Sir George Tressady, vol 2 | Page 8

The thing will be done."
"Well, thank God!" grumbled Fontenoy, "we don't mean to lose the main engagement. But if one of our men were to argue in that way, I should know what to say to him."
George made no reply.
They walked on in silence, the summer twilight falling softly over the river and the Hospital, over the Terrace with its groups, and the towering pile of buildings beside them.
Presently Fontenoy said, in another voice:
"I have really never had the courage to talk to you of the matter, Tressady, but didn't you see something of that lad Ancoats before he went off abroad?"
"Yes, I saw him several times, first at the club; then he came and dined with me here one night."
"And did he confide in you?"
"More or less," said George, smiling rather queerly at the recollection.
Fontenoy made a sound between a growl and a sigh.
"Really, it's rather too much to have to think out that young man's affairs as well as one's own. And the situation is so extraordinary!--Maxwell and I have to be in constant consultation. I went to see him in his room in the House of Lords the other night, and met a man coming out, who stopped, and stared as though he were shot. Luckily I knew him, and could say a word to him, or there would have been all sorts of cock-and-bull stories abroad."
"Well, and what are you and Maxwell doing?"
"Trying to get at the young woman. One can't buy her off, of course. Ancoats is his own master, and could outbid us. But Maxwell has found a brother--a decent sort of fellow--a country solicitor. And there is a Ritualist curate, a Father somebody,"--Fontenoy raised his shoulders,--"who seems to have an intermittent hold on the girl. When she has fits of virtue she goes to confess to him. Maxwell has got hold of him."
"And meanwhile Ancoats is at Bad Wildheim?"
"Ancoats is at Bad Wildheim, and behaving himself, as I hear from his poor mother." Fontenoy sighed. "But the boy was frightened, of course, when they went abroad. Now she is getting better, and one can't tell--"
"No, one can't tell," said George.
"I wish I knew what the thing really meant," said Fontenoy, presently, in a tone of perplexed reverie. "What do you think? Is it a passion--?"
"Or a pose?"
George pondered.
"H'm," he said at last--"more of a pose, I think, than a passion. Ancoats always seems to me the jeune premier in his own play. He sees his life in scenes, and plays them according to all the rules."
"Intolerable!" said Fontenoy, in exasperation. "And at least he might refrain from dragging a girl into it! We weren't saints in my day, but we weren't in the habit of choosing well-brought-up maidens of twenty in our own set for our confidantes. You know, I suppose, what broke up the party at Castle Luton?"
"Ancoats told me nothing. I have heard some gossip from Harding Watton," said George, unwillingly. It was one of his strongest characteristics, this fastidious and even haughty dislike of chatter about other people's private affairs, a dislike which, in the present case, had been strengthened by his growing antipathy to Harding.
"How should he know?" said Fontenoy, angrily. He was glad enough to use Watton as a political tool, but had never yet admitted him to the smallest social intimacy.
Yet with Tressady he felt no difficulty in talking over these private affairs; and he did, in fact, report the whole story--that same story with which Marcella had startled Betty Leven on the night in question: how Ancoats on this Sunday evening had decoyed this handsome, impressionable girl, to whom throughout the winter he had been paying decided and even ostentatious court, into a t��te-��-t��te--had poured out to her frantic confessions of his attachment to the theatrical lady--a woman he could never marry, whom his mother could never meet, but with whom, nevertheless, come what might, he was determined to live and die. She--Madeleine--was his friend, his good angel. Would she go to his mother and break it to her? Would she understand, and forgive him? There must be no opposition, or he would shoot himself. And so on, till the poor girl, worn out with excitement and grief, tottered into Mrs. Allison's room more dead than alive.
But at that point Fontenoy stopped abruptly.
George agreed that the story was almost incredible, and added the inward and natural comment of the public-school man--that if people will keep their boys at home, and defraud them of the kickings that are their due, they may look out for something unwholesome in the finished product. Then, aloud, he said:
"I should imagine that Ancoats was acting through the greater part of that. He had said to himself that such a scene would be effective--and would be new."
"Good heavens!--why, that makes it ten