "Nothing of the kind! But of course he was thinking of us the Liberal Unionists."
The whole course of the previous day's debate, the hour of Tressady's speech, while Maxwell sat listening in the Speaker's Gallery overhead, had been for him for her, too poisoned by a growing uneasiness, a growing distaste for the triumph laid at their feet. She had come down to him from the Ladies' Gallery pale and nervous, shrinking almost from the grasp of his hand. "What will happen?
Two years of labour she caught her breath with a little sob labour which had aged and marked the labourer; and now, was it really to be believed, that after all the toil, after so much hope and promise of success, everything was to be wrecked at last? She gave herself once more to eager forecasts and combinations. As to individuals she recalled Tressady's blunt warning with a smile and a wince.
The buyer who would once have bought was not now forthcoming; the few people who nibbled were, naturally, thinking more of their own purses than Tressady's; and George grew red with indignation over some of the offers submitted to him by his country solicitor.
The man, of course, was a scoundrel, but of the sort that keeps within the law; and Lady Tressady's monstrous folly had given him an easy prey. When he thought of the many sacrifices he had made for his mother, of her ample allowance, her incorrigible vanity and greed and then of the natural desires of his young wife his heart burned within him.
Then Joanna, eluding Tressady's clutching hand, went her way, singing to herself very sweet and low. Hereupon Tressady grew very boisterous and merry and perceiving Mings and his fellows inclined for slumber, roared them to wakefulness, bidding them drink with him and damning them for sleepy dogs. Yet in a while he fell silent also and presently takes out his dagger and begins fondling it.
She did not get on with Mary, nor Mary with her. The tragic absorption of the mother little abated since the spring in her dead boy seemed somehow to strike Letty dumb. She felt pity, but yet the whole emotion was beyond her, and she shrank from it. As for Mary, she had so far received Lady Tressady's visits with a kind of dull surprise, always repeated and not flattering.
Fullerton was as ready as her husband to supply the two former; and even the children, a fair-haired, lethargic crew, painfully like their boneless father in Tressady's opinion, took their share in the general exploitation of Tressady's mamma.
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